Ukrainian family finds safety in Quebec after surviving Russian airstrikes

The psychological scars still give Aurika Olkhova nightmares and loud noises trigger memories of the bombings, but "the girls are happy."

Aurika Olkhova says she still can’t believe that she and her two daughters made it out of Ukraine alive after enduring weeks of bombing by the Russian army in the city of Mariupol — including at the maternity hospital.

Now safe in Quebec, working at a veterinary clinic, and her daughters learning French at school, Olkhova is telling her story.

The psychological scars still give her nightmares and loud noises trigger memories of the bombings, but “the girls are happy.” And thanks to a team of doctors at Montreal Children’s Hospital, her youngest daughter is no longer limping.

The traumatic journey started when 10-year-old Vladyslava was struck in the leg by a piece of shrapnel in March 2022 when a Russian bomb fell on the home of family friends they were staying with in Mariupol, in southern Ukraine.

Olkhova remembers ripping off a zipper from her jacket to use as a tourniquet to stop the heavy bleeding and the panic she felt calling ambulances, begging for help.

When the ambulance arrived there wasn’t enough room for all three of them, so Olkhova made the difficult decision to leave her 17-year-old daughter, Kristina, behind. And when she and her youngest daughter got to the hospital, they learned it had run out of medication, leaving Vladyslava to endure two leg surgeries without anesthesia.

“It was hell outside, and it was hell inside that hospital basement,” Olkhova recounted through an interpreter in a recent interview from her home in St-Bruno-de-Montarville, Que., east of Montreal.

“There was blood everywhere, people heavily wounded, body parts and amputations.”