#Misery at the border as Ukrainian citizens flee from Russian invasion

In Ukraine. 

I slept in late after writing all night and awoke this morning to the sound of a woman knocking nervously on my hotel door. I had slept through the missile strikes that were taking place five miles from the hotel. In the middle of the night, the Russian air force had blown up the runway of the old Soviet airport outside the town. 

A grizzled old veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan staying in the same hotel explained to me that the base had been decommissioned. Yet if he were still in the service, he would have taken it out to make sure NATO could not land reinforcements — not that it seems likely that the NATO cavalry is coming to rescue us. 

The air sirens were blaring — as indeed they are at this very moment as I write this — and the hotel guests were told to pack into the hotel’s basement for an hour. 

My own situation — at least today — while I have been reporting from this medium-sized town outside the Ukrainian capital is much better than that of many of my friends and acquaintances back in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Kharkiv is currently taking massive fire from Russian artillery, but having been told by intelligence-connected colleagues that it was supposed to fall last night, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Ukrainian army has put up daring resistance for the city. 

The Russian incursion has made half the middle-class people I know in this country take their chances on the roads. The roads out of Kyiv are clogged with traffic hundreds of miles long. The process of the flooding of Ukrainian refugees into Europe has already begun. It very well may turn into a crisis soon enough. The Ukrainian state has a dozen borders with half a dozen neighboring countries. Every crossing checkpoint along the Moldovan, Polish, Hungarian and Lithuanian borders is backed up. Some of the lines of cars are reported to be at least 10 miles long. 

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An accountant who had worked on a film project that my wife is producing informed me that she had taken her kids into the underground metro station for the night. The family hadand spent the night sleeping half a mile underground. (The Kyiv metro system is one of the deepest in the world.) The producer could not tolerate a second night of that and got into her car, hoping to make it out through the Romanian border. 

Another friend I had seen for drinks in Kyiv last week texts me that she has spent the previous nine hours on line to get through the first section of the Polish border-control checkpoint line. We have all heard reports of harrowing scenes taking places along the border checkpoints: abandoned cars that had run out of gas, Ukrainian grandmothers hobbling dozens of miles along the side of the road to Lviv on foot. Tens of thousands of people waiting to cross into the European Union, exhausted, dehydrated and without access to facilities for up to an entire day at a time. 

The most terrifying thing is perhaps what happens to the young men — the Ukrainian state has forbidden any military-age male, from 18 to 60, from leaving the country. I have heard numerous reports of men being forcibly separated from their families and told to report for conscription duty. The buses and cars that are stopped on the border are searched for men who are hoping to leave the country, and they are told to get out and report for military duty. There have been reported incidents of women pleading for a reprieve for their husbands being pushed away from the border by the Ukrainian border guards. 

Brooklyn-born Vladislav Davidzon is the author of “From Odessa with Love.”