Yana Muravinets has helped evacuate more than 2,500 people from the Mykolaiv area while working with the Red Cross, although many people have chosen to stay.
The first person Yana Muravinets tried to persuade her to leave her home near the Ukrainian front line was a young woman who was five months pregnant.
He didn’t want to abandon his cows, his calf, or his dog. He told Ms. Muravinets that he devoted energy and money to building his house near the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, and that he was afraid of losing it.
“I said,‘ None of this will be necessary when you’re here dead, ’” Ms. Muravinets.
From the early days of the war, Mrs. Muravinets, a 27-year-old photographer and videographer from the region, has taken on a new volunteer job at the Red Cross: encouraging people to evacuate. In phone calls, conversations at the door, public speeches in town squares, sometimes even under fire, he has tried to convince Ukrainians that leaving everything behind is the only sure way to survive.
Persuading people to give up everything they have built over their lives is one of the many sad jobs the war has created, and another challenge the authorities have faced. While the city of Mykolaiv managed to quell Russian attacks early in the war, the attacks have hit it and its region, causing widespread deaths and destruction. Many residents have left, but hundreds of thousands are still there, and the mayor has urged people to leave.
Ms Muravinets, who has spent thousands of hours in recent months trying to argue the evacuation, said she was not ready for the task. He started having panic attacks, he said, but he felt he had to keep going.
“The war is not over and people continue to be in danger,” he said in a Zoom call from Mykolaiv that had to be interrupted due to the bombings. “If I can convince a person to leave, that’s fine.”
Boris Shchabelkyi, an evacuation coordinator for people with disabilities who works alongside Ms. Muravinets, described her as a tireless worker, kind to the people she needs to evacuate and “always in a good mood” with her colleagues.
With the Red Cross, he has helped evacuate more than 2,500 people, he said, but many have stayed or returned a few days after leaving. It took a month and a half to convince the young pregnant woman to flee, and she left only after the windows of her home were destroyed twice, Ms. Muravinets.
“Especially when it’s safe, people think it’s okay and live with a certain enthusiasm,” he said. “They decide to leave only when the missiles get home.”
Houses damaged in Mykolaiv as a result of a deadly missile attack in late June. Credit … Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times, Ms. Muravinets has tried to persuade the Ukrainians that leaving everything behind is often the only way to survive. Credit … Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
For two years before the war, Mrs. Muravinets worked for Lactalis, a French dairy company with a plant in the area, and toured the farming villages to check the quality of the milk.
Now that many rural roads have become dangerous, he has reached remote villages, avoiding fire using shortcuts he learned in his previous job. But now it has to persuade dairy farmers to abandon their livelihoods.
“It’s a lifetime for them,” he said. “They say, ‘How can I leave my cows? How can I leave my cows?’
Before the war, he said a cow could cost up to $ 1,000. Now, people take them to slaughterhouses to get meat for a fraction of that.
Mrs Muravinets said some farmers who accepted the evacuation left the corrals open, so the animals would not starve to death, and now cows, oxen and ducks roamed the streets of the village looking for food and water.
“People who had money, opportunities, cars are already gone,” Ms. Muravinets. But others, who lived in bunkers for months, told him they were willing to die there because they refused to leave.
He said he stayed for the same reason.
“The people who stay are the ones who are willing to sacrifice their lives.”
Valeriya Safronova contributed a report from New York.