I remember I had this white lab coat at the time, but it was very see-through, so if you wore anything underneath, the clothes you had on there were visible. And I remember coming to a lecture once in that orange T-shirt with the slogan “Yes!” on it. That was the slogan of the Orange Revolution. I wore it under my lab coat. Everyone really saw me as a bit of a revolutionary because people were still hesitant to take any radical steps then — it was still unclear which way things would go. That was one thing. And the other is that I went to work at a polling station. I was eighteen [twenty-one], I had just started voting, and I immediately went to [work] the polls. And I can say I participated in running the polling station through all three rounds of the election. We had a very good head of the polling station. In my opinion, she was well-organized and systematic, I didn’t see any rigging or anything like that. She was excellent, and I learned a lot from her about how to properly work at a polling station. And for example, I never even had a thought about doing anything dishonest or rigging anything, I didn’t understand that, couldn’t even imagine it happening. And I can say that in all the following years, I continued working at polling stations — it was something very important to me, a kind of civic duty. And later… It wasn’t about the money, although they did pay something, I think, as far as I remember. But it wasn’t about the money for me, I wanted to do it because I wanted to be a part of these electoral processes. And, of course, during the Orange Revolution, I also went to Kyiv. I don’t remember the details exactly anymore, but we definitely went to Kyiv, stayed there for a week, I think. We didn’t stay in tents, we stayed at some friends’ apartment. We went to the rallies. I had this great big orange hat. It was from Dutch football fans, that kind of orange, and it really suited me. And I wore that hat around Maidan. That revolution was very bright, really, like a party, in a way. Although there were a few moments when the Berkut guys came running, those were isolated incidents. They only happened at the beginning, later, there was none of that.
When I went to work at the polling station in 2007, I went to Artemivsk, that is, Bakhmut. I was struck by the stagnation I saw in that city: those old buses, those old buildings. When I spoke to a man who was also working at the station, a local, he told me, “They want to divide us,” he said, “but we’re all the same — your place is the same as ours, nothing different, we all live the same. I was there in western Ukraine, in [Ivano-]Frankivsk, and you have nothing different, everything is the same.” And I said, “When were you [in our region]?” And he said, “Back in [19]83.” So, basically, nothing had changed for them since then, but for us, everything was already different. I didn’t respond much, but said, “Come visit us again.” Later, again in Bakhmut, it was already Bakhmut, not Artemivsk anymore, I was there the last time in [20]19. That was for a project — we were bringing people from our communities to visit communities in the Donetsk region, to show that Donetsk can also teach us something. There were some great community spaces there that appeared thanks to donor support after [20]14. We were traveling there to establish these connections and networks, and the people from the Ivano-Frankivsk region who came had certain stereotypes — they believed that in the Donetsk region, there were no patriots in [20]19, no progressive community leaders. Later they shared that their perceptions had completely changed after that trip, and they realized there were a lot of wonderful and patriotic people there.
If you remember, on the 24th and 25th [of February], [Ivano-]Frankivsk got very quiet. There were practically no people — everyone was leaving, and people were lining up at the borders, withdrawing money from ATMs. And as I walked around, I was feeling anxious that everyone had left, and I was still here. Air raid alerts, my son with a broken leg. And then on the 26th, I think it was, I was walking down the street, and I saw these young people packing up a car. Well, they were either packing or unpacking it. They were around the car with all kinds of bags and suitcases. And I asked, “Where are you going?” And they said, “Oh, we’re not going, we just arrived.” I asked, “Where from?” They said, “We came from Kyiv.” Then I met people from Kherson, from elsewhere. Suddenly there were so many people in [Ivano-]Frankivsk all at once! The number of people started growing, and they were all new — you didn’t know anyone. You could tell they were different: they had a different style, looked different. People from Kyiv were more easy-going. And then I realized — why would I leave if others are coming here because it’s supposedly safer? That’s it, I’m staying, no need to go anywhere, everything’s calm. And that really calmed me down. I completely let go of the thoughts about whether I should go or not. It was clear we were all staying, no one was going anywhere. And I started volunteering. Also completely by chance — for some reason, I hadn’t planned to volunteer. It just happened — people started messaging me, “Can you help find this? Can you help find that?” I was stunned that so many guys were messaging me, “Help us find body armor, helmets.” I was just in shock! It was such a stress for me! Like, what do you mean, there’s a full-scale war and we don’t have body armor and helmets? So there are people who want to go fight, and they don’t even have what they need. Now, that was really… Really… That was scary.
