Fleeing Ukraine: How The War Tore Ukrainians Away From Their Home and Identities
Ukrainians on the first weeks of fleeing war in Ukraine and re-settling in Europe
Bilingual chatter fills the office as people huddle together over cardboard boxes full of pizza and cake. While 23 February is no longer upheld as the national day for men, the old Soviet holiday lives on through the generations who grew up during the time when Ukraine was part of the USSR from the late 20s to the early 90s.
Tatiana Yakusheva, 46, born in the Soviet Union on the territory of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk, a city south west of Kyiv, was part of that generation, so it was natural that she celebrated the men who surrounded her every day with a piece of cake and meaningless office gossip.
“It was an ordinary workday. Some of the girls decided to get together and celebrate with the team,” said Tatiana. “We agreed to do it again on 8 March for Women’s Day too, and we were really looking forward to it.”
Just an hour away, Larissa Neberikutina, 50, born in Russia but moved to Ukraine when she was 5 years old, was finishing up a day of work at one of her many stores across the city’s malls and streets. A softly-spoken and balanced individual, she owns an Italian boutique franchise and is very well travelled. It was the start of the Spring/Summer 2022 season, and they had just received the latest stock. She was excited to get it out onto the shelves the next day.
Meanwhile, Olha Sakho, 36, and her son, 8, were at home in their new apartment across town. Olha had bought the apartment last autumn, a beautiful 3-bed in the centre of Kyiv. She had just warmed to making her new apartment a home and was saving money to start a renovation. Olha spent a few years away in Odessa, but she loved Kyiv and eventually moved back as she couldn’t imagine herself living elsewhere, despite having distant roots from Russia and Belarus.
“It was good for me [in Kyiv]. I know everything there. My whole life is there,” she said. “I was excited to renovate [the apartment] and live there. But now? Now, I don’t understand why I even need it.”
Many Ukrainians are now in the same position as Olha, questioning what will be left of their homes when they return after the war.
Migrating to Europe
In the early morning hours, beds, windows and walls began to shake in their frames, awakening millions of Ukrainians to what would be the longest month of their lives. Sirens, bombs, a nightmare — people had their alarm clocks set for work, but no one expected a wake-up call from their neighbours across the border.
Awake and confused, Tatiana cleared the sleep from her eyes as the walls around her continued to vibrate in waves. The wind had never shaken her apartment building like that before, but she couldn’t imagine what else it could be.
Eyes still blurry, she reached for the curtains covering her north-facing windows and watched as armed helicopters dropped bombs at a nearby airport. The smoke stood high above the ground, looming eerily close over the low-storey buildings outside her home.
Tatiana lived in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, when the first bombs fell on a military airport nearby in Hostomel on the morning of 24 February. The neighboring village, just 10 minutes away by car, had been one of the first army sites hit after Putin announced the beginning of his ‘special military operation’ to ‘denazify’ Ukraine.
The echoes from the explosions boomed through her building. She was paralysed with shock, unable to fathom the sight outside of her window. However, she was reluctant to leave because of the disbelief.
“I had this feeling that this cannot be our reality,” said Tatiana. “I felt as though I needed to wake myself up right this instant because what I saw couldn’t be real.”
Finally, accepting her friends’ offer to come to stay with them, Tatiana was one of the millions of Ukrainians packing their bags and relocating that morning, sure she would return home in no time.
An hour after she and her friends arrived in Irpin, a town 20 minutes away, Tatiana opened her news app to read that the crossing they had just passed to get to Irpin had been blown up. Tatiana had packed only two days’ worth of items for a trip that had turned into a much longer stay within the blink of an eye.
A study published by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) released in mid-March showed that 6.5 million people had been displaced in Ukraine due to Russia’s month-long invasion. This week’s latest figures show that over four million refugees have fled Ukraine. There are 44.1 million people in Ukraine. Now, 10 million of those people have had to flee their homes because of Russia’s war. The population of neighbouring Hungary is only 9.7 million people.
The UN refugee agency has warned that this could be the “largest refugee crisis this century” compared to the 1.3 million people fleeing to Europe from Syria and Iraq during the conflict in the Middle East in 2015.
Those fleeing Ukraine have been primarily women and children after the Ukrainian President, Mr Zelensky, called for martial law and banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country.
Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said in a press release earlier today: “The speed of the displacement, coupled with the huge numbers of people affected, is unprecedented in Europe in recent memory.”
Half of the refugees fleeing from Ukraine are children. UNICEF estimates that over 2.5 million children have been internally displaced in Ukraine.
Olha was one of the women fleeing to safety with her son after the invasion began. When the missiles and airstrikes hit Kyiv, Olha was reluctant to leave her home. She, like Tatiana, believed that the invasion would be over in a couple of days; they could wait it out. Their building was relatively new, so there was nowhere to take shelter. They packed their bags and ran down the road to her parents house, 10-minutes walking from their apartment, where they would hide together. Later, Olha, her son and her parents returned to her apartment building where they could take shelter in the cellar.
