I couldn’t resist any longer. On April 6, day 42 of Russia’s increasingly barbaric invasion of Ukraine, I set off with a reporter from Atlanta, Patrick Adams, to see it for myself. The Russians were retreating from their feckless yet brutal attempt to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and reports were accumulating of executed civilians lining the roads of the rural suburbs north of the city. A World War II-style siege of the industrial port city of Mariupol, nearly 300 miles to the southwest, had already killed an estimated 5,000 civilians, according to the city’s mayor. Less than a week later the estimate had doubled.

"The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps,” Mayor Vadym Boichenko stated on the day of my departure, calling his city “the new Auschwitz and Majdanek.”

In Warsaw, itself blitzkrieged by its neighbor more than eight decades ago, symbols of Poland’s support of Ukraine were numerous: Blue and yellow flags lined New World Street; anti-war messages were written on windows and mirrors in businesses throughout Old Town; yellow posters depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face as part of the old Nazi skull-and-crossbones symbol, between the words, “Achtung (Danger) Russia!”

When we arrived at the Polish border town of Przemysl, hundreds of Ukrainians were boarding a train for a short ride to Lviv, a city known as Ukraine’s “capital of culture” near the Polish border. (According to data gathered by the United Nations Refugee Agency, as of April 24, roughly 5.3 million Ukrainians had fled the country since the start of the war, while nearly $1.2 million had reentered the country.) 

Far removed from the fighting in the east, Lviv had become a safe haven for refugees, journalists, aid workers, and diplomats. Foreign embassies, including those of the U.S., Germany and the Netherlands, had in mid-February relocated to temporary embassies in the city as a massive buildup of Russian troops along Ukraine’s eastern border indicated an invasion was inevitable. 

Thousands of people crowded the cobblestone streets of Lviv’s Old Town – a UNESCO World Heritage site and capital of the Kingdom of Ruthenia in the 11th century – as old yellow trams and buses ferried people around the bustling city. It was a stark contrast to what I would see later in Kyiv and Kharkiv further east.

On April 15, I met two Ukrainians, Denis Bredeliev, 18, and Tymofiy, 15, skateboarding on the stone pedestal of a monument of the 17th century poet and politician Taras Shevchenko, whose literary heritage is considered the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature. Tymofiy told me he and his family escaped Mariupol several days after the invasion began, traveling to at least seven other cities in Ukraine before arriving in Lviv early April. His uncle had left early that morning to help Tymofiy’s grandparents escape the besieged city. 

“My father said, ‘We need to go, because Mariupol will be destroyed.’ And he was right,” Tymofiy said of the day they left home.

Asked what he feels toward the Russians bombardment of his home city, Tymofiy put it simply: “The Russian Federation doesn’t like Ukrainians.”

Sirens blare in Lviv, warning people of four incoming missiles that were successfully shot down by the Zenit missile forces of the Ukraine military’s West Air Command, according to A voice on a loudspeaker says, “Help people who are old and sick to leave their places and seek shelter in an underground bunker.”

In the early morning of April 15, we heard loud sirens blaring through the streets below our hostel. A man on loudspeaker urged, “Help people who are old and sick to leave their places and seek shelter in an underground bunker.”

The missiles were successfully shot down by the Zenit missile forces of Ukraine’s West Air Command, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

Three days later, we saw a dark column of smoke rising several kilometers away, learning later that Russian missiles had struck an auto repair shop and nearby military infrastructure overnight, killing seven – the city’s first wartime civilian deaths. A child whose family had fled the northeastern city of Kharkiv lost a finger in the attack. The city’s mayor said one of the explosions was so powerful it shattered the windows of a nearby hotel sheltering a number of Ukrainian refugees.

The shelling was part of a broad offensive operation by Russian forces across Ukraine, including Kyiv and Kharkiv, signaling what experts called a renewed operation to take the eastern Donbas region after a failed attempt to capture Kyiv.

Adams and I rented a car and headed south of Lviv soon after the attack. The previous day we had met a man named Alexiy Yasynskiy at a plaza cafe near Lviv City Hall. Soon after the war began, Yasynskiy, the owner of a large construction company, and three other men decided to use their construction skills and resources to manufacture bulletproof vests for members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.