'I hope in my heart that in a year the war will be over and we will go back and rebuild our country'

Two years after their country was invaded, Ukrainian refugees in Ireland tell Liz Dunphy about their lives here and their hopes of one day returning home

Olena Stzilets with her Sons, Stanyslav, 17, and Vladyslav, 10 Years from Kramatorsk City, Ukraine, living in Groody Student Apartments, Limerick City. Picture: Brendan Gleeson

Soldiers’ death notices and missing people's photos are tied alongside messages of love, hope and determination to a church fence in Killarney today to mark the second anniversary of the illegal and deadly Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Natalia Eismont, who is helping to organise the installation, said that it shows “the broken lives of adults and the wonderful childhood for Ukrainian children, now happy in Ireland".

“There are photos of apartments once owned by Ukrainians now in Killarney after the rockets hit, documents that come to a mother here about the death of a warrior son or husband in Ukraine, messages from children. It will be an alley of facts about the war from Ukrainians in Killarney, with information attached to St Mary's Church fence," she said.

"You see us Ukrainians smiling on the streets of Killarney, but it's hard to know what's in our hearts. Broken lives, hearts squeezed by pain.” 

As of February 4, 104,870 people came to Ireland from Ukraine according to Central Statistics Office data. But some of those people have already returned to their home country, while more continue to arrive every week as the war persists.

Ukrainian Mariya Starukh, who volunteers with The Association of Ukrainians in Republic of Ireland (AURI), now knows of “a good few” families who have chosen to return to Ukraine already.

One family recently returned to a flat near deadly Mariupol in the east, where entire neighbourhoods have been decimated and maternity wards were infamously shelled.

“Their accommodation was lovely here, they had a bungalow, the children were in school. But the mother missed her husband too much, she was depressed," Ms Starukh said.

She said she’d prefer to live just a few more months with him than stay here and never see him again.

“She knows she’s putting her three children and herself at risk."

Even when Ukrainians are in physical safety in Ireland, the stress and trauma of the war is never far from their minds.

“A text comes through to your phone that your home is being bombed.

“People get siren alerts for their neighbourhoods on their phones so they know when the bomb sirens are going off back home. So even when people here should be happy they can be very distressed.

“And there is a very deep fear in the Ukrainian nation now that if this war goes on for another four years we will lose all our men. We will have no men left to fight but Russia has many millions of army. We don’t have the same numbers.” 

Dead and injured

Liudmyla Bortok's Instagram page is now populated with many photos of former colleagues and friends killed or maimed in the conflict.

One is of close friend and former colleague, journalist Oleksandr Makhov, who was 36 when he was killed in Kharkiv.

Liudmyla Bortok, a Ukrainian journalist enjoying a walk at The Lough in Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Six-year-old Lisa, a little girl with huge blue eyes and ringlets in her long hair smiled up from another photo. She was shot dead in a car by Russian soldiers as her family tried to flee Mariupol.

And every day Ms Bortok opens Facebook she hears of someone else who has been killed.

Ms Bortok said that she has not accepted social welfare payments since she moved to Ireland almost two years ago as she “does not want to be a burden on the State”. But she is running out of savings and has been desperately trying to find work.

She said that Ukrainian professionals are struggling to find work in their field in Ireland.

I know a doctor working in Centra. She’s a psychiatrist [a profession in high demand with dangerous vacancies in psychiatric care in Ireland and a profession which the HSE said it cannot recruit enough people to work in] but that’s the only work she can get.

“We Ukrainians want to work, to pay taxes, to contribute to society. We have skills. We don’t want to be a burden, we want to be useful. But it is so hard to find work. It can be hard to maintain hope.

“But we’re very grateful for all of Ireland’s support. Ireland is a great nation."

'I woke up and everyone was screaming'

Ms Bortok was editor-in-chief of a news programme on a Ukrainian TV channel; she reported on a previous conflict in Ukraine with Euronews and she worked as spokesperson for the EU Advisory Mission to rebuild public trust in police in Ukraine after Russia’s previous invasion.

That work with an international organisation is what helped her find her way to Cork.

At 5am on February 24, 2022, bombs hit her hometown of Kyiv.

“I woke up to the sound of bombing. Everyone was screaming.

“The taxi apps were down, everyone was running from the building, carrying their cats, their children, elderly relatives, hamsters, dogs, bundling them into cars and trying to leave.” 

She grabbed some basic necessities from her home and left with her 87-year-old father and her cat that day.

“Millions of people were flooding onto the same roads trying to escape. There were queues for kilometres to get gas. It took seven hours to leave the city. It is usually a 15-minute journey.

Ukrainian tanks were coming into the city as we were leaving. People were getting out of their cars and giving the soldiers whatever food they had.

They spent two weeks in a cabin in the Carpathian mountains before crossing the border into Romania.

She decided to call her international colleagues for help and her former line manager was from Cork.

“He told me ‘you’re coming to Ireland’. He called Rory Dennehy, who has a truck and bus business in Cork, and was evacuating Ukrainians at the time.

“Someone on Rory's bus had found alternative accommodation so there was a spare home in Cork to go to. I contacted them and they agreed to take us in their holiday home in Kinsale.

“It took one week to drive here. When we arrived they were all there, they handed us the keys and said 'welcome.' 

“It was amazing that these people we did not know would do this for us. They are the most amazing people.

 I love them as much as my own parents now. They are my family. I will always be there for them no matter what.

Ms Borkok lived close to Bucha, a commuter town near Kyiv, now synonymous with the slaughter of civilians where people were found shot dead with hands bound behind their backs.

