August 2008. How it remained in our memory.
Olga Chibirova, a resident of Tskhinval, cannot forget the summer of 2008 to this day, because the five-day war left a huge imprint on her health. It was on these days, after sitting all day in the well, she got a leg disease and today she can hardly move.
As the eyewitness of the events of 08.08.08 is recalling, on the night of August 7-8, when the Georgian aggressors attacked the sleeping city, Chibirova was at home alone. Her son was fighting, and her grandchildren were sent to North Ossetia.
“When heavy shelling began, I got scared and went down to the basement, and there we have a well. I spent almost a day in cold water, which later affected my health. Although I am many years old, I want to live at any age, and, feeling that death is approaching, a person in a fit of fear is capable of various rash actions,” she said.
According to her, the events of the bloody war of 2008 also affected her psyche, she became irritable. For several years, the woman was haunted by the fear that the Georgians would again start shooting and destroying peaceful people.
Chibirova says that it is impossible to convey the horror and tragedy that were read in the eyes of the people with whom she was sitting in the basement: “Remembering August 2008, I immediately begin to feel the cold and dampness of the basement in which we spent several days. Crying, tears, coldness, pain and the thought whether we will be saved or remain ashes in the basement, whether South Ossetia will exist at all.”
Olga Chibirova was the eyewitness to how her house was collapsing under massive shelling, how she was hiding from a flying plane that was dropping bombs.
Many years have passed since the August 2008 war, but the heroism and feat of the Russian soldiers and the courage of the Ossetian militias will never be forgotten by the people of South Ossetia.
“If not for Russia's help, not a single living soul would have been left on the land of South Ossetia, and the plan of the Georgian aggressors to turn our republic into the open field would have come true. Sitting in a cold and damp basement, we were praying to God that the Russian troops would help us, and - it happened! They did it and saved our lives. Thanks to their strength and courage, today we live in the independent republic,” she has noted.
The feat of the fallen defenders of South Ossetia will never be forgotten...