They didn’t go out much and didn’t sleep much either. They nestled into the warmest corners, layering themselves with everything they had brought. The fear and the cold became too much.
“I was shaking, shaking terribly,” she said. “I took two anti-anxiety pills, and I was still shaking. I drank half a litre of wine. I was shaking. I was just shaking, and I couldn’t stop.”
They spent two weeks in the basement until the sight of mold, the sounds of war and the sight of her son sleeping on the floor broke her.
“At one point, I just realised I have to get my son out of there,” she said. “It dawned on me that sleeping in a mouldy basement, for days on end, on the floor, just wasn’t a normal way to live.”
Olha packed their bags, wrote down the numbers of all her trusted contacts on a piece of paper and shoved it into the inner pockets of her son’s coat. She also copied the numbers onto both of his forearms with a felt tip. It was her insurance for his safety if she didn’t make it out alive.
Meanwhile, the attacks on Kyiv ensued. Olha had decided enough was enough on 6 March. Just a day before, a wide-spread video was circulating the internet showing a multi-storey building crumbling to pieces after a Russian shelling. The video was taken in Irpinia, the same town Tatiana was taking shelter in.
Over those ten days that Tatiana hid away, the Russian military had progressed significantly into Ukraine’s major cities, including the capital. They made frequent attacks on residential buildings, schools and hospitals.
Irpinia became one of the hottest spots for military actions in Ukraine. The day that Tatiana left for the Hungarian border, they had put the city on lockdown, and over 300 people died. Today Bucha is one of the hottest spots of fighting.
On 4 March, the UN reported that over a million people had fled Ukraine. The country’s military was evacuating civilians, and many had to travel by foot along shelled roads and damaged bridges. In a report, the Kyiv School of Economics calculated that the Russian army had destroyed over 4000 residences, 378 schools, and 138 health facilities. This included over 8000km of roads — an equivalent of the flying distance from London to Texas.
They said on their website: “Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.”
So when Irpin found itself on the frontline between Russian and Ukrainian forces, Tatiana grew more scared. The echoes of shootings and bombings continued to shake their apartment. While the shooting would last all day and often all night, she said, they were lucky to have breaks during which they could catch a few hours of sleep.
Then one day, there were no breaks.
“It was loud, and then it was quiet, and then it got loud again,” she recalled. “But that day, the shooting just didn’t stop, and we knew it was time for us to go.”
Tatiana and her friends understood that no breaks meant that the conflict in the area was escalating, and their window of opportunity to flee, and perhaps even stay alive, was rapidly closing — and there was nowhere underground to take shelter either.
“We were warned in Irpin not to take shelter in basements because there weren’t enough people to dig us up if a bomb fell on the ground above us,” said Tatiana. “The day we left, they blew up a railway station. Thankfully, we had cars.”
Within the first 24 hours, they drove about 100km and spent the night at a petrol station. On the second day, they stopped very close to Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, and spent another night at a petrol station, and then on the third day, after a day of driving, they finally reached Zakarpattia, a hotspot for displaced Ukrainians in the west of Ukraine because it is closest to European borders.
Unlike Tatiana and Olha, many were travelling from eastern-most parts of Ukraine, those most affected by the attacks. To ensure they would make it across the country alive, people sellotaped words like ‘children’ or ‘ill’ onto their cars so that if tanks or armed helicopters saw them, they would consider sparing them their lives.
“When we travelled by roads connecting to more severely impacted areas, we saw sellotaped signs on cars evacuating children,” said Olha. “It was a very crushing sight.”
Many Ukrainians headed to Zakarpattia in western Ukraine to seek safety — a tiny tail of Ukraine bordering Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. The invasion saw 2.3 million refugees flee to Poland, followed by over 360,000 to Hungary and over 280,000 to Slovakia, according to the latest UNHCR figures.
Those arriving at Uzhgorod, a town in Zakarpattia, were mainly women and children. All men were obligated to register at the military enlistment office within 24 hours of arrival in the town, said the head of the Zakarpattia Regional Military Administration to Ukrainian local media. This meant that the men fleeing were required to join local battalions or head back to their home to volunteer their time to help those who have been injured or cannot get the supplies they need.
That is how Larissa ended up leaving her husband behind in Ukraine to seek safety and her husband separated at the border crossing to Hungary.
