A man who fled the Ukrainian capital with his family due to the Russian invasion has reflected on the war one year on.
Dan Baker, originally from Brighton, fled his home in Kyiv with his wife Victoria, step-daughter Veronica and cat Pumpkin around a month after Russian tanks rolled across the border.
Speaking to The Argus on the anniversary of the start of the war, Dan said he still remembers the moment he realised the invasion had begun.
The family had been planning to come to the UK for the wedding of Dan’s younger brother and applying for visas for Veronica and Victoria. They had been celebrating the night before the conflict erupted after receiving their passports back.
Dan said: “We had a bottle or two and we went to bed a little later than usual. I woke up around 4am to explosions and black smoke on the horizon.
“I didn’t understand what was happening for a few seconds - everyone has had a hangover before but this must have been the world’s worst.
“I’d never been in a war before, so I thought that the whole country was going to be flattened in an instant - I thought ‘what do we do?’.
“I didn’t have time to feel any fear, because I had to keep my family safe. I was running on adrenaline and primeval instinct at that point.”
He said that, while troops had gathered on the Ukrainian border in the weeks prior, there was not a sense that war was imminent.
Dan said: “This had happened two years before - we had gone on holiday to Egypt and when we came back Russia had built up its number of troops around the border.
“I think Putin had planned to do it earlier, but then Covid hit and delayed it.
“We had a false sense of security this time - we thought ‘well, he didn’t do it last time’.”
Dan described how, as the city woke up to the reality of the situation, “mass panic” broke out and people scrambled to shops to stock up on supplies.
He said: “Everyone went to the shops to try and stock up, which made me, in a way, feel more British - we always go out to get the milk and the bread the minute there is a flake of snow on the ground.”
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Eventually, the family took the decision to leave Kyiv and Ukraine and come back to Dan’s hometown of Brighton. However, despite being back in the city for several months, Dan admits to still not feeling “at home”.
He said: “It’s my hometown but it doesn’t feel like home, because I had made my own home with my family in Kyiv.”
Dan and Victoria returned to their Ukrainian home in December after enduring a logistical nightmare to travel back to Kyiv, catching a slight to the Polish capital Warsaw and then embarking on a 25-hour train.
While there, the couple endured intermittent power cuts and a night where dozens of drone attacks rained down on the city.
Dan said: “We woke up one morning and my wife looked quite tired. She said while I was sleeping there had been 35 drone attacks from the south.
“She saw all the lights - she said it was like Star Wars, but I had just slept through it.”
He said returning to the capital was surreal, with Russian tanks captured by Ukrainian forces on display in one of the city’s squares.
“I looked down the barrel of one of the Russian tanks - it was still quite worrying, even though we knew there was no danger there,” he said.
“I felt a sense of pride, but it was very sombre as well.
While Dan and Victoria were able to visit some of their friends, two sadly lost their lives in the conflict.
“One of them was an 18-year-old in my daughter’s choir group - that hit her really hard,” Dan said.
Despite the challenges and the bloodshed endured in the conflict, Dan remains as confident as ever that Ukraine will emerge victorious in the war.
He said: “The Ukrainian people are the strongest, both mentally and physically, that I’ve ever met - I never had any doubt in them from day one.”
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