Russian attacks have no limits, Ukrainian denounces 0:26
(CNN) --
In the midst of a chaotic, multi-day cross-country train ride to the northwestern city of Lviv, near Ukraine's border with Poland, Marina made a terrible realization.
The 54-year-old caregiver, who managed to evacuate an orphanage in a besieged industrial city in the eastern province of Lugansk, had no way of returning to her own family.
Russia-Ukraine War: Breaking News, Invasion Analysis and News
Marina, who did not give her last name, was still reeling from the trip: She spent days desperately trying to calm the terrified children in her care amidst the banging and banging of Russia's brutal attack, while still fearing for her family back home.
"And now I'm completely alone," Marina told CNN from a daycare-turned-shelter in Lviv, where she and children from her orphanage were sheltered.
"I left my own (adult) children to save the children in the orphanage."
CNN does not reveal Marina's full name due to the risks to her family who have not been evacuated.
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The fracture of families underpins many of the stories of displacement in Ukraine, where Russia's violent attempts to wrest control of territory in the east, south and center of the country from the Ukrainian authorities have leveled entire neighborhoods.
Millions of people remain trapped in besieged cities with virtually no way out.
The establishment of evacuation corridors outside the most affected urban centers is proving difficult due to the incessant violations of temporary ceasefires.
Without safe passage, families are being separated.
Several people CNN spoke with in recent days said they have been unable to contact loved ones since the beginning of the invasion.
They described frantic escapes from the country's hardest-hit cities, leaving behind parents, spouses, siblings and grandparents.
With the Russian invasion that destroyed the electrical and telephone networks, entire cities were cut off from the outside world.
Many say they don't know if their loved ones are still alive.
"I don't understand why the government didn't try to evacuate us before the invasion started. I don't want to blame them. Still, I can't help but think that my situation could have been avoided," Marina added.
Frantic attempts to reconnect with family
Once a tourist hotspot, Lviv is now ground zero for an estimated 200,000 displaced Ukrainians who have flooded the city in search of relative safety.
Several theaters and schools converted into makeshift shelters are now covered with mattresses for displaced people.
The streets are clogged with traffic.
On almost every street corner you can hear people making tearful phone calls to loved ones left behind in war-torn areas.
This has been, day by day, the war in Ukraine: data and chronology about the Russian invasion
Isabel Merkulova, 31, is a theater actress.
These days she sits nervously by her phone, consumed by thoughts of her best friend Anastasiya Lisovska, who is stuck in Hostómel, north of Kyiv.
The city has become a key battleground in the war and has seen some of its most dramatic scenes, including a standoff at an airport and the assassination of its mayor.
Isabel Merkulova, right, and her best friend Anastasiya Lisovska.
Anastasiya traveled to Hostómel from the Ukrainian capital shortly after the Russian invasion began in an attempt to persuade her uncle to flee.
When she arrived, Russian forces had already besieged the city.
At the time, she spoke defiantly about venturing to her uncle's house while bombs were falling.
She even thought about joining the resistance.
But her fear overtook her quickly.
Anastasiya's text messages that turn on Isabel's phone, punctuated by silences fueled by power outages and telecommunications outages, reveal the terrifying uncertainty that shakes estranged friends and family, who have no idea if they might ever see each other again.
ANASTASIYA
: Isa, the power has gone out again.
There was a terrible battle.
ISABEL:
How are you?
ANASTASIYA:
We went back to our house [from the basement].
Isa, I have never been so scared in my entire life.
ISABEL:
Nastia, I send you my hugs.
The most important thing is that you are not injured.
My****, I can't even imagine what you went through today, but I do think everything will be fine!
ANASTASIYA:
Someone recharged [put money on] my mobile number and I am very grateful!
ANASTASIYA:
Here in Hostómel there is defense of Moscow in the streets.
I'm afraid.
Today there is no tap water.
Tell Yulia and Olia about this Moscow military attack.
Please!
ISABEL:
I'll tell them!
are you hurt?
Nastia, are there neighbors out there?
ANASTASIYA:
There are hardly any neighbors living here at the moment.
We are not injured at the moment, but we are on the verge of collapse.
If only we could read the news and know what's going on around us.
Our cell phone batteries are dying, there is no electricity or water at the moment.
There are many shots.
It is very difficult.
ISABEL:
Nastia, please stay strong!
In a tearful interview with CNN, Isabel admits she felt less hopeful than she would have liked to be reunited with her friend of 15 years.
She flipped through photos of her stage tours in Europe and smiled through tears.
Isabel, left, and Anastasiya pose in front of the German Bundestag in Berlin.
"It feels surreal that this was our life," he said.
After more than two days of silence on the radio, Anastasiya reappeared with news.
By candlelight from the bomb shelter, she and her neighbors had made a decision.
They would take a 50-minute walk through the war-torn city to a rally point for the evacuations.
The government-organized evacuation corridor had failed the day before, but they were running out of food and water, and had decided the risk was worth it.
"It was like something out of a movie," Isabel told CNN, while detailing her best friend's escape on Thursday.
The group had heard gunshots that morning, but embarked on the journey anyway.
Along their journey, they came across a car zooming down the road that took them to the pick-up point.
The evacuation corridor held this time and Anastasiya reached Kyiv.
Her uncle, however, stayed behind.
ISABEL:
Okay, keep in touch if you can!
