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Fleeing conflict triggers the most horrifying of games of chance: Are you on the “right” side of a border when fighting erupts? Are you able to flee a city under siege in the brief moments when bombs are not being dropped? Do the people in your new, ostensibly temporary home have the wherewithal to support you as you find your feet?
Questions and uncertainties do not end once you enter a place—a new city, a new country—that is safe from the violence. Instead, new ones emerge, and you must hope for the best.
According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, more than 4 million people have undertaken this game of chance as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The majority are in neighboring countries—mostly Poland, but also Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Moldova. (Among this overall number are more than 300,000 who fled to Russia and Belarus.)
Of these, Moldova is the smallest and, in many ways, the most vulnerable. The country has barely more residents than does Queens, in New York City, and, like Ukraine, part of its territory is claimed and occupied by Russia. Yet it has also been remarkably welcoming, taking in nearly 400,000 people fleeing the fighting in Ukraine, a figure equivalent to about 15 percent of its entire population.
Yet those crossing into Moldova—like displaced people everywhere—have wildly varying experiences. Over the course of seven days in Moldova, and at the country’s border with Ukraine, the photographer Moises Saman cataloged those differences, capturing images of the Jewish woman who, helped by international Jewish organizations, is bound for Israel; the Ukrainians lumped together in a community home in a village near the border; and finally the Ukrainian Roma who have found that discrimination has followed them.
All have found a measure of safety, yet that is where the similarities in their stories end.
![A woman stands in front of a suitcase.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/tLiNjc1x1d64DhAOV5WR4yRzZAQ=/665x997/media/img/posts/2022/03/SAM2022005G1903_1320005/original.jpg)
“I can feel the house terribly shaking … I am scared in the most terrible way.”
![A man hugs a child.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/S6HZzb3rex4_UtPEwhkrMxPkGYE=/259x381/media/img/posts/2022/03/SAM2022005G1903_1001472A_copy/original.jpg)
Children make up half of all refugees from the war in Ukraine, according to UNICEF and UNHCR.
“I have never thought in my life I would be hiding in basements or fleeing away from my homeland … I can’t honestly recognize how this could have happened in the 21st century and the world came to something like this.”
![A woman holds a cat and an arm reaches in to pet it.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/-y8J_qsQyhtHlL2V6jgDe8b8Awo=/145x217/media/img/posts/2022/03/sam2022005g1903_1330872/original.jpg)
Roman Agakov, the only Ukrainian man in the house, was able to leave Ukraine in the first days of the invasion, before the government implemented the ban on fighting-age men leaving the country. He decided not to return, and stayed with his wife and child; they all live in the house together and hope to move on to Germany or Poland to work.
![A mother hugs her son on a bed.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QvU0kZzNRBSZDSHCw0beMuIQ6AE=/204x306/media/img/posts/2022/03/SAM2022005G1903_1330696A_copy/original.jpg)
“I don’t even know how to describe those feelings—just emptiness, as if you had died, but for the sake of the child, you need to find strength and live.”
“What should I do—go back in the war?”
![A woman sitting in a cardboard makeshift bed with a child behind her.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ZMEUARbDtxb_Yjvuv-Stv2Vd1Z0=/268x404/media/img/posts/2022/03/SAM2022005G1903_1002098/original.jpg)
![A young girl plays.](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/q08UA-RzCVAViKAVf8JAfjevvzY=/0x0:894x1342/204x306/media/img/posts/2022/04/original/original.jpg)
“This is not right when families are separated … It is almost impossible to calm down and relax.”
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