Sharjah24 - AFP: Yelena Kleban's life was turned upside down in a matter of minutes when Russian bombs fell near her hometown of Lviv, but the Ukrainian refugee says the welcome she has received in Poland is beyond her expectations.

"We have everything, really everything, even too much stuff," Kleban exclaimed sitting amid boxes of food in the kitchen of a villa in Podkowa Lesna, a leafy suburb of the Polish capital Warsaw.

"The people here are amazing, so generous, we didn't expect so much sympathy," she added.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have travelled by car, taxi, bus, train and even foot to make the 70-kilometre (43-mile) journey from Lviv to the Polish border town of Medyka.

"We really didn't expect Lviv to be attacked on the first day of the war," the 35-year-old Kleban told AFP.

"But Putin hates Lviv, the spiritual heart of Ukraine," she says of Ukraine's westernmost large city with a population of 721,000, and the closest to the eastern frontier of the European Union and NATO.

When the first Russian bombs fell, there was no room for hesitation: "We had to save the children," she said, adding that the "men stayed behind to fight or dig trenches."