Bohdan told me that our armed forces are winning the battle near Hostomel!
They are winning!
ANASTASIYA:
They are driving the enemy back.
But we're in the thick of it and it's so dangerous and so fucking scary!
ANASTASIYA:
I want to scream.
ANASTASIYA:
I want it to stop.
ANASTASIYA: I'll
try to take a nap now.
ANASTASIYA:
I love you all.
ISABEL:
I understand, Nastia!
I can't imagine how everyone feels right now, but everything will pass and soon we will meet and hug each other.
ISABEL:
How are you?
ANASTASIYA:
I don't know... I'm really scared.
Isa, everything is very bad here.
I'm worried.
ANASTASIYA:
Send a text message to Liuba telling her that we no longer have electricity.
ISABEL:
Nastia, we will find information on ways to evacuate you from there!
ISABEL:
I'll text Liuba, sure.
ANASTASIYA:
Please.
We have to get out of here.
ISABEL:
Nastia, the most important thing is to be in contact!
ISABEL:
Nastia, have you tried calling those numbers I gave you?
While some separated families have managed to maintain some communication through the hodgepodge of besieged cities, many more have been left completely cut off from their loved ones.
Iryna Lytvyn, 31, from the eastern Donetsk town of Volnovakha, has not spoken to her parents and her sister, who stayed behind, in more than a week.
He frantically scrolls through local social media groups looking for signs of life.
A day before Lytvyn's interview with CNN, a neighbor texted her to say that her parents were alive and well, despite heavy shelling in the city.
As for her sister, she has no news.
"I don't know anything about my sister. The last time we saw her was February 27," Lytvyn said.
"A week ago, someone saw her get into the car with her husband, but we haven't spoken since."
The mother of Iryna Lytvyn, with whom she lost contact in a besieged Ukrainian city, with her grandchildren before the brutal invasion of Moscow tore the family apart.
"I guess he didn't get a chance to leave," he continued.
"Otherwise we would have talked about her. Now all three of her phones, hers, her husband's and my niece's, are silent."
Lytvyn fled a week after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
Volnovakha was almost completely destroyed in the first days of the war.
There was no electricity, gas or telecommunications when she left.
"We were completely cut off from the world," he said in a telephone interview with CNN during a brief respite from the sirens in the Dnipropetrovsk region, some 180 miles northwest of his hometown, and some way from the main fault lines of the war.
"We found ourselves in the open air under shelling. To say it was scary is to say nothing. But there was no point in going back."
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Another Volnovakha native, Pavlo Eshtokin, also described a complicated escape carrying his wife and daughter to safety amid shelling.
"For the first few days after we got out, we lost the ability to speak, to think," Eshtokin said.
"There will be no normal life anymore."
He said he left behind his 93-year-old grandmother, who lived through World War II, and has no way of contacting her.
"I can only hope that she has remembered her survival skills from that war and that she is with her friends," she said.
"But that's all I can really do. Have hope."
"The Biggest Performance Yet"
Natalia Rybka-Parkhomenko woke up with a start in her apartment in Lviv in the early hours of February 24.
"The war has begun," her father exclaimed by phone from the eastern city of Kharkiv, one of the first to be hit by Russian President Vladimir Putin's blitz-style invasion.
His family quickly loaded whatever belongings they could into their car, before realizing to their dismay that they did not have enough gas to make the trip.
Like many Ukrainians, they were surprised by the speed of the invasion, despite weeks of warnings from Western officials.
That skepticism, reinforced by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the weeks leading up to the invasion, appears to have exacerbated the chaos on the streets and at train stations.
Now Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of the unthinkable: being forcibly separated from those they hold dear.
Theater director Natalia Rybka-Parkhomenko says keeping spirits up in her theater-turned-IDP shelter has been "the most important performance of her life."
"I didn't know what a panic attack was before that morning," said Rybka-Parkhomenko, an actress and director of Lviv's historic Les Kurbas theater.
She wandered the streets aimlessly and finally decided to turn her author's theater into a shelter for the displaced.
She spent turning the space into a reception point for displaced families and incessantly checking her phone for messages from her parents and brother.
The hardest part, she said, was trying to keep other people's spirits up while she herself was wracked with worry.
"It was the most dramatic and important performance we've ever done," he said of the ordeal, his fingers elegantly intertwined as he spoke to CNN from the theater's basement, littered with relief items for the displaced.
Escaping the horror of Ukraine is not an option for many children with disabilities and their families
Days later, Rybka-Parkhomenko's family was able to find safe passage to Lviv with a volunteer aid worker.
The trip from Kharkiv to Lviv by road, which before the war took 12 hours, took two days.
Others in the theater-turned-shelter are less fortunate.
Tamila Kheladze shares a large mattress next to the stage with her two sisters and her one-year-old son Denis.
Her husband has stayed in Kyiv to tend her shop while the three women plan their escape to Poland and then Sweden.
He had just sent her a text message wishing her a happy International Women's Day, Kheladze said Tuesday, her intact French manicure the only visible vestige of her former life.
"She said 'honey, we'll be together soon.'"
"I hope to see you soon, but I don't think it will be so soon," she said, her voice between sobs.
"Now we must go abroad as soon as we can. We must go for the children. Just for that."
CNN's Sofiya Harbuziuk contributed to this report. Illustration by CNN's Will Mullery.
Russian invasion of Ukraine