To Stay or to be Evacuated: Dilemma of the Choice in February-March, 2022 (According to the Testimonies of Irpin Residents)

The large-scale Russian armed invasion on the territory of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has caused a massive forced displacement of Ukrainians from the areas where hostilities were directly taking place to the relatively safer western regions of our country and abroad. In the first weeks of the open phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war, under the conditions of an imminent threat to the life and health of relatives and friends, a terrible danger of the enemy occupying their places of residence, millions of our citizens were faced with a difficult choice: to stay at home or be evacuated. This dilemma, which arose in February-March, 2022, was personally resolved in different ways. As a result, a whole kaleidoscope of life trajectories is formed, in which most of Ukrainian society has found itself. Irpin is one of those Ukrainian cities from which the mass evacuation of the population has taken place because of the offensive of Russian troops. Like other complex realities of everyday life in the city of Irpin in the first weeks of the war, this aspect is only now beginning to find scientific understanding in some works of Ukrainian ethnologists, and is heard in the reflections of eyewitnesses in recently published collections of testimonies, documentary and journalistic works. The authors of the article, relying on the works of their predecessors and analyzing their own source base introduced into scientific circulation, recorded within the scope of the scientific project of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “Modern Military Everyday Life of the Communities of Kyiv Region: Cultural and Anthropological Dimensions”, outline several life stories of the period of the temporary Russian occupation of Irpin, those reflect the complexities of human choice regarding evacuation in wartime conditions. The testimonies of our interlocutors reveal their motivations for making fateful decisions under extreme circumstances, the difficulty and high danger of evacuation is evidenced. Witnesses of the events of the open phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war present their own biographies, where the cultural and social space of their hometown plays a prominent role. The results of the study show that, being in a constant military threat and psychological tension, the residents of Irpin both left spontaneously and also built certain strategies for evacuation in accordance with their own socio-cultural values.