Ukrainian families say goodbye or fight back as Russia moves into west | USA TODAY

As Russia's assault on Ukraine moves west, men say goodbye to their families as they board buses and trains for safety in Western Europe.

Correction: The previous version of this video misidentified a location.

RELATED: Crisis in Ukraine: The global implications of Russia's invasion

Iryna Kotz calls her husband each morning to ask if the night was calm, even though she monitors the air raid sirens from hundreds of miles away through an app on her phone and knows these days it rarely is. When her children ask when they'll see their father again, she has no good answers for them.

As millions of Ukrainian women and children move west to escape Russia's widening war in their country, a largely unspoken front-line – open-ended, full of searing psychological hurt – continues to expand across Ukraine: the men they leave behind.

Many of the women USA TODAY spoke to were too overcome with emotion to address the subject of leaving their husbands behind, but many Ukrainian men showed remarkable stoicism in talking about the pain of family separations that have no foreseeable end. They feel it is their duty to defend their country.

"My family understands that if we don't win this fight, future generations – maybe even the whole world – will not have a good life," said Kotz's husband Igor, 37, a property-developer-turned-amateur-security-chief for a Lviv-based humanitarian aid center that helps supply Ukraine's professional and civilian armed forces. "I have accepted that I may not ever see my wife and kids again."

» Subscribe to USA TODAY:
» Watch more on this and other topics from USA TODAY:
» USA TODAY delivers current local and national news, sports, entertainment, finance, technology, and more through award-winning journalism, photos, videos and VR.

#Ukraine #Russia #WarinUkraine