Personal News
In her living room one kilometer from the Ukrainian border, Renata Sobka exchanges news over tea with her friend Agnieszka Gajda. Night fell on the small village of Budynin in southeastern Poland, covered in a thick blanket of snow. The sudden onset of cold weather after a mild autumn had given Renata Sobka the idea of getting involved in helping her Ukrainian neighbors, who were regularly deprived of electricity following Russian strikes. This farmer was ready to put an ad on Facebook, to send messages to her acquaintances, convinced that they would respond, even if she readily admits that “it becomes difficult for everyone with inflation”.
Except that the plans of these two women, very committed to welcoming refugees since February 24, 2022, were turned upside down on November 15. That day, at the end of the afternoon, Agnieszka Gajda saw two lights pierce the sky behind her windshield. What the 40-year-old mistook for a meteorite was most likely a Ukrainian air defense missile, about to crash on Polish soil. A few seconds later, the explosion caused in Przewodow, 5 km north of Budynin, carried away two farmers busy weighing corn. Renata Sobka knew one of them well, whom she had seen shortly before the tragedy. “The Ukrainians are only defending themselves, but I blame Vladimir Putin and Russia. It’s heartbreaking to see history repeating itself like this: the Russians have also gone after the Poles in the past.”, continues the forties.
“At the start of the war in Ukraine, I was convinced that something was going to happen to us: we couldn’t escape it. And to think that it could have fallen on me”, says Agnieszka Gajda, who lives not far from the border. “Since then, the emotion has subsided a bit. We will stay here, where everything connects us: our house, our animals and our fields,” adds this mother whose children live abroad.
“Nearly impossible” to find generators
Renata Sobka also intends to sow wheat or beans next year. But she still filled her ancestors’ kerosene lamp to the brim, just in case. “For the day when I find myself taking refuge without electricity in my vegetable cellar… It’s impossible not to think about it when, like us, we live so close to Ukraine at war. »
“Ukrainians need electricity generators so much that it has become almost impossible to find them in Poland,” testifies Mariusz Skorniewski, who has just arrived for tea at Renata Sobka. This retired border guard has planned to go to Lviv, in western Ukraine, at the end of November to drop off two generators: one that a friend of his got in Austria and one from a local association to which he belongs, like his two farmer friends.
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