The war next door: Fear and loathing in Moldova

Shawn Kell, an American, says he would have crossed into Ukraine and taken up arms if his Moldovan wife, Olesea, had not agreed to open their home to Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia's invasion. He felt he had to do something, anything, in response to the war across the border.

A war veteran himself with 22 years of service in the US military, Shawn would willingly have swapped their top-floor apartment in downtown Chisinau for a Ukrainian battlefield or helped to “train the trainers” in Ukraine’s military, advising them on sharpshooting and digging trenches.

“I cannot sit and not do anything. And if it wasn’t this” – helping Ukrainian refugees – “I would be crossing the border into Ukraine and trying to help them fight off the Russians,” he says.

This week's reports of war atrocities perpetrated by retreating Russians in Bucha near Ukraine's capital Kyiv – the images of mass graves, executions of civilians with hands bound and the rape of women – was, for Shawn, just the additional reason to go to Ukraine to fight.

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In late February and early March, Natalia and Tim were hospitalised with Covid-19. Viruses continue to spread, even in war zones

“It really makes me want to cross the border,” he says, visibly angry. “I think my wife facilitates this for that reason,” he says of sheltering Ukrainians.

The war is just six weeks old but already the couple are hosting their third family in an apartment in the Moldovan capital , just four hours away from heavy fighting. One family arrived shortly after Vladimir Putin's Russian troops launched their invasion on February 24th. They travelled on to the Czech Republic.

This is typical for refugees who have fled the war into Moldova; of about 400,000 refugees who have crossed into the former Soviet democratic nation, almost 100,000 have remained here. As a proportion of its 2.6 million population, no other country has borne as great a burden in accommodating refugees from this war as Moldova.

Being close to Ukraine makes Moldova a popular destination for refugees hoping to return as soon as they can; but as one of the poorest countries in Europe, without the economic and political protection of European Union membership, it is struggling to cope with the influx of people.

The second family taken in to the Kell household – a husband, wife and three children – stayed just three nights before heading to Azerbaijan. Men of military age are not permitted to leave Ukraine because of the call to arms to fight the Russians, but being a foreigner, the husband could leave the country and bring his family safely to Azerbaijani capital of Baku, east of the Black Sea.

Now, Shawn and Olesea's apartment is home to three generations of one family: Tatiana Boiko (61), her daughter Natalia Danilova (34) and Natalia's son Timofey, who is just seven months.

It has been a harrowing six weeks for Natalia. She was in the bathroom of her home in Odesa, Ukraine's third largest city – and a strategic prize for Putin on his war map – on the first day of the war when a Russian shell exploded nearby. The boom sent her running. Within seconds, she and her baby had fled to the basement.

In late February and early March, Natalia and Tim were hospitalised with Covid-19. Viruses continue to spread, even in war zones. In the paediatric hospital, every day, several times a day, she had to bring Tim up and down to the basement when the military sirens sounded warning of another possible Russian attack.

When she and Tim were discharged, the sirens continued at home, waking her at night. That was the final straw; she had to leave. She told her mother: “You’re coming too, no discussion.”

“I felt I would not be able to keep going like that. The tension was too great. The baby was very small. I was very, very scared and I just felt I would not make it,” she says.

They packed the car and headed for Moldova on March 5th. Long queues of Ukrainians fleeing the war forced them to abandon their car, pushing Tim in his pram for 8km before a border police car, spotting mother and baby, picked them up and brought them the final 2km of the journey to the border crossing at Palanca, in Moldova’s southeast corner.

Natalia’s husband, Roman, returned to Odesa. The Russians bombed a fuel depot last week, terrifying Ukrainians in the area. Moldovans across the border were equally afraid; they watched this critical gateway to the war through which the Russians may eventually come. Many in Moldova fear that they may be next on Putin’s hit list. No three words scare Moldovans more than “if Odesa falls”.

This week Moldovan border police chief Rosian Vasiloi told Oireachtas EU affairs committee members visiting the border at Palanca that a Russian attack on Odesa could surge the daily flow of Ukrainian refugees from 1,700 currently to 100,000.

Landlocked Moldova has through its history been dominated by foreign powers, from the Ottoman empire to the Russian empire to the Soviet Union

Odesa residents themselves are preparing for the worst. Natalia says her husband, a car mechanic still living at their home, has strengthened the foundation beams in the ceiling of the basement in the house – where he lives now and sleeps – in the hope that it can withstand the Russian shells that many in this region fear are coming to Odesa in greater numbers.

