“My husband is not allowed to leave, so he said to me: you should save our child,” Olga explained. “He has no military experience, he’s never been to the army, but he’s planning to join the Territorial Defense Forces.”
Olga is soft-spoken and takes a long pause before recounting how she met her husband when she was a medical resident in Kyiv, fell in love instantly and married less than a year later.
“I was scared to leave my husband there because I didn’t know if I’d see him again,” she said. “I have this child and he is innocent…so the most important thing was to save him.” Next to her, the couple’s son swayed gently from side to side in a penguin-print onesie, cooing softly.
Children have already become victims of war. Roughly 100 kilometres from Olga’s hometown, two children were killed in shelling by Russian forces on Sunday, as they tried to flee the city of Irpin.
Gabriela was able to avoid every mother’s worst nightmare on Wednesday when she left Ukraine for her native Ecuador with her five-year-old daughter Izabella after days on the road. Like so many parents, the 27-year-old medical student tried her best to assuage her daughter’s anxiety as she said goodbye to her father, a Ukrainian national.
“We told her she was going on holiday to see her cousins and grandmother,” said Gabriela. “And she asked: will I stop listening to the sirens and will the bombs stop falling?”
Gabriela moved to Ukraine in 2014 to study medicine, before meeting her now ex-husband and settling down in the city of Vinnytsia. Leaving him behind has proven harrowing for both mother and daughter.
“If he dies, how do I explain to my daughter that her father isn’t coming back?” said Gabriela.
Less than a week after they boarded a plane in Poland and returned to Ecuador, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that a barrage of Russian missiles had torn through Vinnytsia’s civilian airport. Gabriela’s ex-husband is currently safe, but like thousands of other children, Gabriela’s daughter has no idea when – or if – she will see her father again.
But not everyone has a second country they can seek safety in. Lena, a 34-year-old mother of one left Kharkiv, near the Russian border, last week and travelled for 22 hours before finding refuge inside a small theatre turned shelter in Lviv.
Lena doesn’t know what’s next for her and her nine-year-old boy. “There is no home, there is nothing – maybe we will go abroad, but we don’t know,” she said.
“Our last night in Kharkiv was difficult because there were a lot of aircraft – we laid down and prayed to survive,” said Lena.