Elkana Zohar, 56, came to Ukraine as part of his job as a real estate businessman, where he married 34-year-old Anna. The two are raising their three-and-a-half-year-old son Mark, not far from Kiev.
"Not built for such a large number of refugees," Elkana Zohar,
For a moment he did not think he would find himself at the middle of a war.
"We live in Rivne, a city four hours drive from Lviv and five hours from Kiev. It is a quiet town of 250,000 people, and until the last minute we did not believe a war would break out. We were taken to tour the shelters to prepare but no one took it seriously," he said. A number.
On the day of the Russian invasion everything changed.
"A missile was fired at the city, at an abandoned airport, the field was not really hit but suddenly a war started. I decided to go towards the border and with me there were hundreds of thousands. Yesterday we were on the Polish border and there was a traffic jam of 15 kilometers, in 16 hours we only advanced "Five kilometers in minus two degrees. It's awful and you think where are all these hundreds of thousands? Where will they spend the night? Children and women and adults, it's plays like during World War II," he says.
Ruins in Kiev, Photo: API
After waiting 16 hours at the border Elkana and Anna decided to go to friends in Lviv, "We went to the city and slept with friends and told us that the border to Hungary is more open and here we are 3 hours and already one kilometer from the border.
How is the situation in Lviv?
The city is in complete chaos, there are messages on old speakers hung on the light poles.
"The city is not built at all for the amount of refugees that came to it, the authorities are fighting the Russians and there is no time for the home front and that's how it looks, the city's leaders run it as much as they can but it is flooded with refugees.
"Ukrainians will fight to the last man"
How do Ukrainians feel about the invasion? Are they desperate?
"No, they are full of hatred and desire for revenge, the rage here on the Russians has climbed to terribly frightening heights, people here are now able to kill a Russian with bare hands. They are also suspicious of any stranger, everywhere I have to explain who I am and they ask because they are afraid of spies."
He added: "In their sense Putin wants to bring them back to communism and they want to be Western, it makes them a terrible hatred and a desire to fight to the last man, they see Putin as a kind of Hitler. The hatred and rage here is huge I think Russia will lose the war because of that hatred."
At the end of his speech, Elkana says that "the Ukrainians are a new generation, united, proud and ready to die for his country, they are just fighting for the house. That is the difference between them and the Russian children who were sent to this unnecessary war."
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