“I’m ready for anything, I’m not a soldier, but I will become one.” On the day of the Russian invasion, between two bombings, Sergei Kastornykh was already thinking about taking up arms. A screenwriter, sometimes a TV series director, he woke up with his wife and granddaughter when helicopters caught fire in the sky of Vichgorod in the suburbs of Kyiv. We exchanged videos while he was a refugee with his family in the basement.
A year has passed and we wanted to hear from Sergey. Today, his family has taken refuge in the Netherlands, Sergei proudly wears the uniform of the Ukrainian army. His daily life: back and forth to the front. From the north of the country to the Donbass, he witnessed numerous battles against the “Russian occupier”.
“Our enemy is inhuman,” he sums up in disgust. Having witnessed Bucha’s atrocities, “bombs falling from the sky” and “deaths in the streets”, Sergei crossed the country with the Ukrainian army. Oscar, his new nickname, is embroidered on his military jacket. The one who has always dreamed of getting a golden statuette for his scripts brings hope amid the disfigured cities and trenches. Only the patriotic euphoria of undertakings fades away on the day when he breaks his arm. “Arenaline, which I was fascinated by the first months of the war, completely disappeared,” he admits.
“The hardest thing is to see my daughter grow up without me,” Sergey admits. Back in Kyiv, after weeks in the Donbass, the ex-screenwriter struggles to imagine an indulgent future. Why think about the post-war period, when “I may not live to see next year,” he admits. “I should think better about how to survive.”
Source: Le Parisien
I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.
