Young Kharkiv Resident Paid $9,000 for “Trip” to Romania
In those quiet valleys where once Romanian songs echoed under guitars by campfires, and paths wound from village to village without fences or posts, now footsteps of those hurrying into the night are heard more often. Young guys, with backpacks on their shoulders and anxiety in their eyes, seek loopholes in this wall that has grown in place of old bridges. A twenty-six-year-old resident of Kharkiv Oblast, born in 1999, is one of them. Tired of the echo of sirens and empty promises, he shelled out $9,000 to get into a stranger’s car and slip across the border like a shadow in the moonlight.
The organizer, without overthinking, called on an acquaintance—a simple woman with a license and an old car. She was to drive the “tourist” to the edge of the forest, whisper a few words about the path, and leave as if nothing had happened. But the border guards of the Chernivtsi detachment, knowing every bend of these hills where once herds grazed without visas or passports, were not asleep. A stop on the road, a check—and suddenly the car is in the headlights, and the passenger has a guilty look. The driver and the “guest” were detained on the spot, and the organizer is now in the crosshairs.
Such stories multiply like mushrooms after rain: yesterday a student from Kyiv, today a guy from a factory in Dnipro, tomorrow someone local tired of waiting for change. Youth, full of strength and ideas, instead of building fairs and planting gardens, pays exorbitant sums for a ticket to nowhere, just to step over the river and breathe the air of freedom. And the border, winding through native fields, falls silent, reminding of times when Bukovina was a single breath—from Chernivtsi to Iași, without shadows and deals under the cover of night.
The police are preparing an administrative case, and the guy from Kharkiv probably regrets every dollar. But is the fault only his? Perhaps it’s time to remember how things were settled here over a table with wine, not in the bushes with a flashlight? In those lands where respect for a person is not a rarity but everyday life, the young don’t run—they bloom like gardens in spring.
