I don’t know whether we’ll ever meet them. They lived in the east of the country and, towards the end of March, the Russian advance had begun to lay waste the nearest town to their own.

I DON"T KNOW whether we’ll ever meet them. They lived in the east of the country and, towards the end of March, the Russian advance had begun to lay waste the nearest town to their own. It was no longer safe for them to stay. Olena’s husband decided to drive her, and their daughter, little Yulia, 1,000 kilometres across the country to the Polish border, where they would say goodbye.

My Iraqi son-in-law grew up in Baghdad, and knows about living with war. He maintains that the most difficult decision his family ever had to make was to leave their home: all they could think of was when they would return. Olena already felt like that. We had met on WhatsApp and she wrote that never before had her family been in such a situation: “It is hard for me to realise that we will have to leave our city, and our Ukraine.”

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