Ohe evening before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Alimov Rustam was in Odessa, across the border from his home country of Moldova, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. When his wife woke up to the sound of distant explosions, Rustam tried to reassure her that everything was fine. He soon found out not.

The next day, the couple left for Moldova to find a line of cars already queuing at the border as they approached.

Rustam used to travel to Ukraine for his work as a kickboxing trainer. When he learned of the scale of the Russian attack, he knew he had to mobilize quickly. Using Viber, a messaging app, he started inviting Ukrainian friends from the kickboxing community to come to Moldova, where he would organize their stay.

Julia Moisieva and her friend Narine, whose husband is also a kickboxing coach, answered this call. They put their children in the car and drove to the border, which is usually a short distance from Odessa. Twenty-eight hours later, they arrived in Moldova.

For Moisieva’s seven-year-old son Tymor, the Garuda kickboxing gym in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, was a sweet place to land. There, he has a routine that resembles his in Ukraine, and playmates in the neighborhood that is now his temporary home.

At a second Garuda gymnasium in Trușeni, a village outside the capital, another couple of Ukrainian children have found refuge in kickboxing. Anna Miroshnichenko and Natalie Munteanu were college classmates in Ukraine before Munteanu moved to Moldova with her husband. When war broke out in Ukraine, she invited her former classmate to come and stay with her in Trușeni.

Miroshnichenko, together with her best friend from Odessa, Elena Tkach, soon arrived with their daughters, and a four-person house became 10.

Munteanu’s daughter, Ioana, had started kickboxing a few months before, and when the gym’s trainer said Ukrainian children could train for free, she invited her new guests to join her.

The girls quickly got into sports. “I used to do cheerleading in Ukraine, and I never imagined that I would go to kickboxing,” says 10-year-old Anastasia Miroshnichenko.

When Ioana started kickboxing, she said other parents in her village didn’t agree. “They said it’s not a place for girls,” says Munteanu. Today, kickboxing has become a cherished pastime for the three girls and a distraction for Ksenia and Anastasia, who came from Ukraine. Their trainer translates the class instructions from Romanian to Russian so they can understand.

Munteanu says it was difficult at first to merge three families, but now they live as one unit, sharing news and crying together when things get particularly tough. “It looks like we’re already a team,” she says.

Mothers from Ukraine, who came to Moldova without their husbands, say the sport provides an outlet for their daughters during a chaotic time. “Thanks to kickboxing, they don’t think about the fact that they’re in a foreign country,” Tkach says. “They’re focused on new emotions, new feelings, so we’re grateful for that.”

Rustam says coaches at the kickboxing gym are used to working with kids from difficult circumstances, as they often work with young people from at-risk communities. He explained the situation of the newcomers to their other students, who quickly accepted them into the group. Rustam says the new students were recognizable only by their uniforms – yellow and blue, like the Ukrainian flag.

Colleagues across the border have started giving lessons again in some towns but say it’s not the same anymore because so many of the kids who trained with them have left the country.

Moisieva says her children often cried at first, begging to come home. But they calmed down over time as they settled into a rhythm in Chișinău. “Every day it became easier to accept this situation,” she says.

Tymor visits the kickboxing gym three times a week, where he practices techniques such as splits, back bridges and push-ups, as well as sparring.

Trușeni girls say they also learn to defend themselves, which they consider an important skill for women.

Ten-year-old Ksenia says the friendliness of her Moldovan coaches made her want to keep fighting. “We would like to continue doing this kind of sport, thanks to the coaches.”