'Euphoria' - Evacuees cheer Kyiv's incursion into Russia

Last Tuesday, Oksana and her family could not escape fast enough. Though they did not know it, Ukrainian regular forces had entered Russia for the first time, and Moscow's military wasted little time in hitting back, bombing their village around 11km from the border.

- Dan Sabbagh

"It was 9am and the first glide bomb hit the village," she said, and its ferocity - "very scary, much bigger" than ordinary shelling - was such that they immediately knew they had to escape.

"Our neighbour drove his children first and then came back and picked up me and my sister and family," the mother of two explained.

Like hundreds of others from the Ukrainian borderlands where last week's surprise attack was launched, Oksana and her family made their way south to Sumy, normally a 40-minute drive away. They have rented a property and were working out what to do next at a crowded refugee centre.

Others lining up to register as internally displaced tell similar stories.

While there had been periodic crossborder shelling before, this time was different. "What happened last week was times a hundred," said Mykola, 69, who had been evacuated with his wife from Yunakivka, 8km from the border, last weekend.

Ukraine's civilian authorities had little formal warning of the attack, though some people in the area suspected something was coming.