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apartment rang nearly simultaneously. The
phones belonged to two women, Maryna and
Nataliia, professional colleagues of a sort and
temporary roommates; they were also new-
found friends, both of them pregnant and near
the beginning of their third trimesters. Just over
a week earlier, they had come from Kyiv, where
they’d both been living, on a kind of business trip.
Lviv was around an eight-hour train ride away, a
hassle of a journey even for someone who wasn’t
pregnant, and it was especially unappealing in
the heart of a freezing Ukrainian winter. But the
American businesswoman who was working
with them insisted — the clients demanded it.
They would be away two weeks at the most, she’d
told them. Their manager tried to sell it: See it as
a paid vacation to Lviv! The town was well known
to Ukrainians for its historic cobblestone streets
and charming pastel townhouses.
Under diff erent circumstances, the trip might
have held more appeal. But the two women had
already uprooted themselves once, moving from
their respective homes in the country’s southeast,
as was required by their contract. Their employ-
ers initially wanted them in Kyiv, the nation’s
capital, so they could be near some of the coun-
try’s best obstetric care. That luxury was probably
not one the women could have aff orded if they
were carrying their own children — but neither
of them was. They were both surrogate moth-
ers in Kyiv, two of 13 pregnant women working
with an American company, Delivering Dreams
International Surrogacy Agency. That agency, as
of mid-February, decided to move everyone to
Lviv, a city that was far from any likely confl ict
and where it already had relationships with
medical providers.
Starting in mid-January, many of the agen-
cy’s clients, many of them American, most of
them anxious, had been listening to the news
and worrying. Russian troops were gathering
along the border of Ukraine, and the United
States announced that it had intelligence that
Russia would most likely invade soon after the
Olympics ended in mid-February. Most Ukrai-
nians did not put much stock in the American
intelligence — what were the Russians going
to do, roll tanks into Kyiv? It sounded absurd.
Even if there was an uptick in hostilities, many
Ukrainians believed, the fi ghting would remain
confi ned to the same embattled regions in the
east, along the border, where battles had been
ongoing since 2014.
The surrogacy agency’s owner and founder,
Susan Kersch-Kibler, who lived in New Jersey,
explained to various intended parents, in an
informational Zoom call in late January, that she
did not think war was necessarily imminent. Asan entrepreneur who had worked in Ukraine
and Russia for years, Kersch-Kibler was well
aware of local skepticism about the likelihood of
an invasion; but given the volume of concerned
messages she was receiving from the intend-
ed parents, and how potentially disastrous the
consequences of war would be for surrogates
and clients alike, she felt she had to plan for
contingencies. She reserved apartments in Lviv
for a month for the pregnant women working
with the agency.
Many of the other surrogate mothers consid-
ered this trip an unnecessary disruption. But the
agency told them they needed to pack a few things,
including all their legal documents, and come to
the train station on the evening of Feb. 15. Kersch-
Kibler had her doubts about whether all of them
would show up. In the end, they all did, including
Maryna and Nataliia.
Maryna is a tall, stylish woman who had been a
manicurist. After a friend of hers worked as a sur-
rogate, Maryna started considering the possibility.
Ukrainian law required that women who would
be hired as surrogates had already successfully
given birth, and she had two healthy daughters.
By helping another family, she hoped to buy a
home, a goal that would otherwise have been a
signifi cant stretch for her and her husband, who
worked on cars. On Aug. 21, she was impregnatedON FEB. , IN THE EARLY HOURS OF A COLD, DARK MORNING IN LVIV, TWO PHONES IN ONE