She’d just celebrated her baby shower in Ukraine. Hours later, she was fleeing bombs

CNN

By Brynn Gingras and Faith Karimi, CNN

Hours before Russia started bombarding Ukraine, Olesya Ostafieva’s family and friends had thrown her a surprise baby shower in the capital of Kyiv.

Heart-shaped pink and white balloons floated around her 25th-floor apartment on February 23, the night of the party. At nearly nine months pregnant with her first child — a baby girl she’s already calling Kyra — Ostafieva said tiny kicks jolted her awake every few hours.

Then around 5 a.m. on February 24, she heard a loud boom. Her sister was visiting, and Ostafieva rushed to her room to ask about the noise.

“She said, ‘It’s bombs,'” Ostafieva said. “It was a shock for me. We didn’t know … what we must do.”

And so began a terrifying ordeal that took Ostafieva, her dog, Casper, and her sister, Iryna Ostafieva, to a bomb shelter for four days, followed by a week-long journey to Poland, and eventually the United States.

Nearly three weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion that stunned the world, Olesya Ostafieva is 5,000 miles away in New York City.

She thought the attack would last a few days

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine, she initially assumed it would be over quickly. She planned to stay in her apartment in Kyiv, where a pink and white baby room was ready for Kyra’s arrival. Newborn outfits — mostly in pale pinks — laid neatly stacked in a white drawer.

“I had a contract with the best maternity hospital in Kiev,” she told CNN from a friend’s New York City home.

But the shelling raged. The maternity hospital where she planned to deliver Kyra was bombed. Terrified, the two sisters and Casper hid in a bomb shelter in the basement of Ostafieva’s apartment. After a few days of relentless attacks, they decided to escape to Poland. Ostafieva drove in bumper-to-bumper traffic for about 10 hours a day.

“I forgot about all pain. I [knew] that I needed to [get] to a border,” she said.

The hastily-bought onesies? Future mementos

After months of frantically preparing for the birth of her child, Ostafieva had to leave behind much of what she had purchased.

The sisters stopped at a market in western Ukraine to buy used baby clothes, and arrived in Poznan, Poland, four days later.

“I had nothing,” she said. “I went to a little village … bought [baby] oil and a few clothes.”

Ostafieva’s friend, Anna Arima, convinced her to visit her in New York City and have her baby there. Armed with just a few things, she got on a flight to the United States with a valid visa from a prior visit.

She plans to keep the clothes she bought in the village to show Kyra when she’s old enough to understand.

“This was about war, about stress,” she said, holding up orange and pink onesies. “I will tell my daughter … ‘I saved these things for memory and for understanding that … we want peace.’ We want to be safe.”

Ostafieva realizes how lucky she is to be away from the terror, uncertainty and death engulfing her homeland. Watching hospitals bombed — like the recent attack that turned Mariupol’s maternity and children’s hospital into a smoldering wreckage — left her in tears. A Russian airstrike on the hospital Wednesday injured 17 people, including children, women and doctors, Mariupol officials said.

“I know my baby is safe, but a lot of mothers don’t have the same luck,” she said.

Ostafieva is wearing a white T-shirt with a purple square with the words, “If you don’t close the sky, they will die.”

High hopes to return home soon

An ultrasound taken about a month ago appears to show Baby Kyra smiling. Safe in her mother’s womb, she’s active and in good health despite the fear and chaos of the past few weeks.

“During the day she sleeps, and when I go to bed she starts to dance,” Ostafieva said, of the fetus’s movements inside.

While Ostafieva is glad to be safe in New York City, she hopes to return to Poland — where her sister and her dog remain — and raise Kyra in Ukraine.

“I start my career in Kyiv, I start my business in Kyiv … I want to return,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “I see my future with Ukraine … I want to help people who stay in Kyiv now … They need the support. I hope the war will end in a short time.”

Baby Kyra is due in two weeks, and Ostafieva hopes to introduce her parents to their first grandchild over the Easter holiday. She plans to return to Poland next month, and hopefully back to Ukraine soon afterward.

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