

Though he knows better, sometimes he asks to return home to Kyiv. The elder son, 6-year-old Nazar, continues his schooling online. Marta and her husband are doctors and want to stay and help. They want to stay in Ukraine, but they have no long-term plan. Now the Russian occupiers have pulled back, leaving some of the war's worst horrors in their wake, and the family doesn’t know if their dream home was left intact. There are woods nearby, with trails for hiking and chances for mushroom and berry picking. A new home, designed by Marta’s mother, had been waiting for the family in Bucha, just outside the capital. He sent her photos of nearly 200 pregnant women waiting to give birth. One friend now works to deliver babies in an underground shelter. “I just get the news from my friends.” They tell her of homes destroyed and bodies found in pieces. “I don’t need to read the news,” she says, and starts to weep. Now, some 300 miles away, she sometimes feels nothing. Within days, the Kopans - Marta, her husband and two sons - joined them. She remembers looking out the window of the family’s Kyiv apartment and watching the lines of cars headed for safety. “On the 24th of February, our happy life stopped,” says Marta, 36. Her birth plan, like so much else, has been abandoned - the place where she had expected to give birth was bombed. Marta is 40 weeks pregnant the baby, a girl, kicks her vigorously as she goes through bags of children’s clothing in the fourth-floor apartment the family borrowed from a cousin. Take the small, clanking elevator, walk down the dim corridors and visit with them in their temporary apartments, and you’ll find limbo. They don’t know each other, but they recognize displaced people like themselves on sight, without exchanging a word. It’s a world away from the danger that sent them running from their homes, though in recent days, Lviv too has been a target of Russian missiles.
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It is quiet they can look through their windows and see a school, a playground, not a tank or rocket fire. Most just want to go home, if home still stands.Īs many as 50 have found shelter in a nine-story building on Trylovskoho Boulevard. Others have put down the first fragile roots.

Some plan to move on, perhaps crossing the border to nearby Poland and beyond. Many sleep on mats in cultural centers and schools, shelter in crowded rooms with relatives and friends.

They all escaped to Lviv, along with some 500,000 others - a small fraction of the 10 million Ukrainians who have been chased by war from their homes and resettled elsewhere in the country. There is the woman who fled Kharkiv, becoming displaced for the second time in a decade. There is the family that spent hours in their basement shelter in Irpin, trapped between armies. There is the couple who lament that they may never live in the house being built for them in bloody Bucha. But behind every lighted window is a story. LVIV, Ukraine (AP) - The Soviet-era apartment blocks at the end of a tram line in this western Ukrainian city show an indifferent face to the world, blank and gray.
