The hundreds of desperate Ukrainian children saved by a Labor peer who fled the Nazis

During the Russian occupation of Kherson, the Ukrainian city was full of dangers. In addition to nighttime bombings and terror in the streets, Valya Pylypenko's parents had heard of teenage girls being raped by Russian forces.

So last April they made the desperate decision to get their 17-year-old daughter out of Ukraine, even though they knew they themselves would have to stay in Kherson to care for her disabled brother , Ivan.

Valya says the family called the UK Home Office visa hotline and were told she was eligible to apply for a UK visa.

After a Facebook group connected her with British hosts, teachers Rhian and Sam Chillcott, Valya and her mother, Daria, left Kherson on April 11.

But after her family left Valya in Kropyvnytskyi, central Ukraine, to wait out the final days for her visa, she found herself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare.

The Home Office suddenly changed the rules for accepting unaccompanied minors.

Valya found herself stranded in a hotel room 300 miles from her home and in the way of advancing Russian forces. Daria had already left for Kherson with medical supplies and baby food, convinced that her daughter was on her way to safety.

Lord Alf Dubs successfully persuaded the Home Office to change the guidelines (

Picture:

Philip Coburn / Daily Mirror)

Then Daria and her husband Ihor, prominent Ukrainian scholars, were forced into hiding after a colleague was kidnapped.

Rhian and Sam managed to contact refugee activist Lord Alf Dubs - himself an evacuee as a child of Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport.

“Nothing could be more dangerous than a 17-year-old girl on the way to an invasion,” he says. "This is shocking and outrageous.

"Her parents feared that she would be raped because there were reports of rapes of 17-year-old girls in Kherson at that time.

"And then we thought, how many more young Ukrainians must be stuck in exactly this situation - stranded in a war zone?"