Ukraine refugees tell harrowing accounts of destruction: ‘The sky became red’

The refugees' harrowing accounts of destruction and death are evidence of the continued suffering of civilians in Ukrainian cities besieged by Russian forces.

Elena Yurchuk saw families with children blown up and the hospital she worked in reduced to rubble during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I don’t know if I have a home or not,” said the 44-year-old nurse from the northern Ukrainian town of Chernihiv. “Our city is under siege and we barely escaped.”

Yurchuk has arrived to safety in the Romanian border town of Suceava, which has welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the past days. Chernihiv, she said, now resembles a “ghost town.”

“People in cars are blown up by mines, a car with children and a young family was blown up ? literally behind us,” Yarchuk said.

While the number of people arriving in neighboring countries from Ukraine appears to have eased in the past week, the refugees’ harrowing accounts of destruction and death are evidence of the continued suffering of civilians in Ukrainian cities besieged by Russian forces.

At the train station in Przemysl, Poland, refugees described traveling in packed trains and “people sleeping on each other” during their journeys to safety. Some heard explosions as they passed through a western region of Ukraine near Lviv in the area where Russian missiles pounded a military training base, killing at least 35 people.

“When I went through Lviv there was an explosion. They bombed two military bases,” said Elizaveta Zmievskaya, 25, from Dnipro. “The sky became red.”

More than 1.5 million refugees have arrived in Poland since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 _ out of a total of around 2.7 million people that the United Nations say have fled so far.