The BBC's Sarah Rainsford travelled around Ukraine as the war started and lives were shattered.
I'm writing this in a city where there is no shelling. No Russian missiles slam into homes and there's no air raid siren with a wail that churns your stomach and saps your energy.
Still, I arrived in the capital Kyiv last month convinced that Russia's president would not launch all-out war on Ukraine. The very idea seemed ludicrous, irrational, disastrous - and everyone I spoke to in both countries agreed.When the war began, Nika was so terrified that she sat at her piano and played crashing chords as loud as she could, yelling at the top of her voice. The 15-year-old couldn't stand the sound of the bombs.
"It was cold and small. We didn't have lots of food. This was a very traumatising period," she said. "Now I'm scared of every sound. If someone claps, I think I will cry. I start shaking." So as we crisscrossed a landscape now covered with checkpoints and trenches dug into wheat fields, we also saw dozens of giant billboards telling Russia, or Putin himself, to get lost.
By that point, people had already begun leaving Dnipro. The exodus began a day after the university in central Kharkiv was shelled. Suddenly noone felt safe, even away from the front lines. The shelling did not let up, so Polina's parents steeled themselves and made the dangerous dash across town to the train station. Days later, Kseniya sent me videos of the little girl bouncing happily on a trampoline in the garden of a host family in rural Poland."After four days running, we suddenly stopped and I was so sad," Kseniya explained. "I'm relieved my children are safe, but our whole life has been left in Kharkiv."Soon we were heading for Kharkiv ourselves.
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