When we started collecting humanitarian aid for people in other cities — those that were under shelling — we put out a call, “If anyone wants to help, come volunteer with us.” There wasn’t any space for us at Prosvita, the People’s House Prosvita, as I mentioned before, so we set up in the Vagabundo Underground Passage, an art space. They, Rostyslav Shpuk, told us, “No problem. Set up your headquarters here.” And that’s where we gathered, I remember, in those early days of the war. When we made the call — “Come volunteer!” — a lot of people responded. And most of them were from Kyiv, as a rule. I don't remember what other regions there were people from, but there were a lot of people from Kyiv. These were people who had relocated and who had free time and good experience, because they were pretty professional people from various entities. I mean, from NGOs, from business, and so on. And we managed to get our operations going in those early days. Then those people left. Pretty quickly. Like, a month or two, and they were gone. And we stayed to keep volunteering. And honestly, this volunteering, it... We wanted to wrap it up by the end of [20]23, but it’s not so easy to just stop. And right now we’re moving toward the end of that volunteering work. At first, we were volunteering — and I was, too — for the military. But later we shifted to helping internally displaced people, which is actually much easier, to be honest. And later we moved from active volunteering to meaningful work. We stopped just providing essentials, and instead, like I said, started focusing on telling people what’s happening in Ukraine, helping them adapt, integrate, and so on.
Even before Euromaidan, technically speaking, we were supposed to screen the film Open Access [as part of the Docudays.UA Traveling Film Festival]. To me, it was a very simple film — I didn’t see anything extraordinary in it, but the film was about access to information regarding Mezhyhirya in Kyiv, the presidential residence. And it turned out that the film had been banned from screening by the security services. And at all our screenings — whether it was this film or another — SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] officers would show up, and they would ban the screening. They wouldn’t let the venue owners host us. Nobody told us this directly, but the power would suddenly go out, or there would suddenly be a bomb threat, the police would show up, and we’d all be forced to leave, and so on. It was very stressful for me at the time, because… My son was four months old, and all this confusion, it was really stressful. I was worried, and I thought it looked very strange — this was a film that, let’s say, ten people came to see, nothing major, nothing large-scale. It wasn’t that kind of format or level, and the resources involved were tiny, so few people came. But for some reason, it really alarmed the authorities, and they kept interfering with our events.
Yevheniia Bardiak is a civic activist, regional council deputy, and medical professional from Ivano-Frankivsk. She was born on November 2, 1983, in the city of Kalush, Ivano-Frankivsk region. From 2001 to 2007, she studied at Ivano-Frankivsk National Medical University. During the 2004 presidential election, she worked at a polling station and took part in rallies supporting Viktor Yushchenko. In 2007, she worked at a polling station in Bakhmut, Donetsk region, during the parliamentary elections. Since 2008, she has headed the Ivano-Frankivsk regional organization Moloda Prosvita, the youth wing of the nationwide cultural and educational society. In 2014, she earned a Candidate of Sciences in Medicine. She is the author of the essay series “The Heavenly Hundred of Prykarpattia” about the Revolution of Dignity participants from the Ivano-Frankivsk region who lost their lives. She documented testimonies of human rights violations during the occupation of Sloviansk in 2014, which formed the basis of the 2018 book The City Where the War Began. Since 2020, she has served as a deputy of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council. She returned to active participation in civic life after the full-scale invasion began and has also been engaged in volunteering since then.
