"No one is safe; it has impacted everyone - everyone is struggling," she added. "Men and women, but especially women and children."

The graduate nurse was just 23 years old, but spoke with the clarity and implacable calmness of a person three times her age.

She told me her home - which, for much of her life, had teemed with the promise of democracy and equality - was these days cradled in pathos and despair. Fear had superseded her sense of independence, and the spectre of death now shadowed her every move.

Though hundreds of thousands of people had tried to flee the conflict, most had instead found themselves caged in a purgatory limbo.

"Our life here is like prison," she told me, her eyes wide with that same weariness often seen in returned veterans. "And we are all afraid."

The UN estimates more than one million displaced people have fled Ukraine over the past week, streaming into those countries that flank the eastern edge of the European Union.

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But unlike Latifa and her fellow Afghan people - who were thrown to the terrifying whims of the Taliban after the fall of Kabul last year - those fleeing Ukraine have been welcomed with open arms into countries which, prior to the Russian invasion, had previously resisted refugees with policies not so dissimilar to Australia.

Earlier last week, some within the overseas media attempted to identify, if not sympathise with, the motivating rationale for the shift in approach to refugees.

"This is a relatively civilised, relatively European...city," one CBS News correspondent said of Kyiv, adding that he'd chosen those words "carefully". Perhaps less subtly, a correspondent from NBC News told his audience that "these are not refugees from Syria...these are Christians, they are white."

Though the comments were met with a swift backlash, the notion that race and religion underpinned the different treatment of Ukrainians found support in reports of non-white refugees from Ukraine struggling to cross the border into neighbouring countries, not to mention the rhetoric of a number of anti-migration European leaders.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a range of organisations - including the conservative Australian Christian Lobby - levelled criticism at Prime Minister Scott Morrison for saying those who were fleeing Ukraine would be prioritised and placed at "the top of the pile".

Kon Karapanagiotidis, founder and chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the comments exposed the "cancerous racism" which gives expression to Australia's refugee and humanitarian program.

"War does not pick and choose its victims and nor should we pit vulnerable groups against each other," he said. "And to hear the prime minister say, 'we have plenty of room' all the while some people in Australia - who have been accepted as refugees - enter their tenth year in detention, is just staggering.

"The implicit message is that Australia has plenty of capacity for refugees, so long as you're not brown, black or Muslim."

Others, too, have noted the deliberate dismantling of Australia's humanitarian and refugee program had rendered it superficially ill-equipped to meet the twin humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

"The generosity of Australia's response to both [crises] has been limited by the Australian government's refusal, so far, to offer additional humanitarian visas and to restore the cuts that have happened during the life of this parliament," Paul Power, chief executive of the Refugee Council of Australia, said.

"If the government thinks that a refugee policy that is tough on people seeking asylum and not generous towards people seeking resettlement in Australia is a vote winner, then they're misreading the public mood in much of the country," he added.

Australia's refugee and humanitarian program currently provides for 13,750 places per year, down on the 20,000 places offered prior to 2014, creating what Mr Karapanagiotidis described as an "artificial scarcity".

"At a time when we have record numbers of people globally in need of protection, last year it was lowest it'd been in fifty years - fewer than 5000 places were offered," he said.

Mr Power, likewise, described the pressure for places in the refugee and humanitarian program as "overwhelming", particularly for Afghan refugees, who were promised only 10,000 places over the course of four years in response to the fall of Kabul.

As of February, 6000 of those 10,000 places had already been taken, leaving the over 150,000 Afghans who had applied for humanitarian visas in Australia in recent months to compete for the remaining 4000. And none of those places, contrary to the federal government's claim, were in addition to the existing annual quota of 13,750 places.

"I would not say I feel betrayed [by the Australian government]," Ballarat-based Afghan refugee Abdul Rasuli, 22, quietly said, when I asked him for his views on Australia's response to the fall of Kabul.

"Even if you save one life, it's good, you know.

"But of course," he added, his voice braided with caution, "Australian forces were supported by nearly a million people in the Uruzgan province, so 10,000 people is .... not enough, you know."

Under the restored Islamic Emirate, he told me, the Taliban had unleashed a chilling campaign of reprisals against those who had worked as informants, interpreters or contractors for allied forces, including Australian troops.

And in provinces that had supported the western occupation, the homes of all had been raided for weapons and supplies, leaving those people defenceless. Executions by local gunmen, in these communities, were no longer considered extraordinary but ordinary, and many women - confined to the home - lived in fear of the consequences of having received an education.

The result, Rasuli said, was a belief death at the hands of the Taliban was a foregone conclusion if they stayed.

"With winter finishing, everybody fears more conflict and is desperate to leave," he said. "That is the real fear; that's why people [are] trying to leave now."

But since the war in Ukraine a new fear, he said, had blanketed the people of Afghanistan: a fear that they'll be forgotten.

"It's really important to focus on Ukraine because we understand they're in struggle, because we've been through this and the world has to help them," Rasuli told me, alluding to the 20-year occupation by allied forces, which was preceded by the Taliban regime in the 1990s and the Russians again before them.

"But in Afghanistan there is much needed to be done, too; we're in a similar position to Ukraine, only we have no resistance because everything is under the control of the Taliban - everything is now the Taliban way of life."

It was a sentiment shared by Latifa, who told me despair was engulfing the Afghan people and erasing all hope. Millions, she said, were falling victim to the famine created by food and fuel shortages across the war-ravaged country, the freezing of international aid and the force of international sanctions, which included US$7bn in Afghan assets unlawfully seized by the US government.

However one might view the situation, Afghanistan was on its knees, crying out for help.

"We really understand how it feels to be in Ukraine and we wish we could help them," Latifa told me. "But we can't do anything."

"The crisis here is as bad as Ukraine - it is much bigger than the people see from the west.

"We're losing our hopes."

*Not her real name.