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Today we hear from those who navigated the precarious escape from Mario Paul and what they left behind.

In Berlin, residents are grappling with a seismic shift in defence policy with one eye on the past.

We're in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where protesters are being met with a brutal crackdown.

And we're in Canada, where a mass of sunflowers will soon bloom after Ukrainians there planted seeds to show solidarity with their old country.

First peace talks in Turkey, and yet the pounding of civilian infrastructure by Russian forces has continued this week in cities like Mikolayev, Khacheev and Mario Paul.

Russia had since last Friday been signalling a change in strategy, saying it would reduce its military activity in the north and focus more on Ukraine's eastern Donbass region.

Yet attacks continue across the country.

And as reports emerge that members of the negotiating team in talks earlier this month, including Russian oligarch Romanovich, had been poisoned, there's been little cause for optimism or trust.

Oligarin contrasts the situation today with that of an earlier visit to the country when she started out as a reporter.

Please come back.

As we step out of our hotel every morning into the sunlit uncertainty of Kiev, we depart with this plea from our dormant.

Taras is Cartias gently spoken and proud of his heritage as a Kossak. These sword-wielding warriors contrast their history back to the 15th century.

He's proud too of modern democratic Ukraine.

On his sleeve there are armbands made from sticky tape in blue and yellow, the colors of the flag.

He was missing one day recently, giving blood for the wounded.

Each of us must do what we can for our motherland, he told me.

Taras worries about his guests, but the worst of the war has been elsewhere. Kiev has suffered occasional missile strikes rather than round the clock shelling.

In Vladimir Putin's playbook that amounts to a light touch.

This isn't my first visit to Ukraine. I was here over 30 years ago when the past truly was another country. It was called the Soviet Union.

In July of 1990 I went to Moscow for the 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR.

The party's grey upper ratchets delivered endless monologues in front of a towering image of Lenin, but the Soviet Empire was already crumbling around them.

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