Until Sunday morning, the Lviv region in western Ukraine was a safe haven in a war-torn country.
This is where families further east sent their children to be safe.
Vasily Kunets, a driver who lives in Novoyavorivsk, a city about 20 miles from Lvov, said that until now, when the sirens went off to warn of a possible air raid, he hadn’t been too worried. He will go to safety, but perhaps not as fast as he should.
Before the war was still far away.
That all changed when Russian strikes on the Yavoriv military training ground on the outskirts of Novoyavorivsk resulted in 35 deaths, the Lviv regional administration said on Sunday.
More than 30 missiles fired from aircraft over the Black and Azov Seas hit a military base, Maxim Kozitsky, head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration, said in a statement posted on Facebook on Sunday.
Suddenly, the war was on the threshold of Kunets.
The educational base is inextricably linked with the life of the city. Many of its residents work there or in the services that support it. Those who don’t work for him directly know someone who does.
Kunets saw firsthand the damage they caused.
“I saw the rocket hit the ground, I saw the explosion and the smoke, the mushroom cloud of smoke and fire,” he told CNN.
“It lasted 30 minutes and I heard maybe eight hits, maybe some rockets fell or parts of the rockets exploded separately, I don’t know.”
Kunetz told CNN that the attack on the base “changed everything.”
“Now we are worried. I’m not worried about myself, but about my children. People are worried about the safety of their families and some of them are considering moving to another place,” he said.
Kunets said he is now thinking about sending his two children out of Ukraine, which he had not necessarily considered before.
“It seems less safe and more dangerous. Yesterday and the day before yesterday we were more relaxed and when we heard the alarms we didn’t move as fast, we didn’t take it too seriously. But today we are gathering and preparing to leave very quickly when we hear the alarm,” he said.
Sofia Harbuzyuk of CNN contributed to this post.