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Iryna Verbivska had already experienced the worst of war, hiding with her family and pets in a bunker while Russian jets ravaged the skies above her city.
But when she arrived in Germany, she was shocked by the sanitized version of the war that was presented on TV. So, she decided to return to her bleeding homeland, in secret and on weekends, to document the cold realities of Vladimir Putin’s war and show it to the world.
Verbivska recorded her journey with journalist Igor Zakharenko, but the scenes they captured were so horrible that German news wouldn’t publish them.
There were rows of dead men with their faces caved in, charred bodies on the pavement, abandoned stands of strollers, luggage and stuffed animals surrounded by bloody lakes that stained the bricks on which they sat. Verbivska wanted people to see the real side of war and the cold realities of Vladimir Putin’s war.
Before the war, Verbivska was an entrepreneur, owning a travel agency with offices in three cities and running a translation office with 44 employees. She also had a resort in Crimea.
But when the Russians came, they seized everything. She heard the first air raid warnings in February 2022, and they fled the city for her grandmother’s village. They spent the whole night in a bunker with cats, dogs, and people, not knowing what was happening above them.
Verbivska, her mother, grandmother, dog, and two cats fled for Moldova in March 2022, hiding their car among a row of tanks, waiting for Russian airstrikes.
They arrived in Germany by April and have been there ever since. However, she decided to sneak back across the border to chronicle Ukraine’s bloodiest hour, even though there was an ugly truth that needed to be told.
The scenes she witnessed were heart-stopping, such as scorched bodies piled on highways and corpses of naked women surrounded by condoms, who she believed had been raped before they were butchered.
In Bucha, she and Zakharenko stumbled upon killing fields rarely found in Europe since 1945, with so many bodies on the streets, dead animals, women, and children.
They visited houses and saw people shot dead in their beds. Verbivska stopped visiting last fall after a close call in Irpin left her shell-shocked.
Now, she lives a decent life in Germany, but still, her eyes blaze when she talks about the Russian foe, who tortured and burned his way across the Ukrainian plains.
»A Witness to War’s Horror: Ukrainian Entrepreneur Iryna Verbivska«
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