Larissa and her family, including her husband, fled Kyiv when the invasion started. They had headed straight to Rivne, a four-hour drive west of Kyiv, for five days to find shelter. However, they decided that Larissa and their daughter would leave Ukraine once they realised the severity of the conflict. Since they had read that men would be forced to enlist upon arrival in Uzhgorod, they knew that the most her husband could do was drive her to the border to say goodbye. The night before they left for western Ukraine they, along with their friends in Rivne, had a final farewell dinner. They shared fond memories and cried unsure when they would see each other next, then they went to bed and set off for the Hungarian border. After her husband drove them to the border, he remained in Ukraine and joined the Territorial Defence Forces in Kyiv.
Larissa and her daughter, 13, and their cat spent six hours at the Hungarian border. She had forgotten her car’s tech-passport back in Kyiv and only remembered about it at the border. The officers didn’t question anything. They didn’t even ask for her Covid-19 passports.
“We were exhausted and tired,” she said. “So we were lucky and thankful that the crossing was easy, despite waiting for 6 hours, and our journey onwards was even more heart-warming as everyone greeted us with open arms.”
They travelled through Hungary, Austria, Italy by car and finally arrived in Ireland after X days.
“When I was filling out the form to enter Dublin, I was so humiliated to write that I was born in Russia,” said Larissa. “I simply don’t want to be involved with them, at all, just… entirely.”
Larissa was born in Russia, but she identifies as a Ukrainian and married a Ukrainian. She has extended family in Russia and friends whom she speaks with.
Her friends had made an effort to distance themselves from Russian culture since Putin has been in power. They sent their children away to study abroad, and maintained distant relations with acquaintance in support of the government in power. They found a common language in the things they shared as Russians and Ukrainians — holidays, memories, and traditions. Larissa felt that she could keep in contact with them because they are ‘adequate’ with a ‘sober outlook’ on what is truly going on in Russia, she said. She tried to protect them by not speaking too much of the war since she knew they could get arrested and punished for even texting the words ‘war’. They, too, avoided speaking of it. Some even blocked her online in fear that someone would find out they spoke to Ukrainians about the unfolding war.
However, when filling out that form, thinking about her journey to Ireland and mourning the death of her old life, she couldn’t help but feel rage towards her friend, she recalls.
She remembered when the 2014 war started in Donbas and Luhansk areas. There was bloodshed, she said, and back then, no one took notice of the war, and while people spoke about it and events were being broadcast every day, not many were raising awareness beyond borders. Awareness which could have been meaningful to a population who had grown immune to the daily reports of war in their home country.
“I was angry and upset that their inaction created this whole situation,” she said. “We had a similar situation in Ukraine many times. We had one revolution. We had a second revolution. We put in a lot of effort for this, but they didn’t try for their democracy.”
She recalled her trips to Maidan, a pro-European uprising in 2014. In the late months of 2014, Larissa, along with most Ukrainians, took to the streets in a peaceful protest after ex-president Yanuckovich chose not to sign an agreement which would bridge relations between Ukraine and the EU. The protests were a denouncement of the post-Soviet way of life and governing, away from endemic corruption towards a European way of life. Larissa and her family donated their time and resources to the cause, as did many others. She sighed her frustration closed with this: I can feel that we did everything we could for our country. She nods in agreement that perhaps her friends didn’t try as hard as they could have before it was too late.
Now she lives 3000km away from her home and husband, while her friend reads every text message twice before sending it in fear of being arrested for something as primal as a simple opinion.
The consequences on an entangled culture
It isn’t unusual for neighbouring countries to have tense relations. Like roommates living in the same flat for a year too long — some milk will be spilt. The real problems start when your roommate starts teaching you how to live, and one day, you come home to find they have moved their belongings into your room without your permission. This is the situation Ukraine ended up in, but at a much larger scale and over many generations.
I, myself, am from one.
Mostly Ukrainian, with a splash of Russian blood, I was born in Kyiv and raised in a Russian-speaking household abroad. The primary school in Kyiv I attended taught Russian in second grade as a mandatory language. I lived in Ukraine and made Russian-speaking friends, unknowingly speaking Ukrainian words to them when I thought it was all the same in Russian. I grew up identifying Russian culture as Ukrainian, later bonding with Russians at university in the UK over shared national pop icons.
When people asked me where I’m from, if it was from Russia, I would rarely correct them because it felt so inconsequential. Speaking with these women I understand now that while once that was perhaps okay to do, now attitudes are changing and after all, it does carry consequences.
According to a 2004 public opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Russian is used in Ukrainian homes by 46% of the population, and Russophones — people who speak Russian –make up a majority of the people in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine. When you Google how many Ukrainian speaking Russians there are in territorial Russia, nothing comes up in the first pages of Google.
Tensions rose between the two nations when Russia came in for a bite of Ukraine’s land. And through a slow-burning war, many people remained neutral about what was going on until their homes were destroyed.
Tatiana wishes she had paid more attention to the slow build-up to this war and calls herself ignorant for not paying attention before. Through trailing sentences and a suddenly lowered tone she tells me about how she should have raised awareness. The regret is audible and heartbreaking.
