Mr Gurskyy and his wife Viktoria, who became Australian citizens in 2015 in Orange, have parents and close family living in a small village south of Ukraine capital Kyiv who are now grappling with war unfolding around them.

In constant contact with friends and family, Mr Gurskyy said he and his wife heard from his mother-in-law on February 24 while she was visiting Odessa.

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"I started getting messages from friends: this is what is happening," he said referring to the Russian incursion on February 24.

"We got a message from my mother-in-law, she said 'oh I just woke up, I thought is was the thunder'. We told her move out," he said, explaining she quickly boarded a train back to her home village where she is now spending the nights in her basement.

"No one knew what to do.

"They knew about shelters but until the last moment, no one expected that this would go totally crazy. They didn't expect rockets hitting civic streets and civil buildings."

While his mother-in-law and his own elderly parents have chosen to stay in their homes, his sister-in-law and her teenage daughter fled to Romania in the hope of travelling to friends in the Netherlands to wait out the conflict.

Contact with his father-in-law is limited as he is now part of Ukraine's Territorial Defence, or boys on the ground, which Mr Gurskyy says is similar to Australia's Army Reserve.

Mr Gurskyy's phone is constantly pinging and he said the anger is growing, with the Ukrainian people taking action like removing or changing street signs and cutting trees down to hamper the Russian forces' progress. But it worries him.

"It's up to the point where like I can see so much resistance, there is not even a simple doubt of what people wanted to do," he said.

"They didn't want anything to do with Putin.

"He should not have invaded Ukraine.

"They're going to resist or they're going to die. It's their land. [My mother-in-law says, `no [to the offer to come here on a holiday visa], I'm not going anywhere until this madness is over'," he said.

"'This is like ... we have grandma and grandpa in graves here' ..."

He said despite what Putin has said, there has never been a problem having both Russian and Ukraine being spoken in his home country. Mr Gurskyy said he has no doubt that the Ukrainian people will maintain their autonomy. "For the democracy," he said.