WARSAW, Poland — After eight years of violence, including three weeks of a full-scale Russian military offensive, Tetiana Revun and her son Evgen finally left their home in the war-torn province of Lugansk.
“Too heavy shelling of our territory began,” Evgen Revun, 16, told the Washington Examiner, with the help of a translation app.
Evgen Revun has lived half his life on the edge of a conflict zone. The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent proclamation of a so-called separatist Luhansk People’s Republic drew a “line of contact” between Russian-controlled territory and the wider Ukrainian state, including their city of Lysychansk. Now the war has partitioned his family. Under Ukrainian martial law, most able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 60 cannot leave the country.
Evgen Revun’s father, Andrii, could not leave with them. “He’s just at home,” the younger Revun said.
And not only him, his mother interjected, but also Nikita. “My eldest son still remained there,” said Tetiana Revun, 39.
Are they safe? “No,” she said.
Of course not. “Our house is near the front line,” Evgen Revun added.
So the mother and her younger son left for Poland, which has sheltered millions of Ukrainians before them. But first, they needed to find “a safe corridor” out of their city. “We were taken out with the police,” Tetiana Revun explained. “It was our cover.”
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They reached a local freight rail station and then made their way to Slavyansk, in Donetsk, another long-divided province. From there, they proceeded to western Ukraine and Warsaw — a 25-hour ride, crowded with a third person into a space meant for two. The trip was “good but could have been better,” as Evgen Revun put it, but he lit up when asked how people treated them along the way.
“Very good and helped in every way they could,” he said.
On Sunday, after two days of travel, they reached Warsaw Central, where they found a hot meal at the pop-up World Central Kitchen outside the station. The customary hallmarks of a train station have been layered by placards and flyers that proclaim their service to the incoming refugees from the first glimpse of the bright blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. A pair of service desks once reserved for train station employees to guide customers have been taken over by volunteers, decked in bright green or orange vests, who descended upon the station Feb. 28, just a few days after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Me and 10 people just came to the train station and want to help. We don’t know each other, but we do a 12-hour shift just talking to people,” Magdalena Marowik, 30, told the Washington Examiner on Sunday. “After the 12 hours, we just think, ‘OK, so maybe do this again,’ and again, [and] again.”
They began to call themselves “Grupa Centrum,” or Center Group, after the station. “It’s a volunteer organization, but we’re not a foundation,” Agnieszka “Fed” Anikin said in a separate conversation. “We just came to [Warsaw Central] … and, basically, there was nothing here, no help. So we just stayed for, like, 15 hours. And then this is what we created.”
Much of their energies centered on guiding refugees to the trains they need, advising them on how to find lodging, and coordinating with station managers uncertain about what to do in the face of thousands of newly arrived Ukrainians. “And so we just, like, in the anarchist way — just put [up] the table, came back with the tea, food, and just give [it] to people,” said Morawik, who studied art and aspires to open her own gallery someday. “And we did it well.”
Other volunteers identify Marawik and Anikin as the leaders of the group, but they wear the authority lightly. “Not the boss because we are all equal in my organization,” Anikin said.
Morawik used a gentler term: “The center [group] has two moms.”
Quite a large family grew around them. “We created some kind of structure, and now we have, for example, 15 sectors,” Anikin said. “We even have our own lawyers.”
They are supported by a steady stream of donations from Polish citizens. “The whole country is involved,” Anikin said, before breaking into a smile from behind her mask. “Which makes me kind of proud.”
Jacek Tomaszewski and two of his friends, Bartosz Gnojewski and Arek Szweda, have been filling a van with supplies collected in their hometown of Przasnysz.
“Every day, I am bringing a full van [of] products,” he said one chilly evening outside the station.
Tomaszewski said one of his friends would soon be delivering 10 generators to the border. He expected that the Ukrainians who took custody of the generators would bring them to a “hospital for the army,” likely in Kyiv.
“Full van brings products,” he said in English, “and when [on the way] back, bring [a] full van [of] people to central station.”
When the refugees reach the station, they find interpreters wearing large flag pins to denote the languages they speak — often the Union Jack, for English, or the Russian tricolor flag. These volunteers near the firemen at information tents or meet the incoming Ukrainians who stand in the open spaces or sometimes sit on whatever luggage they managed to bring on their journey.
“It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got,” Karol Chudzikowski, 25, a volunteer interpreter, told the Washington Examiner. “Everybody — rich people, poor people — they are staying in the same field on the border in the same train … in this same situation. It doesn’t matter who you were before.”
The crisis dwarfed the gravest expectations of international officials. The Polish Foreign Ministry hosted a briefing for allied officials just prior to the war, according to two senior European sources, in which Polish Interior Ministry and Border Guard officials estimated that they could accept no more than 50,000 people per day.
“Everybody’s estimates have been proven inaccurate,” one of the officials recalled. “They said this was their maximum, but now they’ve done, even in a single day, three times what they said that their maximum could be before the war.”
More than 2.1 million Ukrainians fled for Poland between Feb. 22 and March 24, according to the Polish Border Guard. The population of Warsaw has increased by about 300,000 since the Russian offensive began. The scale of the task before Grupa Centrum can be inferred from World Central Kitchen figures.
