Shreveporter gives first hand account of war in Ukraine
Robert A. Harris II, who many may remember as the first person to be the Byrd High School Marching Band’s drum major for three consecutive years, is leading a different life these days: Escaping from the siege of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and settling into Poland for the time being.
Harris, who grew up in Anderson Island and Stonewall and was in the Byrd Class of 2002, owns an online tutoring business called “Lone Star English.” Because business costs are far lower in Eastern Europe and his fascination with Slavic culture, he moved to Kharkiv in 2021 to base his company there. “After living in China for seven years, Ukraine seemed like a cakewalk by comparison,” he said.
Then we all know what transpired. He and his girlfriend, Valeria Vitalievna, born in Ukraine, got out on the first Sunday of the war. He tells it like this:
“At first, we were planning to just ‘ride it out,’ as ridiculous as that sounds now. Frankly, I thought it would be over in days. I’d already mistakenly been mixed up in a mass mobilization of every male in my subdistrict and had been dropped onto a hastily built skirmish line on Moskovskii Avenue with a rifle in my hand. After the first skirmish, the sergeant who mobilized us realized I was foreign and couldn’t understand enough Ukrainian to hear orders (and also saw that, with an old leg injury, I can’t run to or from a fight), so I was sent back home. The fight lasted 28 minutes.
“Twenty-eight minutes, one and a half magazines of ammunition and one minor engagement, but it was enough to realize ‘man, these Russians can’t fight their way out of a broom closet if a bunch of untrained civilians are mowing them down like this,’” he said.
From that point, Harris expected a quick Ukrainian victory. In the early days, his thinking was that it seemed like it was more dangerous to move than to stay put. His apartment building was “pretty solid” and had several layers of inner rooms and a storm shelter inside. “We figured in an air raid it was safer to be there than on a train,” he said.
All that changed. On the night of Feb. 26, he saw an interview on YouTube with a retired general who said, “This is only the advance wave; the main force hasn’t even attacked yet.” Rockets were exploding all around his apartment in Industrialnyii, 200 meters from the oil depot that was set aflame on the first Friday of the war.
“I don’t know how to describe the sound of a rolling barrage of heavy artillery,” Harris said. “I guess start with the repetitive ‘poppa-pop-pop’ sound of microwavable popcorn, but pitch shift it down about eight octaves and crank it up to a volume level that shakes the foundations of the building and vibrates the windows.”
When he read a report right after that interview saying the Russians were moving thermobaric artillery in (those are the ones the news usually calls “heavy flamethrowers”), that was it, Harris said. “I looked at my girlfriend Val and said, ‘If there are still trains rolling tomorrow, we’re on one.’”
It took a day to get from Kharkiv to Lviv, another from Lviv to Chelm and half a day from Chelm to Warsaw, a city his girlfriend is familiar with because she went to the university here.
Harris said an American gets 90 days visafree in most countries in Europe, and borders are open for Ukrainians, so he has the income to move around as needed until the war ends. The couple can work the online tutoring, and their income is intact.
What did you take? What did you leave behind?
The answer is “whatever I could fit in a suitcase and a computer bag.” Some clothes, company documents, basically any official papers I could imagine ever needing again, and (in a bizarre choice) some dried food, since I was anticipating we’d have to walk from Lviv to the border and wanted to have food if that happens. That was a bad move because it took up a lot of space in my suitcase where more important things could have gone. As for what I left, the hardest part was leaving my book collection. I had about 600 books I’d been collecting since my days in China. When I left China at the beginning of the outbreak, they got left behind with a friend, and it took me until last March (and cost me nearly $4,000, all told) to finally get them shipped to me in Ukraine. Leaving them behind again and not knowing if they were going to survive the war felt like leaving an old friend behind who I’d only just been reunited with.
They’re stashed at a friend’s apartment in a part of Kharkiv that hasn’t been shelled (so far), but God only knows how long that will remain true.
What is propaganda? What is truth?
