Single mother with two-year-old son leaves Kramatorsk after drone strikes their building

Ruslana and her two-year-old Alexei evacuated from Kramatorsk after a drone hit an apartment two floors below theirs.

A report on how humanitarian organizations are evacuating families with children from Donbas has been published by RBC-Ukraine and UNICEF.

The 27-year-old single mother said the shelling had intensified long before she decided to leave. “The shelling became more frequent — at night and during the day. You go to the store and you no longer know whether it’s safe. I’m an orphan myself, I know what it’s like to grow up without a mother. And I simply don’t want my son to go through that, that horror,” said Ruslana, holding her son close. For the past two months she had been sleeping four to five hours a night because of the nighttime shelling and fear for her child’s life.

The drone strike on the apartment building was the last straw for her. Ruslana sold her old broken car for spare parts, packed her belongings, and went to the evacuation point. “I don’t know where we’re going. We have no relatives or friends who could take us in. I hope the volunteers will help us find a place that is quiet and safe,” she said as she registered for an evacuation run by the Proliska humanitarian mission.

This summer, Kramatorsk increasingly resembles a frontline city: along the central streets, municipal workers are installing concrete triangles — “dragon’s teeth” — wrapped in coils of barbed wire. Gaps in the barriers have been left only for pedestrians, and nets protecting against drone attacks have been stretched above the roads. According to local authorities, more than 50,000 people currently live in Kramatorsk, including nearly four thousand children. In certain districts of the city located closer to the front line, mandatory evacuation of children has already been announced.

The bus carrying Ruslana and her son was filled with families with children, pensioners, and animals. A few minutes after their departure, Kramatorsk came under attack again — this time with guided aerial bombs and artillery — and black smoke rose over the city. The evacuation route runs through long tunnels of anti-drone netting past the burned-out shells of cars on the roadside. From Kramatorsk, humanitarian organizations and volunteers transport people free of charge to safer regions and to an evacuation train that departs daily from Lozova to Lviv.

At the transit center in Lozova, Ruslana and her son were temporarily housed in a shared room for families with children. There she received humanitarian aid packages and registered for cash assistance from UNICEF. In 2026, the organization continues to provide multipurpose cash assistance to families with children being evacuated from frontline areas of Ukraine, to cover rent, food, medicine, and other basic expenses.

“I’m currently on maternity leave, and on top of that I’m a single mother. I have no savings or stable income, so this assistance is very important to me. It will allow me to rent housing for myself and my son for the first while, until I find work and can enroll Alexei in kindergarten,” says Ruslana.

Before her son was born, she worked as a pastry cook. About the future, the woman speaks simply: “I would really love to rent a house in a village where I could grow vegetables and herbs. And where Alexei could play outside, make friends, and grow up in safety.”