ELGIN, S.C. — A Midlands man was in Russia when the country invaded Ukraine. Now, he's sharing his experiences as he fled Russia to Germany.
Jonathan Hinely, who lives in Elgin, says he had just flown to Russia to visit his girlfriend days before the invasion began.
“I went to Russia to visit my girlfriend," Hinely said, adding he hadn’t seen his girlfriend in just over six weeks. “I was just looking forward to spending time with her," he said.
On February 22, Hinely flew out to Russia to see her. Two days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Her and I both thought there’s a zero percent chance he’s going to do anything, we thought he was just bluffing.”
Hinely, a flight attendant, started searching for flights home, saying the couple decided to leave the capital St. Petersburg. They then realized it would be safer to leave Russia as a whole. However, Hinely's girlfriend choose to stay.
With sanctions in place, Hinely said he wasn't able to access his money. "With the SWIFT sanctions, my debit card stopped working.” However, he was able to borrow money to help him get out of the country.
With no flights available, Hinely got a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where he flew to Kallingrad. From there, he took a bus to Warsaw, Poland. There, he then jumped on a train from Warsaw to Berlin, getting another train from Berlin to Munich, and then finally a flight to Charlotte.
Hinely described the scenes on that bus ride from Kaliningrad to Warsaw.
“Every once in a while, this air raid siren start piercing, and the dogs started barking. I don’t know what’s going on, because you can’t see it. You could hear a pin drop, it was deadly quiet. You couldn’t hear a single thing on that bus.”
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Hinely, described the chaos on that seven-hour ride from Warsaw to Berlin. “When I got on the train, you cannot find a seat, every seat is full, you cannot even find a place to stand.”
Hinely says on that train ride, he worked with the train conductor, helping translate Ukrainian and Russian into English, walking up and down the 10 train carriages with the train conductor. Hinely says he started learning Russian and Ukrainian after meeting his girlfriend two years ago.
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Seven hours later, after arriving in Berlin, he was mentally and physically exhausted.
“Emotionally, it made me feel helpless, to be truthful, because I want to help these people but there’s nothing I can say or do to repair that damage.”
Now home safe in Elgin, his concerns mount for the loved ones he left behind.
"I am incredibly concerned for my Russian friends, for her, for the Russian people I don’t know,” Hinely said.