Irish man fleeing to Ukrainian border says 14-year-old boy among the many dead in 'hot war'
Brendan Murphy and his family in Ukraine.
As Brendan Murphy and his family were slowly making their way to the European border with millions of other Ukrainians on Friday afternoon, the Irishman described the Russian invasion on the ground as very much a “hot war”.
“There are a lot of people dead. There’s a lot of Russians dead," Mr Murphy told the .
"Thirteen Ukrainians were killed defending a tiny island when a Russian navy ship bombed it flat,” he said.
Mr Murphy and his Ukrainian wife Marina, as well as Marina’s 80-year-old mother, her daughter, and her three-year-old granddaughter, fled Kyiv on Thursday morning when the invasion began.
Now as they inch along a traffic-jammed route out of Ukraine, Mr Murphy said they were concentrating on travelling “with an abundance of caution, knowing that at any stage, what’s happened to others in Ukraine could well happen to us”.
He said they have no idea of where they are going, or how long it will take to get there.
“Where I'm getting to, I don't know. I'm getting to the next kilometre, and the next bend in the road, and then the next one, and the next one, until I get to somewhere else,” he said.
“I might not find the next kilometre. This is a hot war, people are being killed, and I don't have a special pass. They won't say ‘sorry, Brendan, we will be killing you’,” he added.
Mr Murphy said they feel proud of the sacrifices and successes of Ukrainian forces.
“We're proud of the sacrifice. Proud that Russians who came here to kill are being killed, proud of the success of the very brave people,” he said.
He said they were now “watching out for people in parachutes”, as they have been driving past units of the Ukrainian military preparing for paratroopers and rockets from the sky.
He added there was a lot of fake news and disinformation circulating.
Mr Murphy has been critical of the Irish Government for not waiving visa requirements for Ukrainian citizens in the days and weeks leading up to the invasion.
He has spent the last 20 years travelling between Ireland and Ukraine for business, and he and his wife have a home in Ireland.
Until recent days, Ireland had been the only EU state to require visas for incoming Ukrainian citizens. While Mr Murphy could have freely returned to his home in Ireland within five hours at any stage in the past few weeks, he said he “couldn’t live with himself” if he left his family behind, who are all Ukrainian citizens.
He and a group of other Irish and Ukrainian citizens wrote to Justice Minister Helen McEntee on February 15, urgently asking for a visa waiver.
On Friday, the minister announced the immediate lifting of visa requirements, but Mr Murphy said this was too late for his family and many others who are now struggling to leave the country.
He said he was upset that after getting home “has become impossible”, the visa announcement has proven it could have been done all along, and everyone is just supposed to be “happy they’ve changed it now”.
Mr Murphy said it now feels like “no one is coming to Ukraine’s aid”, and that everyone left in the country is being neglected. He said “every single cent” should be cut off from Russia.
While the EU has already imposed severe sanctions on Russia, the country has been allowed to remain inside the Swift banking system.
“Not a single Russian business, not a single financial trade, nothing should move until such time as this is stopped, and to any minister who comes out with waffle, who says ‘sorry, it's complicated, I'm trying’, I would say, people are dying,” said Mr Murphy.
“This is much bigger than the pandemic. So just lock it down. Turn the tap off. Not a single cent. Turn everything off, until they start screaming. Then point them in the right direction and say you go stop that fellow there who is killing 14-year-old boys, killing people in cars and buses and in their homes,” he said.
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