On 25 February 2022, Viktoria, 35, gave birth to her son in a bunker beneath the Ukrainian capital just as the Russian bombing started. Two years on, she speaks about her family’s experience of being displaced and seeking safety abroad

The day after I gave birth to Fedir, the shelling started very hard around Kyiv. We lived near Irpin and Bucha. After I saw a falling shell from my apartment window, we decided to leave. My husband and I packed up without knowing where we were going. We had spent so long getting the place ready for the baby, but Fedir only got to sleep in his bed for four nights.

The drive to Lviv took 17 hours. My first experience of motherhood, as we couldn’t stop, was learning to feed and change Fedir in the back seat of the car. On the journey, we saw military checkpoints, tanks. It felt unreal. Arriving in Lviv, it was hard to find an apartment to rent. The city was full of displaced people. As my husband was born in the Russian federation, the landlord we eventually did find demanded a double deposit. We paid it – it was better than going back.