Natalia worries about Roman. “My husband is very scared,” she says.

There are other reasons why Shawn and Olesea are giving refuge to Natalia and her family. Top of the list: it is the right thing to do. It is an act of generosity replicated by many people across Moldova who share a common language and close neighbourly ties with the Ukrainian people.

“We have the means and the space and it would be wrong not to help other human beings, especially in such a horrible situation,” says Shawn.

The space in their home became available because his stepdaughter Elena moved to Dublin six months ago to work for a consulting company, freeing up a room for Natalia and her family.

The family's connections to this war span Europe. Elena's father, Victor Pantea, who is also Moldovan, lives in Kyiv and is serving in Ukraine's territorial defence hunting Russian saboteurs.

Speaking by phone from her home in Lucan, Elena (20) is delighted that her old bedroom can be used as a temporary home for Ukrainians fleeing a country that her father is helping to defend.

"I am proud of my mom. I wanted to be there and do the exact same thing but I am trying to do as much as possible here. I don't have a room to share but I am going to all the events possible," she says of the protests she has attended against the war outside Dáil Éireann, the GPO and the Russian embassy in Rathgar.

She communicates with her father in Kyiv every day, mostly by text because talking is “very emotional”.

When the war broke out, Elena considered returning to Moldova because of her fear, shared by many of her compatriots, that Putin would not stop with Ukraine but would advance further westwards and add Moldova to his conquest in his bid to build his Novorossiya (New Russia).

“I wanted to live together with my family, either all of us dying or being together,” she says.

Landlocked Moldova has through its history been dominated by foreign powers, from the Ottoman empire to the Russian empire to the Soviet Union. Moldovans see Putin's expansionist goals in the context of the same kind of empire-building out of Moscow in a new century; to them, it is a question of when, not if, he will turn his attention to Moldova.

"He is trying to bring imperial Russia back – Moldova is part of that," says Michael Lelescu, who, like Shawn Kell, is an American living in Chisinau.

“Moldova is a few hours’ conquest for Russia – maybe a week. I cannot see them putting up a fight,” says Lelescu, Shawn’s friend who lives with his Moldovan wife, Tatiana, and son in the capitol.

“In Moldova there will be no war because Molova has no army to fight with. If the Russians go in right away, it will be occupation, not a war, because we have no possibility to defend ourselves,” says Elena.

Another concern in Moldova is Transnistria, territory within Moldova that stretches along Ukraine’s border and is controlled by Russia-backed secessionists. About 1,500 Russian troops are stationed there, offering Putin another way to push west beyond Ukraine in his grand plan to annex more of the region. Linking Russia’s troops advancing westwards along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast with the Russian soldiers in Transnistria raise the threat level for the rest of Moldova.

In the early stages of the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, Russian aggression led some Moldovans to make drastic preparations. Michael and Tatiana, like others here, have packed all their important papers – passports, birth and marriage certs, identity cards – into a large folder that they can grab in an emergency should they need to leave if the Russians invade. Their escape plan, if required, involves moving west across the border into Romania to Iasi.

'The first few weeks was not easy. We are lucky because Ukrainians are a wall. That is why we needed to help the refugees'

“No matter how much I love my country I will never stay here with the Russians. Moldova has a very long history with the Russians and it is not the best one. They tried to exterminate our language, our culture. They are trying to say there is no such language as Romanian,” she says.

And if Odesa falls? "That's a sign to get your luggage and leave the country, at least for our family," she says. Like many Moldovans, Michael and Tatiana have Romanian citizenship. Unlike Moldova, Romania is a Nato state and offers an umbrella of protection against Russia.

Some Moldovans have already left. Moldovan MP Ion Spac, who until he was elected last year was a builder in Dublin for 20 years fitting out spaces such as Marco Pierre White's and Jamie Oliver's restaurants, says he knows of one Moldovan family who left for Ireland because of the Russian invasion. The main reason was because his friend was seven months pregnant.

“I don’t want to put my baby at risk here, so it is probably best that I go to Ireland,” she told Spac. “That was the first or second week of the war,” he says. “Now it has calmed down.”