Her family lost their home in Donetsk when they were forced to flee during the 2014 Russian invasion in the east and now she does not know if she will ever be able to return to her own home in Kyiv either.

“I had a good job, I loved my work, I had just paid off my mortgage.

“I worked so hard in life. I thought I was secure then, in one day, everything was gone.” 

This year’s many elections, including in the US, are further fuelling instability, with politicians more motivated by retaining seats and majorities than helping her country defeat Russia, she said.

Far-right agitators are maligning and marginalising refugees in Ireland and across Europe, blaming them for things like the housing crisis which existed before the war in Ukraine.

“The world is shaking. It’s very unstable at the moment. But if Russia takes Ukraine it won’t stop there. We are protecting Europe and the world from Putin crossing their border.

“And if we move in unity now we can defeat Russia and end the war quickly. My hope is for Europe and the world to recognise that."

'Something unreal was happening' 

On this day two years ago, Olena Stzilets was also woken by rockets smashing into her hometown of Krematorsk in eastern Ukraine.

“It felt like something unreal was happening. You could hear the sounds, see the fires.

“That whole day we were attacked by bombs. All the things in my flat shook and moved with the shock waves and tremors.

"One night, a phosphorus bomb looked like fireworks, so beautiful in the night sky," she said. But the sounds which followed were so loud they traumatised her then 11-year-old son and convinced them to flee their home.

When her son cried ‘I don’t want to die’, she and her husband decided they must bring their children away to safety.

She fled to Ireland with her two sons but her husband remained. He died in Ukraine four months ago.

“My town [Kramatorsk] is in the east of Ukraine. It’s been bombed again by my house in recent days. As I talk to you at the moment it’s under shelling. I don’t know if I’ll have a home to go back to," Ms Strilets said.

After my husband’s death I thought of going back. I was depressed, in grief, but because of my children, I can’t let myself be weak and go back to my mum and relatives to grieve.

“Life is not easy but I have no choice, I have two children so I have to do my best for them and keep going.” 

She said that her future is still very uncertain. She does not know if State supports will still be in place this time next year. And although she has been made permanent in her job with an Irish bank, affording rent on her own for her family is not possible.

“We arrived into Ireland two years ago in May. We were so scared and uncertain but we received so much support. Irish people have been so supportive and understanding.

“But we understand that we must help ourselves as well.

“My own feeling is that the war will not be finished in one year. I hope we will still have options to stay here then.

“I hope we can find our own accommodation but I don’t know how. And I don’t know how long we can rely on this country’s support.

“But despite all this, I have hope in my heart that in one year the war will be over and we will have the possibility to go back to our homes and rebuild our country.” 

Olena's sons have settled into Irish life. Her younger son is in school and her older son is studying IT at the University of Limerick.

But they are living in a hotel in Limerick city because Olena cannot find accommodation she can afford for three people on one wage.

She said that she “completely understands” current government plans to limit support to new arrivals from Ukraine to 90 days serviced accommodation and reduce social welfare payments to just €38.80 per week for that period. 

But the new regime 'makes her sad' as it will be extremely tough for newly arrived Ukrainian refugees to quickly find a home in a foreign country gripped by a housing crisis.

The Irish Government has given a huge amount to Ukrainians. But we knew such good conditions for Ukrainians could not last forever.

Protests outside refugee accommodation centres make her “feel scared and sad". 

“It makes me feel fear. And I’m surprised that people can damage and bring fire to someone’s property. Whether they’re protesting against Ukrainians or other refugees it doesn’t matter. We’re all humans. And someone could die in these fires. It’s so serious. It makes me think about our hotel and hope it never happens here."

'Lives destroyed and torn apart'

Ulina Poshyvak spent the beginning of the war helping Ukrainian refugees who fled from the east to her hometown of Lviv near the Polish border.

Uliana Poshyvak, from Lviv, Ukraine, came to Dublin in September 2023 and is studying at Griffith College Dublin. Picture: Moya Nolan

“It was really difficult to see people with nothing, their lives destroyed and torn apart. Hundreds of thousands of people moved to Lviv at the start. We took a family from Kharkiv, near the Russian border, in our home.

The woman had given birth underground in a bomb shelter. The poor baby spent the first eight days of their life underground. 

Nine of them then came in a really small car, it was dangerous, Russian soldiers were shooting people on the roads. They came with just one backpack."

But when her town came under Russian fire in August, she also decided to flee.

“I almost said goodbye to my life. We were on the seventh floor and we didn’t know where to go. My sister and I went to the flat’s corridor, which can be the safest place, The building was shuddering, the windows broke with all the vibrations. There was smoke out the windows.

“A rocket hit so close and 13 people died.

“We’d have no electricity for eight hours in a row all winter. It was very difficult to study, to live to work.

“You could go to a bomb shelter when a siren went off but the building could crumble and you could be trapped."

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She had saved for a Masters degree in journalism and decided to study in Ireland as her university in Ukraine was hit by shells and her study there had been moved online and with repeated blackouts they often had no electricity for days.

“I miss my home and I miss my parents but I feel safe here. I don’t hear rockets or wake up from stress. But I worry about my family.

“But my college, Grffith College in Dublin, is really nice. And I really want to be a journalist. I hope that one day I will be able to tell the truth about my country and what is happening there. I feel that is my destiny.

“I first thought the war would be just for a few months but now it’s been two years. It’s exhausting and distressing. A lot of people die there every day.

“I hope it ends soon and we can return home."