A Texas resident is caught in the crisis in Ukraine.
Walter Urban, 66, recently moved from North Texas to Dnipro, Ukraine, located in the central part of the country.
Despite Russian troops making slow progress towards the city, Urban said he and his wife Larisa have no plans to leave.
“It could be any day. I suspect it will be within a week or two that they will get to this city,” Urban said.
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NBC 5 spoke with Urban from their apartment in Dnipro, which he said they had built over a year’s time.
“Only to abandon it six months after we moved in or eight months after we moved in?” Urban said. “We'll take our chances and protect our, you know, our assets here.”
The couple moved to Dnipro last summer from Arlington, where they lived since 2016.
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Their son is now a student at UT Austin and three of Urban's four daughters live in Texas.
“They're worried, very worried about us being here, but we told them we're not leaving," he said.
Between 2011 and 2014, the couple lived in Donetsk, Ukraine, which is Larisa’s hometown.
They left during the Russian invasion in 2014, relocating about three hours west in Dnipro.
Two years later, when conditions in Donetsk didn’t improve, Urban said he and Larisa decided to move to Arlington where their son would have access to better education.
Now, back in Dnipro for less than a year, in a ’brand new’ apartment, Urban said they have no intention of leaving.
“We're not going to do that again,” he said. “We love it here and it's too late now to leave. So, there's no way to get out. It's not practical at all.”
Inside their apartment, they've stocked up on drinking water and food, filled buckets with water to flush and wash with -- just in case -- and packed bags with money, documents, and medication.
“We have a parking garage in the basement of our building which is underground, so we know where we'll go we have already set up chairs down there, water,” Urban said. “So we prepared, but when the actual combat activities come here, who knows what will happen?”