The main reason Moldovans are breathing a little easier is because of the resistance that Ukrainians have shown against the Russians, reclaiming some of the territory lost in the early stages of the war. The invasion did not just shake Moldovan nerves. Spac recalls the glass in the windows of the Moldovan parliament building vibrating from the heavy Russian shelling in Ukraine.

“The first few weeks was not easy. We are lucky because Ukrainians are a wall. That is why we needed to help the refugees,” says Spac.

Some in Moldova believe Putin would have advanced further and taken at least Transnistria, if not all of Moldova, had he seized Ukraine quickly. He could have taken advantage of the two-week window that it took the EU to co-ordinate financial and economic sanctions in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

"If he had the chance to occupy this part of Moldova in the first days of war, he would have done that because if you have a price to pay, why not take as much as possible for that price?" says Alexandru Flenchea, a political analyst and former deputy prime minister who was in charge of trying to reintegrate Transnistria into Moldova.

But the world has changed and responded in a unified way, possibly changing Putin's short- term calculus. Setting out further sanctions that would be imposed by the European Union and United States will discourage Putin from taking further steps beyond Ukraine, at least if the war prevents him doing so in the short term.

“Then the price would be too high for Putin and Moldova would not make sense,” says Flenchea.

“The risk of an imminent invasion is minimal at this point. However, in the mid- to long-term perspective, Moldova remains extremely vulnerable in the face of Russian threats. Nothing will change to the better in the following years for Moldova.”

More immediately, Flenchea sees Odesa as “the last bastion” to prevent Russian troops moving on towards Moldova.

“The fact that Odesa stands and that Russian troops have been unable to deploy troops and occupy Odesa has kept Moldova safe for now. If that unfortunate scenario happens, at least Transnisitria will imminently be the next target,” he says.

Moldovans see the Bucha atrocities exposed by Russian withdrawals near Kyiv this week as eroding the little optimism that came from the Ukraine- Russia peace talks late last month.

"It shows that the peace is very, very far away for both sides," says Vitalie Sprinceana, a volunteer with Moldova for Peace who has been helping Ukrainian refugees crossing the border at Palanca since the war began.

'I don't know much about politics but who needs this war? Who would like to be bombed or shot? No one likes that'

“When the Russians pull back, you see that this is really a war: this is atrocious, violent, immoral.”

What Bucha has revealed has also rekindled new fears in Moldovans of what might happen if Russian soldiers bring their war westwards. The anxieties are real.

"I am afraid of being raped, not of being killed; if I am to run away, it is because of that," says Lilia Nenescu, another volunteer with Moldova for Peace, after seeing the images out of Bucha.

In Shawn and Olesea's home for refugees, Tatiana Lelescu is angry and frustrated at the same pictures that have horrified Moldovans and at the Russian denials of their actions.

“How can you call a whole world stupid? We have all these satellite images. We have people who saw it with their own eyes,” she says. “I never thought that I would be able to feel these feelings, especially towards Russians.”

Downstairs in the playground, below Shawn and Oleasa’s apartment, is another Ukrainian family who have found refuge in the same apartment complex. Liuda Shevchenka and her grandsons Nikita (8) and Ivan (4) fled Odesa.

Liuda struggles to understand why Putin is attacking their homeland.

“I don’t know much about politics but who needs this war? Who would like to be bombed or shot? No one likes that. We really hope it will end soon. We want to go home so bad,” she says.

She considers Moldovans the “same as Ukrainians”, so moving across the border made sense for her family. She is renting accommodation in Chisinau while the war rages on at home.

“We used to be the one country before,” she says.

As one of those have fled Russia’s attacks, Natalia’s mother, Tatiana, says family friends in Ukraine expressed surprise that they chose to leave Odesa for Chisinau.

“Of all the places, you found Moldova?” they told her. “It doesn’t make sense to leave for Moldova because it is not safe either; they can bomb Chisinau from Transnistria.”

But Natalia and Tatiana are optimistic that the war will be short-lived and that Natalia can return to her husband again shortly, possibly as soon as the end of this month, they say.

“This situation is temporary but it will have huge consequences. We cannot plan things any more,” Tatiana says.

Still, they haven’t lost hope. Asked what future they see for baby Tim, his mother says: “The brightest and the best, that he will be a doctor one day and that he will treat kids.”