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25-12-2023
KYIV: Ukrainian couple Hanna and Andriy Berezynets were delighted when they found out they were expecting triplets. But on the day the babies were due, war broke out and the little girls were born to the sound of Russian shells falling around them.
When Hanna went for her first ultrasound scan, it showed a small dot, the baby she and Andriy had planned for so long but on their next visit to the doctor they were told they were expecting twins. The third visit revealed she was actually pregnant with triplets.
“We were afraid to see the doctor for the fourth appointment,” Hanna jokes but the couple were happy. “We really wanted children. God had heard us and gave us three at once,” she tells the Ukrainecast podcast.
Hanna went into a maternity hospital in Chernihiv on 23 February 2022 for a Caesarean section, which was scheduled for the next morning.
Rumours about a Russian invasion had been spreading for a while but she did not believe them until early on 24 February when she got a message from her brother, who was studying at a military school. He told her that the war had started and he did not know where he was going to be sent. He urged her to leave Chernihiv but she could not leave straight away. Her operation was planned for 09:00 and the hospital staff were preparing to deliver their first triplets in three years.
Hanna could not believe the war had begun: “I thought it would happen somewhere far away, in a field, a forest, but not in our lives.”
Andriy arrived at the hospital at 06:00 carrying suitcases filled with clothes and other supplies and tried to calm her down. “He said that the main thing was to bring our children into this world,” Hanna recalls.
The babies were born just minutes apart: Emilia at 09:36, Olivia at 09:37 and at 09:38 it was Melania’s turn. “I couldn’t imagine they would be so beautiful,” says Hannah.
Ten minutes later, at 09:48, the Ukrainian state border service officially announced that Russian military vehicles had entered the Chernihiv region.
Chernihiv is in northern Ukraine on the border with Belarus where Russian troops invaded from and was immediately hit by shelling. Although Russia did not occupy the city, it was badly damaged.
On the evening after she gave birth, recovering from surgery and barely able to get out of bed, Hanna was told to go down to a bomb shelter with her babies. “I was totally lost. I didn’t understand how I would get there,” she says.
To reach it, she had to go outside, where the temperature was close to zero. The nurses wrapped the babies in warm blankets and carried them for her.
There were about 100 people with newborns in the shelter and hospital staff delivered 20 babies down there, they later told Ukrainian media. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
