‘A battle in our souls’: women who fled Ukraine agonise over when to return

Natalia Kompaniets lives with her daughter and granddaughter in a shelter in Hungary. ‘Every day my conscience is crying out that we are sitting here.’ Photograph: Andras Fekete/The Guardian

Natalia Kompaniets spends her days running over a dilemma with her daughter as they sit in their temporary new home, a simply furnished room on the first floor of an unmarked building, in a nondescript suburb of Budapest.

“Every day we think, should we go back or not? There’s a battle in our souls,” said Kompaniets, a 51-year-old who left the town of Obukhiv outside Kyiv in early March, along with her daughter and young granddaughter.