As women fleeing the fighting in Ukraine squeeze onto trains, buses, and cars heading west, a smaller contingent is rushing home and into the line of fire, hoping to reunite with their children
. The vast majority, however, are returning to their families. They are the grandmothers looking after the children of sons in the Ukrainian army; the daughters who will wait out the war with elderly parents; the sisters lending a hand to their brothers’ partners; and mothers, like Kosheleva, returning home in the hope of reuniting with their children.
Nearby, Anna Abramosova sips steaming tea out of a little cup. Last summer, the 35-year-old former veterinarian left the eastern Donbas region to work in an Amazon warehouse in Poland to pack boxes bound for Germany. She is one of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women who go abroad each year to support their families.
The train is half full and filthy, scattered with empty food cartons, used toilet paper, and the occasional mound of cat litter. Its sole toilet is covered in human waste and has no running water; plastic bottles of urine dot the carriage floors. A few hours into the journey, Abramosova gets word from a friend that a Russian artillery strike destroyed her neighbor’s house overnight. She goes over to the space between the carriages to smoke a cigarette, holding up her phone to show me a photo of a pile of rubble. “All will be OK, all will be OK,” she repeats like a mantra, her green eyes wide.
Abramosova starts to question her decision to not tell her boys—Nikita, 16, and Vanya, 14—that she was coming home. She wanted to surprise them, telling them not to leave home as a care package from Poland was arriving. “I suppose that’s what I am,” she says, suddenly sounding vulnerable.when the train pulls into the station in Lviv, ending a 10-hour journey that in peacetime would have taken just over two. Most mothers scatter into the darkness, hoping to catch night trains going east.
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