One man from Greensboro, North Carolina, wondered the same when news broke of Russia moving their blood supply to the Ukrainian border in late January.

Billy White said that after hearing the news he immediately reached out to his 18-year-old stepdaughter in Ternopil, Ukraine.

The current figures estimate that more than 2.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country since the Russian invasion began on February 24, according to the United Nations. White said his stepdaughter, Sofia, and her grandmother were some of the first thousand people to successfully escape.

White told Newsweek that Sofia moved back to Ukraine to live with her grandparents after spending a few years at school in North Carolina. He said the two see each other every summer and keep in contact via Facebook messenger.

In January, White started asking Sofia if she would consider coming back to North Carolina but said she replied that she was not worried about an invasion.

“I said, I think you ought to come back,” White told Newsweek. “Then once the invasion happened, she’s like ‘get me out of here.’”

He recounted receiving videos from Sofia who sat on her porch in Ternopil and filmed the Russian missile attack lighting up the sky.

“There’s one video, it’s nighttime, she’s on her porch and the air raid sirens are going off,” White said. “That was day two, and I’m like, you’re getting out of there.”

White said that on the third day of the invasion, February 27, he arranged for one of Sofia’s cousins to drive her and her grandmother to Poland, but the arrangements fell through.

“The next day, she was able to catch a bus, she and her grandmother,” White said. “It took them like 36 hours to get over the border. Just madness, and it’s worse now because there are more refugees now.”

Sofia and her grandmother left on the bus for the Polish border on March 2 and were some of the first people to successfully escape the country. Once they arrived, White said he arranged for them to stay at a hotel in Warsaw.

While Sofia has her Green Card and would technically be able to come to the United States to stay with White, her grandmother must wait until she can receive a visa. He said he was able to arrange an appointment with the embassy for April 19 and Sofia is waiting with her grandmother.

“The first days when she got on that bus her phone died and we couldn’t stay in contact, that was harrowing,” White said. “They had to take an alternate path because of Russian troops, I mean it’s like a movie!”

White recalled his first time flying into the airport in Lviv five years ago.

“When I first landed there were concrete walls all around the airport and as soon as we touched down, I look out the window, I’m like ‘wow, that’s the ghost of Russian oppression,’” White said. “Here it is five years later and it’s back and Lviv Airport has been bombed.”

Now that White knows his family is safely out of Ukraine, he said he hopes more Americans will step up to the plate and help out in any way they can.

“We need to pressure our politicians to be more open to Ukrainian refugees,” White said. “Because some Ukrainians went to Mexico and then they were denied access to the United States through Mexico, I don’t understand that.”

White said he hopes his story about his stepdaughter will bring awareness to how Americans can do their part in supporting Ukrainian refugees.

Currently, more than 1,720,227 refugees have entered Poland, 255,000 entered Hungary, 204,000 entered Slovakia. An estimated 626,000 additional refugees have entered other European countries including Romania, Moldova, and Belarus.

“If you notice in the news, there’s not been any welcoming of any Ukrainian refugees in the United States,” White said. “I don’t think any are here yet, which to me is pathetic. We’re in week three!”

Most refugees entering these countries face more than 24-hour long lines with many waiting without food or water.

“Krakow and Warsaw are starting to swell at the seams now,” White said. “So people who’ve been there need to get out. Open the beds up for people just now coming in and relieve the pressure, and it’s not happening.”

He said his plan is to get Sofia and her grandmother out of Poland so another family can have their hotel room. Once here, he said Sofia will enroll in school in North Carolina.

“We just gotta get them here, everybody can decompress, and then we’ll figure all that out,” White said.