Peta Murgatroyd's heart is with the children of Ukraine.
On March 16, the Dancing With the Stars pro shared a video of the devastation Ukrainian families have experienced amid Russia's attacks on their homeland.
"A catastrophe," the New Zealand-born star wrote on Instagram along with a broken heart emoji. "I want to bring all the children to my home. I want all of them. I wish I could. I wish the sky could close. I wish I could take away the parents pain. This is continually breaking my heart. It's unfathomable…."
The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine reported on March 17 that 108 children have been killed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24. On March 15, the United Nations said that 1.5 million children have fled the country.
"Every day, over the past 20 days, in Ukraine more than 70,000 children have become refugees," James Elder, spokesperson for the UN Children's Fund, said. "That's every minute, 55 children fleeing the country."
In a video shared to Instagram Stories, Murgatroyd expressed how hard the news is hitting her. "This is continually breaking my heart," she said through tears. "Like, I'm struggling to get through some days. Sometimes I have great days, other days I have terrible days because I just can't get this out of my head. I've walked those streets. I've been there. It is such a beautiful country. And the children that are dying right now, just watch that video that I posted."
She and her husband, fellow Dancing With the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy, are continuing to keep the people of Ukraine in their thoughts.
"And believe me, just because my husband is home—he's home for now—does not mean that we aren't continuing to do stuff to help and we aren't continually thinking about what is going on there every single day," Murgatroyd added. "Please be aware of that."
Chmerkovskiy, who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine with his family in the 1990s, had returned to the Eastern European country to film the Ukrainian World of Dance series and serve as a judge. After the Russian invasion began, he shared updates from Ukraine on social media. On March 2, Chmerkovskiy safely returned to the U.S.
"I never thought our family would be directly affected by this in our lifetime," Murgatroyd wrote in a March 5 Instagram post alongside a photo of their reunion, "I never thought what we are seeing on our TV's was a reality in 2022."
Days later, Chmerkovskiy told Anderson Cooper he planned to return to help. "I've spent couple last days with survivor's remorse...and currently working on an opportunity to go back," he said on CNN. "And so, probably sometime next week, I'm going to go back to Poland and joining efforts on the ground and sort of, like, want to justify my safe out that way."