The volunteers’ response is shifting as the weeks stretch on; they still deliver first aid, but are also focusing on building shelters to protect from bomb attacks in the long term. There’s an increasing need to safeguard women and children crossing the border, too.

Two million children have now fled, and an additional 2.5 million children have been displaced within Ukraine. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented that more than 100 children have been killed during the conflict, and a further 134 children have been injured.

A human rights organisation, Homo Faber, said last week that it had registered the first cases of suspected sex traffickers and pimps preying on Ukrainian women near refugee shelter points in Lublin.

They said women were being accosted aggressively, “under the guise of offering transport, work or accommodation”.

Mr Chapagain added: “In the past, people were moving as a group or on a bus, the chances of getting misled is less if you’re in a group. But now people are moving individually, on foot, that’s where abuse can happen.”

Rapes and sexual abuse reported

In conflict-hit areas, women are reporting rapes and sexual abuse. On Monday, The Times published an account of a Ukrainian woman who said Russian soldiers killed her husband and then raped her. 

“I shot your husband because he was a Nazi,” the gunman told her, before he and another soldier raped her, as her four-year-old son sobbed in the room next door. She told The Times she was later raped a second time by the soldiers. She eventually managed to flee to western Ukraine with her son.

Volunteers are working to support vulnerable women and children, and racing to build health clinics too, Mr Chapagain said.

“Seventy hospitals have been destroyed; other hospitals are under pressure as supplies [run out],” Mr Chapagain said. “As in any conflict environment, the needs and supplies get worse over time, more schools and hospitals are impacted.”