'I aged ten years': Ukrainians on stress of war and leaving loved ones behind

euronews.com:

Yelyzaveta Pulvas, 23, begged her grandmothers to leave Kyiv in the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but to no avail.

She said her 86 and 88-year-old grandmas did not want to travel west, arguing Kyiv was their home and they wouldn’t leave.

"I was shaking them and saying oh my God, you don't understand you will die here. You know the missile will hit your house and there will be no grandma for me, and I love you. Don't do this to me, but they said no," Pulvas said.

"You leave everything, you leave your house, you leave your life, you leave everything,” she added of her decision to flee the country with her mother.

The communications specialist is now safe in Romania and one of more than two million Ukrainians who have left the country since the war began.

Some 1.7 million of them went to neighbouring EU countries, according to a UN tally.

Svitlana Maistruk, a 33-year-old communications expert, also fled Kyiv after the war broke out and is now trying to help the effort from Warsaw, Poland, after working for years to promote democratic reforms in Ukraine.

Her husband and brother stayed behind to help drive humanitarian aid across the country and get people to safety.

Among Maistruk's friends, often older parents and grandparents stayed behind, not wanting to leave their homes.

Maistruk's mother is staying in Ukraine as well as her husband's parents who live close to the frontline in the east.

"This is a common problem for all my friends because their parents didn't want to leave their homes.. of course, it's their choice and we have to respect it but we hope that the Ukrainian army will fight back."

When the war broke out at the end of February, Pulvas spent three days sheltered in a bunker in Kyiv before fleeing for