“Genocide” is a word you hear a lot in Ukraine nowadays, but it still plays tricks on the ear, like something out of a history book, where it really belongs. The g-word came up in conversation soon after I met Edvard and Ina Drech as they were hurriedly packing suitcases and preparing to leave their home in Kyiv at the end of the second week of the war.

“I’m a proud Ukrainian, who speaks Russian,” Edvard, 63, told me. “But I’m also Jewish, so I have a very personal understanding of genocide. And there really is no other word for what Putin is now doing to this country.”

He and his wife are now two-time refugees, having fled their home in Donetsk in 2014 after the eastern city seceded from Ukraine, along with Luhansk, and pledged its allegiance to Russia. Ina’s 80-year-old mother still lives at the family home in the separatist republic, where claims of a “genocide” of Russian speakers being carried out by Ukraine’s army had furnished Vladimir Putin with his casus belli against the Kyiv government.