In this day and age, it’s easy to distrust the news, no matter what country it’s coming from. My best advice is (the) truth is eyewitness accounts from the ones who are actually in the thick of it. Except for a handful of spots like Mariupol, people inside the battle zones still have at least partial internet access. Social media is filled with videos that they’re taking on their streets every day, and those photos and videos are sickening. Because of the sheer shock, a lot of people don’t believe it’s actually happening. People think this level of brutality has got to be an exaggeration by someone who wants us to get emotional; it can’t be real. Not in 2022. I get it. I didn’t believe it either at first. I posted three articles online saying all the reasons I didn’t think there would be an invasion. The last one was on Feb. 23. Even when the war started, I didn’t think it would get to this level. My girlfriend’s grandmother, when she finally escaped and met us here in Warsaw, said one thing that put it all in perspective for me. “I was in Kharkiv when the Nazis occupied it. The Nazis were not as heartless as this.” Now to anyone who asks, “How do you tell the truth from propaganda?” I ask, “What political agenda do you think a 99-year-old woman from a village has?”
The plain, hard-to-swallow truth is this is happening; it’s savage, it’s barbaric and far from embellishing; most of the Western media is actually watering down the horror of it because Western audiences are a sensitive lot. If you don’t believe the news, you have an internet connection. Ask people who are in the middle of it.
I want to re-emphasize to the folks back stateside that this is not “Ukraine’s War.” The rhetoric coming out of Russia to try and rationalize this barbarism makes it pretty plain that they don’t intend to stop here. They still need support. Ammunition stops Russian troops. Blue and gold ribbons don’t. Javelins stop Russian tanks. Rallies and hashtags don’t.
Do you feel safe where you are now? Well, yes ... for now. Then again, I “felt” perfectly safe in Kharkiv on Feb. 23. We see how wrong that was.
What does Shreveport need to know, and how can we help?
Simply put, people are dying. I know there are a lot of people who are trying to come up with reasons to pretend this is not as big a deal as the news claims. The truth is it’s bigger. The number of civilians killed in the past 52 days in Ukraine, according to some figures, is higher than the number of civilians killed by four or five 9/11s.
He said he receives “if anything happens to me, I want you to make sure you do such and such” messages every day from friends and neighbors back in Kharkiv. Some I hear from later. Some I don’t. I have neighbors, friends and former students who I haven’t heard from in weeks. I’ve gotten barely coherent calls from bawling parents telling me their child is dead and to please let their friends in class know that. I had a former student message me saying she had to cancel her classes with me because she had to go and take over her brother’s spot in a militia cell to defend her district now that he’s dead.
“She’s 12. Her brother is 14,” Harris said. He had gone back to Lviv to bury a teacher who worked at his company and her 8-yearold daughter, who had just moved from their hometown to Kharkiv when the war started. According to her husband, both were raped until they bled to death while he sat secured to a chair by nails through his wrists and feet, watching. This is one of the less graphic stories, Harris said.
For everyone else, there are charity fundraisers everywhere, but really, the “best I can ask is ‘quit griping about paying a little extra at the pump if that’s what it takes to cut off the oil income from the animals who are doing this.’”
Editor’s Note
Harris is the guy who started the tradition of the Byrd drum major’s uniform being solid white and the founder of the school’s JROTC band. His mother is Shreveport artist Betsy Levels, who is selling art, one with an angel with a sunflower motif and a blue-andgold backdrop on the day of the invasion.
Her son said when she told him she made it before the invasion without knowing what Ukraine’s flag looked like or what its symbol was, it felt like a moment out of a movie. One of those “something inspired me and now I know why” moments.
Levels said she saw a news report of a Ukrainian lady who told the Russian invaders to put seeds in their pockets so sunflowers would come up where they died on Ukrainian soil. The art groups immediately went wild with sunflower art using the country’s blue and yellow, adding that painting gave her something to do besides gnawing her fingernails while she waited to find out if her son could get out safely.
At one point, her son sent her a brief and terrifying email “If you do not hear from me within 24 hours, notify the State Department that I have been killed.”
A local focus might remind our area just how precious our free and privileged status really is, Levels said.
