When Svitlana Maksymenko’s train pulled into the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, about halfway through her 800-mile journey from home to safety, people pushed onto every part of the carriage, she said, grasping for their own escape route west. Some abandoned their luggage. Some begged to get on. “They were on their knees on the platform,” Maksymenko said. “There was no room. There were people standing in every space, in every gangway, there were five people on every bed.” Maksymenko’s journey began in Kharkiv, an eastern city that has been heavily shelled by Russian forces, and stopped, for now, in Lviv, a

Refugees from across Ukraine are being welcomed as they arrive in the Polish border town of Przemysl, but there are concerns about how the relief effort can be maintained if the war goes on. “We have had 180,000 refugees in 10 days. If it carries on like this, we’ll have had half a million people coming through by the end of the month.” In the packed train station at Przemysl, eight miles from the Ukrainian border, mayor Wojciech Bakun is both proud of what his town – population 60,000 – is doing for Ukraine but also apprehensive about what could

Successive US presidents have struggled to get the measure of Vladimir Putin but now that Brussels and Berlin have joined the fray with such resolve, it’s a different story, writes Nick Bryant. It is often tempting to look upon Vladimir Putin as the millennium bug in a human and deadly form. The Russian president rose to power on 31 December 1999, as the world held its breath that computers would go into meltdown when the clock struck midnight, unable to process the change from 1999 to 2000. In the 20 years since, Putin has been trying to engineer a different