Actress Angelina Jolie surprised Ukrainians after turning up to a cafe in Lviv on Saturday.
Jolie, 46, drew attention as she appeared wearing nondescript clothing at the cafe, with Maya Pidhorodetska posting a video of the famous actress and filmmaker on Facebook.
‘Nothing special. Just Lviv. I just went to have coffee. Just Angelina Jolie,’ she wrote in Ukrainian after filming the actress, who waved to her from the counter. ‘Ukraine is simply supported by the whole world.’
Fans spotted her in the Ukrainian city, greeting Jolie as Russian forces gathered in the east of the country for a renewed assault.
Footage shows her singing autographs for her fans in Ukraine.
Jolie is not the first American celebrity to land in Ukraine during the conflict.
American actor Sean Penn was met with the country’s president and attending government press briefings as part of a VICE documentary he is filming.
When Kyiv was under assault, Penn and his team walked miles to the Polish border.
The actor, 61, said both he and his film crew decided to abandon their car and pursue on foot after seeing the thousands of Ukrainian residents fleeing for safety, with queues stretching for miles.
Penn described how cars were filled with women and children, with their only possession of value being the vehicle they were travelling in.
The documentary is a VICE Studios production, ‘in association with VICE World News and Endeavor Content,’ according to a spokesman for the media group.
In a translated Facebook post, the Ukrainian government said it was grateful for Sean being there and he was lauded as being more courageous than Western leaders.
Although the majority of the fighting has shifted to the east of the country, Ukrainian cities in the West such as Lviv are still under bombardment from Russian missile attacks.
On Saturday, Ukrainian officials said the bodies of more than 1,000 civilians have been retrieved from areas around Kyiv, and they are working with French investigators to document alleged war crimes.
Forensic tests carried out on civilian corpses dumped in mass graves show women were raped before being brutally killed, it was revealed on Monday.
Dozens of autopsies have been carried out on mutilated corpses from Bucha, Irpin and Borodianka, with many showing signs of torture and multiple bullet holes in the back.
One coroner north of Kyiv said it is difficult to find signs of rape and sexual abuse because the bodies ‘are in such bad shape’.
A United Nations mission to Bucha documented ‘the unlawful killing, including by summary execution, of some 50 civilians there’, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
In the same town, 25 women aged 14 to 25 were kept in a basement and systematically raped, with nine of the women becoming pregnant in a case now recorded by human rights commissioner Lyudmila Denisova.