'Mummy, when will the war end?' asks a trembling child

As the Russians relentlessly shell the Ukraine's Kharkiv region, Tom Watling meets a mother who, against the odds, finds volunteers to get her and her six children to safety

- Tom Watling

Nine-year-old Sasha rushed down to the basement as Russian-launched drones buzzed in the sky above him. He was terrified, shivering as he desperately tried to block out the noise of the “Shaheds”, the Iranian-designed drones that have become a deadly feature of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The boy was living with his mother and five siblings in the village of Zakharivka, just a few miles from the Russian forces advancing across the border into Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. The region has been the scene of intense fighting for weeks.

This was five days after the Russian attack had started in the middle of May. Poor defensive fortifications and severed communication lines, the result of Russian signal jammers, had caught Ukraine’s forces off guard. Moscow’s troops had then pushed rapidly across the border.

The rising sound of Russian shells, getting closer by the hour, had panicked the thousands of civilians who suddenly found themselves in the way of this attack, while the green fields around them quickly turned a muddy black from the explosions of rockets.

Becoming more agitated and shaky by the minute, Sasha turned to his mother, Valentyna, and said: “Mummy, when will this war end?”

“Where are we going to go?” the little boy added, wiping away his tears. Valentyna was aware that she needed to get all her children, Mykyta, 18, Tetiana, 10, Sasha, Iaroslav, eight, Angelina, six, and two-year-old Matviy to safety.

An order had come through from local officials to leave at once. Ukrainian reinforcements were coming but it was unclear when they would arrive – and no one knew then how far Putin’s forces would push into the region. Valentyna called volunteers that she knew were doing evacuations. She pleaded with them to help but they said they wouldn’t be able to reach them for several days.