It was 4 am on February 24, 2022, in Odesa, in southern Ukraine. Kateryna Shykula, 30, had just breastfed her three-month-old baby, Artem, and was about to fall back asleep when an explosion occurred. The young Ukrainian woman thought that a building nearby had collapsed, when a second blast shattered the silence. Kateryna stiffens. A third followed almost immediately. Panicked, the mother got up and checked her phone. The news was already everywhere: Russia had just invaded Ukraine.

Kateryna was living at the time in an apartment with her husband, Oleksandr Shykula, 33, on the eighth floor of a brand new, bright building decorated with large mirrors. Air raid sirens wailed in the sky. The young woman went to shelter in the corridor with her son. The family stayed there for days to protect themselves from the bombings. But all those mirrors worried her. What if the building was hit? Glued to the news, Oleksandr paced back and forth in the apartment. The baby was not sleeping through the night. The tension quickly became unbearable. So when a friend who had settled in Germany offered to put her up, Kateryna didn’t hesitate for long. She called her mother, Iryna Kostina: “Do you want to come with us?” “Yes, of course,” her mother replied. They bought the tickets.

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