When Yuliia Petrenko, a 31-year-old lawyer originally from Donetsk, arrived outside Downing Street for the Stand With Ukraine demonstration on Saturday, she started crying.
“The first thing I saw was somebody’s little boy with a sign that said ‘Putin is killing my gran’, and I just burst into tears,” Petrenko said.
Like many Ukrainians living in the UK, Petrenko has experienced a wave of emotions in recent days – fear, anger, frustration, powerlessness, guilt – as she talks to relatives at home experiencing the arrival of war.
“At the minute, my auntie, my cousin and their puppy are in a shelter,” she told the Guardian at the rally. They fled the Donetsk region for Kyiv after Russia’s 2014 invasion. Now, war has followed them. “It just feels like you’re waiting to wake up from a nightmare,” Petrenko said. “They can’t believe what’s happening, they feel like sitting ducks.”
Petrenko joined hundreds of people in London on Saturday demonstrating their support for Ukraine and revulsion at Russia’s invasion, as diverse crowds expressed their solidarity with Ukrainians and called on western leaders to take stronger action.
“Stop Putin, stop the war!” crowds shouted outside the prime minister’s residence. In a separate demonstration eggs were thrown at the Russian embassy in Kensington in outrage at the military incursion that has already killed hundreds and turned a sovereign nation into a battleground.
But there was a sense of hope at the rallies, Petrenko said, as a groundswell of people across the world stand up to demand their politicians act.
“We want more sanctions, we want Swift [the international payments network] turned off, this pacifying approach does not work,” said Oksana Trofymuk, a 43-year-old from Ukraine who moved to the UK in 2000. “It’s just lots of talk, it’s pathetic. The system in place for security does not work – the world is not safe.”
Trofymuk spoke to her family on Saturday morning. Her mum and brother are based in western Ukraine and are currently safe. “They’re in church right now, praying,” Trofymuk said. “I did tell her it’s not enough praying, you need to go and find out what you can do.”
Russians living in the UK also turned out to send the message that President Vladimir Putin did not act in their name.
“I’m here to support the Ukrainian people because I’m against this war,” Svetlana Woods, a 39-year-old from Siberia, said. “I can’t even imagine what they’re going through now.”
“When I was a child one of my nightmares was Hitler invading Russia,” said Woods, who has two children aged four and two. “And I’m absolutely embarrassed to think kids from other countries fall asleep and in their nightmares Russia is attacking them.”
Woods said friends and relatives back in Russia are “brainwashed” by state media and cannot accept Russia is the aggressor. She can’t go home, but said: “I’m not sure I want to go back to Russia at the moment.”
“You’re ashamed to say you’re Russian,” she added.
Kateryna O’Kill, a 42-year-old dentist who moved to the UK from Ukraine 20 years ago, said the demonstration was to “express ourselves peacefully [and] tell the world that the war has to stop”.
She went on: “Putin, please stop the war. You have people in the Russian army who all have families and futures, why do they have to go and die, go and fight on Ukrainian land?
“Boris Johnson, please introduce stronger sanctions, please do something to stop this craziness. We don’t need bloodshed on European territory.”
As well as in London, demonstrations were held across the UK in cities including Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh. The events join a long list of countries including Ireland, the US and Estonia where people took to the streets demanding an end to the invasion.
The demonstrations also brought together people from a raft of other countries to express their solidarity with Ukraine.
“We’re here in solidarity,” said Julia Britton, a 62-year-old charity chief executive from the UK. “We want Putin to stop and Boris to start.”
Karol Karpinski, a 33-year-old from Poland, underscored the importance of stopping Putin now before he moves on to intimidate other European countries. “If Ukraine is made a Russian colony I would expect him to move on to Poland and the Baltic states,” he said.
Likewise, Antanas Jocius, a 32-year-old from Lithuania, said: “We’ve been occupied by the Russians, they used force, they killed lots of Lithuanians … We know what’s going to happen if nobody’s going to stand up.”
