Ukraine letter: Wail of air-raid sirens pursues refugees into EU safety

A month into Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine and 30 minutes into the latest air-raid alert in Lviv, the city's bus station is still working to a near-normal routine.

Travellers and people seeing them off smoke and sip coffee in the spring sunshine, as ticket sellers try to fill up Soviet-era minibuses that trundle out to all points west and south, towards the Carpathian mountains and Ukraine's borders with Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

According to a woman selling warm potato and cabbage pies at the station, the most noticeable changes from peacetime are a sharp reduction in buses heading to Kyiv and other cities to the east – some of which have endured weeks of shelling and fighting – and the number of women and children travelling to European Union countries without men.

Ukrainian men aged 18-60 are barred from leaving their country, because they could be called up to fight a Russian invasion that has already killed thousands of people and displaced about 10 million, one-third of whom have sought safety in EU states.

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As buses to EU cities fill up, men part from wives, girlfriends and daughters without knowing when they will meet again, and the few Ukrainian male travellers of fighting age recheck the documents they will show to border guards to seek an exit from the country.

Russian troops are some 500km from Lviv, but missiles have destroyed military and industrial sites near the city and many of the quiet country roads and villages of rural western Ukraine are now guarded by checkpoints built of breezeblocks, tyres and sandbags, topped with the nation’s yellow-and-blue flag and guarded by armed locals.

Ukraine says more than 100,000 civilians have joined its territorial defence force since Russia invaded on February 24th, and the formidable fight shown by the country's military has been backed up by a mammoth volunteer effort to raise funds and source supplies for the armed forces and for people displaced by fighting.

Just as volunteers are now setting up checkpoints around western Ukraine, so police officers in its towns and cities are doing their bit for national security – which makes travel slow going.

At provincial bus stations, young police officers check passengers’ documents and often send them on to more senior colleagues for further questioning if they spot something suspicious, such as evidence of recent travel to Russia.

Ukrainians are getting used to such scrutiny amid fears that Russia has deployed hit squads to attack high-profile sites and individuals, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy; one such group of 25 operatives was reportedly captured in western Ukraine last week.

Passport checks

At one checkpoint, a young man with a French passport is taken off the bus by policemen and briefly questioned, they say, by an officer of the SBU security service; looking about 20-years-old, with a shaved head and wearing khaki fatigues, he could easily be one of many foreign volunteers who have come to Ukraine to fight Russia – some of whom quickly headed home after a March 13th Russian missile strikes on their camp – but he says he is a journalist and is allowed to continue his journey.

Traffic at the frontier is now far lighter than during the first, chaotic fortnight of the conflict, but progress is still slow – due largely to the rigorousness of all passport checks – and air-raid alerts bring movement at the border to a near-standstill.

Many of the women and children waiting in line have driven more than 1,000km to reach the EU, in cars with number plates that denote Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the areas hardest hit by the war, and with signs taped to windows that say “Deti” – “children” – in the hope of warding off possible gunfire and shelling en route.

Just as the bus finally reaches the front of the queue, a wail spreads through the cabin before being replicated outside, as the air-raid siren app now used by many Ukrainians informs passengers of an alert in this region.

When we finally pull forward into the border zone at Chop and passport checks commence, two Ukrainian men are told they will not be allowed to leave. They beseech the young camouflage-clad guard, showing her sheaves of medical documents again and again, but she is implacable and tells them to get their bags and wait for a bus back to Lviv.

A few metres into Hungary, the air-raid app wails again on the phones of the remaining passengers; but now the bus drives on, taking them away from their homeland and loved ones still living under the sirens.