On the afternoon of 27 February, Budapest was bustling with the normal Sunday life of a big European capital. It seemed surreal that less than three days before, I had been hastily packing essentials in Lviv, western Ukraine, as municipal authorities announced city-wide blackouts.
I had left Lviv with two friends early on the morning of 25 February, catching a 3.28am train (delayed by two hours) south-west to Uzhhorod. We arrived there seven hours later, and continued by taxi to Chop, a small city on the Ukrainian side of the Hungarian border. Another nine hours and 358km later, we were in Budapest, the Hungarian capital.
Still stupefied by our experience after a day of rest, we were walking by the sunlit Danube and did not immediately register a hesitant “Slava Ukraini!” (“glory to Ukraine”) uttered in our direction. In front of us stood a family of three: a woman, Alla Kulikova, her husband Konstantyn, and their daughter, Polina. Originally from Kharkiv, north-eastern Ukraine, Alla and her family had fled to Hungary two days earlier.
