As a police officer helped her don child-size body armor and an orange helmet, Margaryta Karpova, 12 years old, stood quiet amid the roars and shock waves of heavy shelling. Russian forces had reached less than a mile from her mostly abandoned village in eastern Ukraine.

She held back tears, preparing to leave her home, her tiny village, Novoolenivka, and her father, who stayed to watch over the house. In that moment last fall, the goodbye with him felt terrifyingly final. She and her mother, Liudmyla Karpova, dashed to an armored car and joined more than a million civilians who have fled Ukraine’s Donetsk region since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

But relocation brought them no relief. After they reached temporary housing in western Ukraine, Margaryta began to complain of pain. Doctors soon found she had cancer, a rare and aggressive form called rhabdomyosarcoma that mostly affects children. Now, in Kyiv, the capital, she fights a second, more personal war, against a disease that is consuming her body as the war continues to consume her country.

“As I tell everyone, life has stopped,” her mother said. “The only thing that matters now is saving my child’s life.”

They were able to reunite with Margaryta’s father, and Kyiv offers the care she needs, despite the destruction last July of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and pediatric cancer center, in the heart of the city, by a Russian missile.