Days after waking to the sound of explosions, Kyiv student reunites with sister in Montreal

Less than a week after waking to the jarring sound of explosions in the early hours of the morning, an 18-year-old student who fled the devastation in Ukraine has been reunited with her older sister in Montreal.

"I was relieved to finally see my sister, reunite with her — finally — after four years," said Sophia Shton, who attended university in Ukraine's capital of Kyiv.

Mariia Myronova recalls the thrill of laying eyes on her sister at the airport after Shton's plane landed in Montreal Wednesday night.

"We were like, 'Oh my God, actually, this is her!'" said Myronova, 30.

Their relief is muted by the fact that their parents are still in Ukraine and unlikely to be allowed to leave, the sisters said, because both work for the military.

"It's still a victory for us that we managed to help her to, you know, get out," said Myronova, who has lived in Montreal for six years.

'I couldn't even tell them a proper goodbye'

Shton said she had already received a visa to enable her to travel to Canada before the bombings began. Still, she said, it was difficult to wrap her head around the fact that war was imminent, and her life was about to change radically.

"It was hard to believe it, but deep down you knew," she said.

In order to leave Ukraine, Shton had to do things she had never done before.

She got on a plane for the first time in her life.

But before she could fly from Poland, she had to get there, hitching a 13-hour car ride with a stranger she met on social media who volunteered to get her and others to the city of Lviv, 550 kilometres west of Kyiv and about 80 kilometres from the Ukrainian-Polish border.

The teen also had to face the reality of leaving her parents and now living without them for the first time in her life.

When the sound of bombs exploding shook her from her sleep, she found her parents had already left, reporting for work.

"I couldn't even tell them a proper goodbye."

'We sleep when our parents sleep'

The sisters are able to speak with their parents daily, and worrying about their safety is taking a toll.

"We don't sleep. We live on Ukrainian time," Myronova said.

"So we sleep when our parents sleep," she said. "We try to sleep at the same time [as them] so we can assist them as much as we can when they're awake."

Shton is grateful to be in Canada, but she says she hopes the Russian invasion is thwarted and the war ends quickly, so she can return home.

"I just want to reassure myself that everything is going to be OK with my parents, that we are going to win this war," she said. 

"I hope that I can see my house, my home as soon as as possible."