A Virginia pastor who was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, said he has been using online messaging to stay in daily contact with aunts, uncles, cousins and close friends who still live there.
“What’s concerning is their ongoing well-being and health,” said Andrew Moroz, a pastor in Lynchburg, Virginia. “These are people had normal lives and are now walking around with the wreckage of tanks.”
“Some of them are seeing bodies,” he said. “It’s disturbing.”
Moroz, who moved to the United States in the mid-1990s, told WTOP that some of his relatives have been able to escape to Poland in the days since Russia launched war on Ukraine.
Some 2 million people have fled the country, nearly half of them children.
Russian troops have captured swaths of territory in the south, but have faced fierce Ukrainian resistance in other regions.
“People are very fearful right now,” Moroz said. “What they’re seeing more and more is regular neighborhoods and places where civilians live are being shelled.”
Ukrainian officials said civilians, among them children, were killed by Russian firepower in the town of Chuhuiv late Tuesday and in the city of Malyn, to the west of Kyiv.
Life has become increasingly desperate in cities cut from electricity and facing food and medicine shortages. The port city of Mariupol is particularly devastated, lacking running water, heat, sanitary systems and phone service. City authorities there said dozens of bodies had to be buried in a mass grave because morgues were overflowing.
Moroz said he received an urgent message Tuesday from a close friend in Brovary, an eastern suburb of Kyiv, who said, “please pray for us. We hear the battle in our neighborhood.”
According to Moroz, his friend sent another message three hours later saying that Ukrainian forces were able to push back that group of soldiers.
“There were some 30 tanks that were left abandoned or destroyed in that community,” Moroz said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said efforts were being made Wednesday to evacuate some 18,000 people from embattled towns in the Kyiv region to the capital itself.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
