“Panic, tears, shock!” is how Natalia Miroshnikova sums it up. She was on her first foreign trip – a week in Sharm el-Sheikh with her husband and son – but when they tried to leave early on 24 February, there was no sign of their charter flight.

She found out that war had started from a message sent by her son’s school.

“To say we were shocked is an understatement. We’re in a foreign country and all our relatives, acquaintances, in fact our entire lives, remained at home in Ukraine,” she tells me.

Another stranded Ukrainian holidaymaker, Julia - a mother of nine-year-old twins - staying in Hurghada, was forced to tell her children the news.

“I was crying all the time for the first few days and could not hide my feelings,” she admits. “My husband is in Kyiv, and it is very worrying.”

Ukrainians can now choose to stay in their hotels for an extended period at a cheap rate or be moved to three-star accommodation paid for by the Egyptian government.

Russians have previously made up the biggest numbers of tourists in Egypt – with Ukrainians not far behind. Hotels are now being advised to try to keep the two nationalities apart.