Posted on 04/13/2022 12:24:06 AM PDT by Zhang Fei
He makes it within 5 miles of Platt and his wife and suddenly comes under artillery fire. He is forced to abort the rescue.
Stern tries again and again. Finally, one morning at 4 o'clock, Platt gets a text message from him.
"Be ready to leave in 20 minutes."
Under the cover of darkness, Platt, his wife and two of their six cats take logging trails through a national forest out of their suburb. They make it out.
"The whole two, three weeks we were stuck, artillery, mortar fire, it was falling all around us," Platt told NPR after crossing the border into Poland as Russian bombardment continued in and around Kyiv. "We were in the middle of a 360-degree Russian battalion."
While Platt and his wife were stuck in their village of Bohdanivka, they started to run low on essentials.
"The gas got cut off. The electricity got cut off. We were down to eating six potatoes a day," he says.
Those who did venture out did not always make it back, like one of their neighbors who tried to get water from a community well.
"He was an unarmed civilian — probably a guy about my age — and [Russians] killed him," says Platt. "To this day, he's still sitting in his car. They won't let anybody recover the body."
The scenes of cities and towns that Ukrainian forces recently took back show just how many people, like Platt's neighbor, did not survive the Russian siege. Ukrainians in cities like Mariupol are still stuck.
Even so, Platt is determined to return home to Kyiv.
"If I have to live to be 100 to spend every dollar of my retirement income to help rebuild the place, that's what we're going to do," he says. "I will go back."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Ukraine ping
Project Dynamo extracts Americans stranded in danger zones. An elderly American 82nd Airborne vet and his Ukrainian wife are exfiltrated from an area surrounded by Russian troops after a harrowing series of events.
Sounds just like the accounts from ppl living in the Donbass for the last 8 years. They were under attack 24/7 by the Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian Army, including shelling, snipers and mines. Over 14,000 ppl were killed, mainly Russian speakers, including approximately 250 children. I really don’t GAF that Ukrainians in Kiev have been suffering the same plight for a measly 2 months.
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Thanks Zhang Fei.
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