She hadn’t even reached the border when she felt her teeth crack. Diana Kyrychyk had just finished getting a root canal in Ukraine the previous day, but she still had four temporary fillings that needed to be replaced and now they were disintegrating. She pulled two bits of broken teeth from her mouth, carefully tucked them into her front jeans pocket, and kept moving. On a crowded road in northwest Ukraine, she was fleeing Russian missiles by foot with two suitcases, her husband, her sister, her three young children, and her 6-month-old niece.
At around five in the morning three days earlier, on Thursday, February 24, Diana was asleep in her apartment in Kyiv when she was awakened by the sound of explosions. She realized that, as unbelievable as it had seemed only days before, the Russian army was dropping deadly mortar shells on the country’s capital.
Diana and her husband, Dima Kyrychyk, packed up their essentials—laptops, documents, winter boots, medication, sandwiches, some toys for the kids. They loaded up the gray Citroën sedan they’d bought in 2013, soon after their wedding. They asked their children—Evangeline, 7, Oskar, 5, and Oliver, 3—to be obedient and attentive because anything could happen, even to their parents, and it was extremely important to listen and follow instructions.
They drove toward her parents’ house in Volhynia, about 100 kilometers from Lviv and only 20 kilometers from the border with Belarus. A drive through the Rivne region that normally takes six or seven hours took 15. Along the road, they saw tanks and Ukrainian soldiers. They managed to make only two pit stops so the kids could use the bathroom. Their trusty Citroën was fuel-efficient, so they didn’t need to wait in the long lines for gas.
Diana alternately cried and prayed for God to save them from explosions. “Every minute we were afraid of missiles,” she says. On February 26, two days after the Kyrychyks crossed over it, the bridge they took to leave the region was blown up by Ukrainian troops to prevent the Russian army from getting any closer to Kyiv.