Just two weeks ago, Yulia Rabievska and her mother Ira frantically threw their possessions into bags and fled Ukraine ahead of invading Russian forces. They reached Poland after three days on the road with Yulia’s 6-year-old son, her sister and her nephew.
But on Friday, Ira went back into war-torn Ukraine, ignoring Yulia’s pleading that she remain. She joined a steady stream of Ukrainians heading home, going against the epic wave of refugees fleeing the country.
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“I’m very frightened," said Yulia, 31, after she watched her mother board the train in Przemysl, a small city near Poland’s border with Ukraine. “I tried to convince her to stay, but she kept saying she wanted to go, and I had to let her."
It is unclear how many people are returning to Ukraine for personal reasons. They get less attention than those returning to fight, which Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Friday numbered 215,000.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, more than two million people fled the country. One Ukrainian now enters Poland every second, a total of 1.5 million that is expected to keep rising.
But some are going back. Heading home are people from all walks of life: men signing up to defend their cities, often accompanied by their wives; mothers returning to their husbands after taking children to safety abroad; Ukrainians going to care for ailing parents and relatives who are too weak to leave. Some people were on vacation abroad when the war broke out and decided they must return to do their part.
Ukrainian doctor Oleh Trehuba was on holiday in the Dominican Republic when Russia invaded. He and his wife Iryna, a nurse, traveled through Austria, Germany and Poland to reunite with their three children and care for their patients in their city about 100 miles west of Kyiv.
“I walked around crying for three days" after the war began, said Mr. Trehuba, 44, just before he crossed into Ukraine this week. “But we gathered the whole family on a video call, and decided we will remain in Ukraine. A doctor must help."
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Every evening outside the train station in Przemysl, a long line forms for the 7 p.m. train to Odessa, a Ukrainian port city that is hunkering down in advance of an expected Russian attack. Trains headed for Ukraine are so delayed that security guards at the station tell passengers to ignore the posted schedule.
Hundreds of Ukrainians, plus a few foreign young men hoping to aid the country’s defenses, line up all through the day, standing outside in freezing temperatures, sometimes singing Ukrainian patriotic songs. “It’s warmer when you sing," one woman told them on Thursday.
As passengers wait to board, weary travelers arriving from Odessa and other cities along the train’s route walk by the crowd, seeking shelter in Poland.
Nearby, in the main building of the Przemysl train station, the arrival halls, waiting lounges and cafeteria are packed with Ukrainian families waiting to travel into Poland and Germany, many of them sleeping rough.
“Why should we sleep on the floor if we have homes in Ukraine?" said Yulia Boychenko, a supermarket cashier who was in line for the Odessa-bound train with her two children so she could return to her apartment in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that is one of the train’s stops en route.
Like most Ukrainians heading back, Ms. Boychenko said she had carefully calculated the risks and wouldn’t hesitate to leave Ukraine if Russian forces reach Lviv, which is currently far from the worst fighting and has become a temporary safe haven for thousands of Ukrainians fleeing bombardment.
Others in line say they are heading home because they feel a duty to do their part in helping Ukraine fend off the Russian attack. Katia, a 30-year-old beauty salon worker who was visiting relatives in Poland when the war broke out, was heading back with her husband Pavel so he could join the territorial defense force in the town of Khmelnitsky in western Ukraine.
“Wherever he goes, I go," she said. The Wall Street Journal agreed to use only her first name.
On the road going into Ukraine, trucks and cars carrying humanitarian aid are mixed with people heading home. Among them this week was Elena Strushkina, who had dropped off her children in Poland and was heading back to care for her 86-year-old mother.
“She needs my care, she cannot be alone," said Ms. Strushkina, who had attached a Ukrainian flag to her steering wheel and admitted she was nervous about going back. “I tried to persuade her to leave, but she says she is too weak."
Ms. Rabievska, who saw her mother off in Przemysl on Friday, is now staying in Poland with her son and her truck-driver husband, who has a home there.
She said her mother Ira returned because she missed the comfort of her house in Khmelnitsky, and had a dog and two cats to look after. The elder Ms. Rabievska also wanted to join her brother, who like most Ukrainian men wasn’t allowed to leave Ukraine.
Air raid sirens were almost constant in Khmelnitsky, according to neighbors who’d stayed there, but the elder Ms. Rabievska said she wasn’t afraid, and would head back to Poland with her pets if she feels her life is at risk.
“If I had no one to come to in Poland," said Yulia Rabievska, “I might also have stayed in Ukraine."
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text
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