Olha was sixteen and Marharyta was thirteen. And they spoke surzhyk (a colloquial mix of Ukrainian and Russian).” Yet that alone was enough to make them enemies of the new regime at school. 

When the occupying authorities forcibly enrolled the girls in a Russian school, the local administrator called their mother and issued a warning: if you do not bring the children in tomorrow, the services will come and take them away. “All of us,” Olha recalls, “were required to speak and write exclusively in Russian.” When they refused, Marharyta’s mother was summoned to the school. “They told my mother to help me learn Russian, because soon nobody here would understand me in Ukrainian,” the girl recounts. 

But Marharyta had no intention of complying with that demand — and this automatically made her an outcast among her classmates. Her older sister Olha responded differently — she withdrew into herself and grew quieter with every passing day. No one wanted to be her friend. Their classmates shunned them both. 

“We tried not to go to school too often. In any given month, we might attend for just one week. We would say we were ill, or that we had gone to visit relatives,” Marharyta recalls. 

School had become a conveyor belt of ideological re-education. Every Monday brought a mandatory ritual: carrying out the Russian flag, pinning on the St. George’s ribbon, singing the Russian national anthem. Marharyta refused to take part in every single one of these acts. 

Because of this, her family became subject to regular inspections. Officers would come directly to their home, checking their phones and their pockets. If they found a hryvnia banknote — they would tear it up and burn it. 

In the end, the family decided to leave the occupied territory with the help of Save Ukraine. Olha and Marharyta are now in Ukraine — adapting to their new life and still unable to believe that here you can speak outloud — in your own language, expressing your own thoughts — and nothing will happen to you for it.