June 21, 2026 — She was calling an ambulance to Sevastopol
I am Olha Stefanishyna, originally from Sevastopol, Crimea.
This is a first-person testimony, based on dissociative flashbacks. I am recording them and analyze them. I do it because I have amnesia and didn’t know I am injured and traumatized till I started to work through it. No one worked with me on it so I am looking for witnesses and support on my own. Open letter.
Incidents from my direct memory and my commentary are marked in bold.
The location and time for these are unknown.
I’m on a couch, a man is leaning over me with clearly malicious intentions. He said, “I will do whatever I want with you.”
I am lying on the couch. Yulya comes up to me and starts dragging me off the couch. She is leading me away somewhere.
Night.I am screaming and hitting some man in the back. He is doing something to Yulya. He is tall, heavily built, dressed in black, with long black hair. He turns around, grabs my hand, forces a knife into it, and starts stabbing.
Night. Yulia is sitting, leaning against a wall. I try to lift her, but she is too heavy for me. I try to explain to her that we need to go, they might come back, but I am having great difficulty speaking.
She shakes her head, refusing to go, and I get angry. Then I realize she can’t speak. She only says, “Leg. Leg.” I look at her leg, my gaze moves further down to the asphalt, and I see a huge black puddle of blood. It’s spreading. I leave her and run to call for help.
- She was calling an ambulance to the Sevastopol embankment! She didn’t even know what city she was in.
Yulia is lying on the bed. Someone says, “This is all because of you!” A woman is begging me to run and save a gynecologist. She treats me like a child. I agreed to go to save a gynecologist.
I’ve known Yulya since school. She is a kind, bright person who wanted to help people. She chose medicine because of this. Before 2014, Yulia was a nurse holding the rank of sergeant if I remember correctly her rank. She worked in one of the military hospitals in Sevastopol (Crimea). I hadn’t seen her since school, at least, not in my conscious memory. I have no direct memory of the events shown in these flashbacks. If she did something wrong in the eyes of Russia, it’s not clear why Ukraine didn’t pull her out through an exchange.
I don’t know exactly what happened or how we could have ended up in a different city, but that blood loss I saw could have been fatal if this flashback accurately conveys what happened. If this flashback does indeed convey at least a part of what took place, then these events are the result of what they did to us after my detention (which I also don’t remember, but have already seen in a flashback).
This flashback also conveys the state of not understanding what was happening, being unable to speak, and being unable to evaluate my surroundings. It’s like the mind wandering through a dark labyrinth with no windows and no doors.
In Russian we say “набережная” for riverside and seaside. Initially I translated it as embankment, but I really meant a paved public walk along a waterfront.
