Olha Svyripa was woken up at 5:30 am on February 24 by what she called “my husband’s warmest hug”.
“He said, ‘Please wake up, it’s started’.”
Two hours later, she was crammed into a small van with her husband, her best friend and four strangers for an 18-hour journey from Kyiv to the relatively safe Rivne in western Ukraine.
“We packed the most important things – documents, laptops, chargers. My husband filled my backpack with books and said: ‘It’s heavy, but it will protect you in case of shelling’.”
- Learn more from tech workers in Ukraine in this week’s tech tent
- We also discuss on the show whether Russia will disconnect from the Internet
- Also, how much of the conflict is being played out in real time on social media
- And how one man runs a mass email campaign to counter disinformation about the conflict
Olha’s laptop was important because, like many Ukrainians, she wanted to keep working despite the upheavals in her life and the disastrous circumstances she found herself in.
This, she told the BBC, takes her mind off “the endless stream of news and the constant fear” for her friends in the heavily shelled cities.
She works for the software company Intellias, and many of her colleagues tell the same story.
Oleksandr Bilyk lived in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, and he knew war was coming.
“Even in my worst case scenario, I could not have imagined that we would be woken up at 4:30 am by explosions. But we did it.”
They gathered all their family members – including their two-year-old son – and set off in the two family cars for a three-day drive west to Ivano-Frankivsk,
“The road was terrible, hundreds of people left the city. At one point my wife had to breastfeed and she did it without stopping the car.”
Colleagues and friends helped them in the two cities they stopped en route, and Intellias’ local team helped them find housing when they arrived. The following Monday, Oleksandr went back to work.
“I go to the office every day and try to complete the urgent tasks while my beautiful city is being destroyed.”
He also calls friends who stayed behind in Kharkiv every day: “I just hope that they will take the call.”
The company, like many others, has tried to relocate its employees either to western Ukraine or to Kraków in neighboring Poland.
Andrew Pavliv is the CEO of the software company N-iX, one of the largest in Ukraine. Since the conflict began, many of his associates have relocated to Lviv, where he is based. He even moved out of his house to accommodate some employees.
He told the BBC his company is operating at around 80% of its usual capacity, serving a range of customers from around the world: “We think getting people to work and continuing to pay taxes is an important part of the war work,” he told the BBC.
He said the Covid pandemic “has helped” because it meant people had gotten used to working remotely.
But the scale of the invasion surprised him: “We expected something to happen and we were ready for the escalating conflict in the east. The scale is much larger than we expected, but we quickly reorganized.
“Our company works with the army and we help with connectivity for government institutions and – in cybersecurity – our professionals help special forces.”
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