“WCK is serving over 18,000 meals per day in Warsaw,” WCK Relief Operations Lead Fiona Donovan told the Washington Examiner. “At [the] central train station, we serve 12,000 meals per day, and we’re also providing meals at private shelters in apartment complexes and office buildings, as well as other facilities housing refugees, churches, schools, hotels.”
Ukrainian passport holders are eligible for free tickets on the Polish rail network. The new arrivals have a strong preference for the major city centers. “People are afraid to go to small towns because there might not be enough work,” Tetiana Revun explained.
One large poster displaying a map of Poland, inscribed in Russian and English, attempts to counter this impression.
“Smaller cities in Poland mean greater possibilities of accommodation, lower costs of living, and better chances to find a job,” the blue-and-yellow poster states. “Big cities in Poland are already overcrowded. Don’t be afraid to go to smaller towns: they are peaceful, have good infrastructure, and are well-adapted.”
One section of an information desk now functions as a makeshift pharmacy staffed by volunteers with medical training, aided by firefighters dispatched from the city. “We have a medical education, but we work for free,” a woman named Natalie, whose vest badges showed that she speaks Russian and Polish, told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
Natalie, who gave only her first name but said she has pediatric expertise, revealed that she started volunteering last week after escaping “the bombing” in her home city of Dnipro. Her husband and son stayed in Ukraine. “They are not safe,” she said. “They are in areas where there is a war.”
As President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders gathered Thursday in Brussels, Natalie worked alongside a Ukrainian-speaking woman who was studying medicine in Lviv. “My mom and dad wanted me to move to Poland because it’s safer than staying in Lviv,” said Taisiia Mironiuk, 21. “I will be here as long as the war continues.”
Natalie emphasized that she and other Ukrainians volunteered of their own free will. In between questions, a woman approached the counter seeking some assistance. They spoke, and Natalie removed a piece of thin paper from one of the medication boxes and folded it into a miniature bag that would hold a few pills.
“We don’t have to do the work. That is, we came ourselves to help our people who came here. … We can communicate with our people,” she said. “We want to help. Secondly, [we want] to be busy in order not to think and not cry all day.”
She bristled at the mention of Putin’s “provocative” claim that the Russian military is trying to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The Revuns agreed that Russian-speaking Ukrainians such as themselves need no protection from Zelensky’s government. “Russian-speaking citizens do not support the Russian army, support the Ukrainian,” Evgen said.
Natalie is staying with family in Warsaw, but many Polish households have welcomed Ukrainians previously unknown to them into their homes. The hosts and their guests often find each other through social media, but Grupa Centrum does what vetting it can on behalf of the newcomers. “It’s basic stuff, and the police cooperate with us,” Marawik said.
The volunteers sound amazed, even amused, by their own innovations. “It‘s really an anarchist way,” she chuckled. “But we help people.”
One young woman, in between deliveries of hot water for drinks on a chilly evening, revealed that she is sleeping on the couch these days. She has yielded her bedroom to Ukrainian refugees who needed a place to stay. This volunteer dashes off with the electric tea kettles rather than continue the conversation.
“I have a job [to do],” she calls over her shoulder.
Marawik is making arrangements for the government to take over that responsibility, particularly as Polish lawmakers have voted to give a one-time cash payment of 300 zloty (about $70) to each refugee family and another $10 per day to Polish people who provide a room to Ukrainians in need,
“I can’t be the owner of the database because it’s dangerous,” she said. “I can’t have a personal database of the whole [group of] refugees and the accommodation of people.”
They have established a private area for some refugees to stay in the upper deck of the train station. “Our nicest place … [is] the room for moms and children,” Anikin said.
Depending on the evening, that dedicated space might be too small for the need as shown by the groups of people seated on blankets along the upper hallway next to a McDonald’s. The number of people passing through the station varies with the train schedule and conditions in Ukraine.
“The number of refugees crossing the border into Poland has decreased steadily over the past few weeks,” said Donovan, the WCK official. “We are seeing a large increase in the number of [internally displaced people] in western Ukraine and are developing solutions to provide food to these communities.”
Tetiana Revun hopes to find work in Germany, even if the job does not match her “electromechanical” skillset. “A lot of people [need] work, and there may not be enough work that a person needs by education,” she said.
Her son has begun his own studies at Severodonetsk Chemical-Mechanical College. Something about his phrasing prompted his mother to say something to him in Russian. He revised his statement. “My college was destroyed during the shelling,” he said.
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Marawik does not want to discuss her own future plans. “I really can’t explain. Because of this situation, I forgot about the whole — my experience, my love for the arts, and so on. … For now, I’m not interested in art. I’m interested in this place and situation,” she said. “All reporters and journalists want to talk about the volunteers, and I think it’s [the] less interesting thing to do here.”
She paused as if waiting for a response. “Because they have to talk about the crisis,” she added in a lilting tone, “the humanitarian crisis, and the situation in Ukraine.”
Three nights later, Evgen Revun confirmed that he and his mother had reached Germany. “All is well,” said the boy from Lugansk.
