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Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
World
Nils Adler

Fleeing Ukraine: I would ‘have done anything to keep him with me’

Olga speaks to her grandmother by phone at Ukraine's border with Poland [Nils Adler/Al Jazeera]

When air raid sirens began to sound in Kyiv at 5am on February 24, Olga Balaban’s instincts told her that she had to get out of the city with her family while they still could.

“Many of my friends said it will be ok, that it would finish soon, he [Putin] is just doing this to scare us,” she says, “but I just knew we had to go.”

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