‘What am I going to do?’ A Chicago-area woman traveled near the Ukraine border to help her parents escape

CHICAGO — As Russian troops and bombs descended on Ukraine, the daughter frantically booked a flight from Chicago to Warsaw, Poland, to help her parents fleeing their home in Kyiv.

Her 78-year-old mother and father earlier this month escaped the war-torn capital with the clothing on their backs and few other possessions.

Explosions rocked Kyiv overnight. A convoy of Russian military vehicles said to be 40 miles long was headed into the city. Security checkpoints dotted the route west, further slowing the traffic already congested with thousands of cars.

Brutal media images of Russian shelling and civilian casualties terrified their daughter, 47-year-old Yaroslava Dunn of west suburban St. Charles, as she headed to Poland.

“It was a helpless feeling,” Dunn said. “What am I going to do? Who am I going to contact to get them out? It was a feeling of desperation.”

But her parents safely reached the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on March 7, with the aid of a Christian volunteer group. About a week later, the couple crossed into Poland and reunited with Dunn, the parents and daughter gratefully hugging one another at the train station.

“It broke my heart, made me sad to tears, to see