RECAP: India Today’s Mausami Singh and cameraperson Parmender Sharma took a bus from Lublin in Poland to go to Lviv, around 70 kilometres inside the Ukraine border. She narrated the hopes and hardships of the Ukrainian refugees with whom she rode in the last instalment of this series of Ground Report. In this instalment, she continues her journey into Ukraine.

AND NOW…

As we reached the Poland-Ukraine border, the Polish border authorities asked us to alight the bus for document checks. It was dark, windy, and absolutely freezing. We walked up to the checkpoint and queued up as the elderly people gingerly stepped out of the vehicle.

Smile is a rare and expensive commodity in times of war. Parmender Sharma frames Mausami Singh in a rare moment when she could afford one.

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A short lean woman, carrying a toddler — a girl and a boy — in each arm, walked right up to the front.

Awoken from sleep, her son was crying inconsolably and had grown red in the face. She would peck him on the cheek and then do the same with her daughter. She was unable to hold them together for long. So, she laid one of her children down for a bit at intervals as she tended to the other child.

As I looked at the people in the queue, I saw them blankly stare into the dark of the night. But all the blank faces bore a tinge of determination of returning ‘home’, irrespective of the consequences.

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It seemed that even after 50 days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these people were struggling to come to terms with what was happening to and around them.

As we crossed the border into Ukraine, an officer walked onto the bus and collected the passports of the passengers — all blue. However, two stood out, with the national emblem of India. After the necessary checks, the officer quickly returned our passports and the bus set off for the last leg of the journey from Lublin to Lviv.

Mausami Singh and Parmender Sharma reporting from Lviv.

By now Parmender had started pacing up and down the running bus. We had run out of drinking water and we didn’t want to bother our fellow passengers, who were already resource-strapped. We surely didn’t want them to part with anything at all, considering that their whole world had shrunk into just a bag tucked on the baggage shelf of the bus.

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We reached our destination sooner than we had imagined. It was 1 past midnight but the Lviv railway station looked ready to cater to the needs of the war. One could no longer see tourists boarding luxury coaches. Only hungry, war-torn, and desperate people dotted the platforms.

It had become the gates that could help people final exit the hell that was war. It bore witness to the swelling crowds on the platforms, the overused toilets, the messy trains that were running behind schedule, and the smell of war that wafted through the air.

After a short two-hour sleep, we made a beeline to get our media accreditation at the media centre. The cultural capital had turned into a makeshift city for refugees as Kyiv was battling the Russian onslaught. In happier times, the 13^th-century Ryonak Square in the heart of the city would be buzzing with tourists — with a neat market and fancy souvenir shops to keep them engaged.

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But these were desperate times. In times like these, the colours had faded and one saw more olive greens and clusters of neon jackets. “We have come to take refugees to Rome and other parts of our country. We have medicines and other relief material. This war must stop,” said Yakopult, a volunteer from Italy.

The defiance of the city in the face of repeated air raid sirens was writ large on the walls. Steel shades plated the world heritage marketplace with mythological sculptures of Neptune, Diana, Adonis, and Amphitrite.

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“They thought that Ukrainians will welcome them with open arms. What they didn’t understand is that we may speak Russian but our hearts and souls belong to Ukraine. We value our freedom and we will fight for it,” said Olga, a Ukrainian journalist, as we sipped coffee at one of the most popular cafes called Svit Kavy.

By the evening, the city centre was lit up with candles of blue and yellow as citizens gathered to pray for the departed. They bid adieu to those who lost their lives as the melody of ‘eternal memory ‘ reverberated in the air, drowning the sound of bombs in that solemn moment.