Roman’s family spent the first night of the war in a damp and dark bomb shelter of a Kyiv school. More than a hundred civilians also found shelter there. Explosions were heard outside and children’s crying inside it...

My brother called me at six in the morning. I was sleepy and could not understand anything. He asked, ‘Do you know what has started?’

In a second, I realized that nothing would be the same as before, that we would all have a very hard time.

Certainly, we heard all the forecasts about the war, that Russia would attack, but we hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the best did not happen.

I have a wife and two children. The air raid siren is a new and the most terrible sound for us. And in Kyiv it is heard every hour or two. All this is very stressful, especially when the apartment has windows all around and plasterboard walls. No any containment. 

That is why we went to the bomb shelter already on the first night. We thought we were the only overcautious people there. It turned out we were not.

The basement of a local school was full of people. It was stuffy and damp, but we did not feel scared there. And our reserve of fearlessness was enough for a few more days.

We no longer went down to the basement – the child fell ill after the first night. We put up with the situation during three days. In the end, on the morning of the fourth day, we rushed off and went into the unknown.

No one was waiting for us anywhere, and it was risky, of course.

But we were lucky. On the first day we reached Ivano-Frankivsk region and there we were well received and were offered a free overnight stay in Horodenka town, in a local sports school for youth.

Maybe this information will be useful for others too. They accept people for free and you can stay for a longer time if needed. But we continued our travel even further. For now, we have stopped near Uzhgorod. We are thinking about what to do next...