ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. — The Russia-Ukraine war is now the largest ground war in Europe since WWII.
In the Tampa Bay area, Ukrainians keep in touch with their families daily and watch from afar as the war wages on.
"It didn't get any better, people are still dying and families are still in danger," Lesia Kudashkina said.
Kudashkina moved to the U.S. in 2020 to get her master's degree at the University of South Florida. On this week's somber anniversary of when the war started, she's thinking of her family who still live in Ukraine.
She said when the news broke of the invasion, it was a panicked struggle to get in touch with all of her family.
"Checking in on my loved ones to see if they're still alive, it was awful," Kudashkina said.
Kudashkina said her family is all unharmed. But like many, she knows people who died fighting for Ukraine. A classmate Kudashkina went to medical school with died just a month after enlisting in the Ukrainian army.
"It's like dualistic reality when you look around and everything is perfectly fine. It's palms, it's Florida and life is good," Kudashkina said. "And you realize in the very same moment, your mom is sitting in a bomb shelter and she is cold, it's dark, it's unsafe. Kids are traumatized for the rest of their lives."
Kudashkina's hometown is Kropyvnytskyi. Her family is still living in central Ukraine where her mother is a schoolteacher.
"Pretty much every time I talk to her, it starts with 'Today we spent two hours in the bomb shelter,' or 'today we spent one hour in the bomb shelter,'" she said.
While the day-to-day life in the Tampa Bay area seems normal, Kudashkina is consistently checking headlines, wondering and worried if her loved ones are safe.
"That's the time when I started checking news, all the time, throughout the day," Kudashkina recalled after the news of the invasion broke. "First thing I did in the mornings was get into the news channels and see what's going on"