“I will go back and help. I am a health worker, so the hospitals need help,” said Iryna Orel, 50, lugging her luggage as she boarded a train from Przemysl, Poland, to Lviv in western Ukraine. “And I will stay until the end.”
While over 3 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, a small but growing number are heading in the other direction. At first they were foreign volunteers, Ukrainian expatriate men returning to fight and people delivering aid. Now, increasingly, women are also going back, AP reports.
Motivated by a desire to help loved ones in trouble, or to contribute to the defense and survival of their country and compatriots in ways large and small, these women are braving the bombs that have increasingly pounded Ukraine since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24.
Many are not refugees but Ukrainian women who had been living and working abroad. Others had already chosen to stay put in their country but were forced to cross the border to shop for needed goods as supplies dried up under the onslaught at home.
“I will go back and help. I am a health worker, so the hospitals need help,” said Iryna Orel, 50, lugging her luggage as she boarded a train from Przemysl, Poland, to Lviv in western Ukraine. “And I will stay until the end.”
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