Although Tatiana is Ukrainian, she had spent a few years living in Cyprus, where her son and his father still live Cyprus is a mecca for Eastern European tourism, and Russians make up 6% of the 800,000 population.
“I chose not to go to Cyprus to stay with my son because I couldn’t do it,” said Tatiana. “I couldn’t be surrounded by so many Russians right now. I just can’t do it.”
Instead of returning to the familiar place to her son, she now resides in Switzerland with her friends, where she is trying to learn German and settle into a new culture. She feels much more at peace than she would have returning to Cyprus right now. She would consider returning to western Ukraine before she would think of going to Cyprus if things in Switzerland don’t work out, she said.
This hardening attitude is the result of many years of betrayal from Russia. In an April 2017 public opinion survey conducted by Rating Group Ukraine, 57% of Ukrainians expressed a cold attitude toward Russia, as opposed to only 17% who expressed a very warm or warm attitude.
“I never segregated people into Ukrainians and Russians, or whoever. I’ve never approached my relationships with people based on their nationality,” she said. “Now, I don’t want to see any Russians in my circles. And I won’t speak to any Russians anymore.”
About 72% of Dnipropetrovsk, Tatiana’s home town, speaks Russian and even though she grew up in the Soviet Union, and like me, in a Russian-speaking household, she wants to stop speaking Russian. She said: “I am more used to speaking it, but I don’t want to be associated with them any longer.”
Tatiana believes that there could have been more done to prevent the conflict. Many Ukrainians wish that Russians had believed more in the power of voting, and others like Larissa hold resentment towards those who refused to look even after the war in eastern Ukraine began in 2014.
Data suggests that around 50% of Russians turn out to vote for their president. And while their fairness of elections is at a 0.3 out of 1.0, most Ukrainians with friends and relatives in Russia believe that their turn out at elections and protests could have made a difference in changing the leadership in Moscow. Almost everyone, out of the 10 people I spoke to for this piece, believed that the current war in Ukraine could have been prevented had Russians read foreign news outlets and been more politically active over the past decade.
“I understand that they didn’t directly do anything, but I suppose that is the point — the silence itself. An ‘Oh, this is awful’ text isn’t a reaction. It’s not a reaction of an adult person who truly believes that their country is wrongfully killing innocent civilians of another nation. To say that you’re just sorry is not the feeling that you should be experiencing after hearing about suffering at this scale.”
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Since their escape, most Ukrainians have spent their days reading the news. They apply for various forms to become people on paper again and watch more news. Their relatives loom on their minds.
“The thought is awful. I haven’t even texted anyone [still in Ukraine] because I’m too scared to write to them,” said Olha. “I’m scared that I will text them and they won’t be there. I’m overjoyed when I see people active on Facebook; it means they’re okay and alive. I don’t even ask how people are because to ask how you are is pointless.”
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While Russian oligarchs lost millions to sanctions, Ukrainians melted snow for drinking water and scraped together pennies for bus rides out of their cities to flee to safety.
“No one created sinking funds for this situation, not even companies,” said Tatiana. “For now, [I am not stressed about my future money-wise], my priority right now is learning German and finding housing.”
Tatiana is an accountant and is working online while she is seeking a new home.
“Currently, I’m not actively seeking a new job. I am keeping an eye out, but the problem is without German, it is tough for me [to find a job],” said Tatiana. “For now, I don’t speak German well enough to be eligible for any job, even on the minimal level.”
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Olya, a QA tester, works for a European company based in Switzerland.
“Generally, no one demands [I work eight hours a day]. They understand that we’ve got problems; many people are now displaced,” said Olya. “For now, I need to settle here and then, if my current job falls through, I can find a job without taking a pay cut, hopefully.”
Olha and her son have found an apartment in Cyprus because going back to Ukraine is not an option for the in the near future. While Cyprus was not the first choice of residence for Olha, she decided to stay because of the proximity of clsoe friends. They will stay for six months until they find their feet in the new country they now have to call home.
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While Larissa’s shops are still intact they are all shut. Right now, she is volunteering in Ireland to support fellow Ukrainians and is living off the generous government subsidies provided to Ukrainian refugees in Ireland. She now lives at the hotel the government also provided for Ukrainian refugees in Dublin where her daughter is enrolled into a school in the city.
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At the time of writing, 31 March, Russia is continuing its war on Ukraine after failing to uphold promised humanitarian corridors after a series of stagnated peace talks.
The UN reports a record 4.1 million Ukrainians are now displaced across Europe. The OHCHR reports over 2600 Ukrainian civilian deaths, estimating a much higher number in reality.
Ukrainians remain hopeful that peace will come on their terms. They hope that they will finally be the country they have always deserved to be, with their language, people, and new holidays, which don’t encourage memories of the Soviet Union.
