On the day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Svetlana found it hard to believe that what she was watching on the news was really happening. Things were calm in her home town, Bila Tserkva, a historic city on a winding river 80km (50 miles) south of Kyiv. Then the explosions began. Svetlana and her husband dragged their mattresses into the corridor of their apartment building and huddled there with their three children. The noise of the sirens was constant and they didn't sleep for days. Thousands of miles away in Australia, Emma Micallif was frantically messaging. The two women are intimately connected because Svetlana is pregnant with Emma's second child. As rockets fell on Bila Tserkva Emma felt angry and helpless. For six months the two mums had chatted back and forth using a translation app. They shared pictures of their children, discussed the things they liked to bake with their kids or moaned about the stress of pandemic home-schooling. Now they were trying to co-ordinate an evacuation. "I thought having cancer was stressful or having a baby while having treatment was stressful or having round after round of IVF and it not working was stressful," Emma says. "But it just does not compare." With the help of the surrogacy agency, Emma got in touch with two other parents who had surrogates in Ukraine. They found a bus that would take the three women and their 10 children on an 18-hour trip to the Moldovan border. When they finally got to the Moldovan capital they were crammed into a small apartment. Emma was horrified when she heard that there weren't enough beds. "Our lovely, pregnant Svetlana was sleeping on the floor," she says. But Svetlana was too devastated to care. She had left her husband behind in Ukraine and her mother had fled to Germany. When her mother calls she just cries down the phone. "It hurts so much that this war is tearing families apart," she told me. "I feel safe in Moldova but my heart is in Ukraine." Short presentational grey lineMore than 2,000 children are born through surrogacy every year in Ukraine, the majority to foreign couples. The country has around 50 reproductive clinics and many agencies and middle-men who match couples - known as "intended parents" - to surrogates. Ukraine is a popular choice because of the way its laws on surrogacy are written. In many European countries, including the UK, when a surrogate gives birth she is listed as the mother on the birth certificate. If she is married, her husband will be listed as the father. In Ukraine the intended parents are listed as mother and father. That means getting the baby a passport and bringing them home is much simpler. The agency that Emma and Svetlana are using is small - it is currently managing nine surrogacies - but Ukraine's biggest agency currently has 500 surrogates at different stages of pregnancy. Forty-one babies in its care are stranded in Kyiv, because their intended parents, from all over the world, have been prevented from collecting them by the war. Many of these children are being cared for in a basement nursery in Kyiv as Russian forces sit outside the city and shell it. Every day more children are born, but since the invasion only nine sets of parents have risked the journey to Kyiv to pick up their babies. Another five have arranged remote pick-ups. "If nothing changes in the near future, we may have 100 babies under our care," says Denys Herman, the agency's legal adviser. The company has been grappling with whether to move the babies out of Kyiv to a safer location in western Ukraine, but transporting them in a war zone also carries risks. It's not just Denys Herman who has a problem with stranded babies.Nastya was saving up to buy a house in Kharkiv, where she lives with her two young boys, and coming to the end of her second surrogate pregnancy. When the war broke out she was only weeks from her due date and went into labour to give birth to twins a few days later. "We spent the entire time in the hospital in a bomb shelter," she says. Kharkiv was under heavy bombardment and the hospital's basement was packed from wall to wall with mattresses and baby cribs. She camped out in a storage room with her two children, sleeping on sofa cushions on the floor, underneath shelves piled high with files and paperwork. "But the doctors were wonderful, I am very grateful to them," she says. She gave birth to two healthy boys.A week later she left the hospital. Kharkiv was still under attack and the foreign parents couldn't get there to collect the twins. So, together with some staff from her agency, Nastya, her two sons and the new-born twins travelled across Ukraine. She cared for the babies while delivering them to their parents at the border. That was more than a week ago, and she hasn't heard from them since.