Not the usual teenage dreams: Ukraine students seek future amid war
Alisa Skoropadyk was doing the dishes when the Russian soldiers killed the man driving his car outside her home. She could see from the kitchen window where she was cleaning with her mother. The man was driving up to the Russian checkpoint, and they shot him, dragged his body out of the vehicle, and dumped it on the street of her once idyllic suburb on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.
That is just one moment the teenager cites when explaining why she scrapped plans to become a pastry chef and decided to join the police academy.
“After what I saw in Bucha, I just want to fight these orcs and liberate Ukraine,” says Alisa, using the evil, subhuman creatures of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to describe Russian soldiers.
“My dad understands it; Mom is against,” she explains while lingering with her friends outside a newly reopened supermarket in Bucha where they stocked up
