Returning Ukrainian Refugees Say There’s No Place Like Home

When Russian forces bore down on her hometown last year, Yaryna Yahodkina took her two young children and—along with millions of other Ukrainians—fled abroad, leaving her husband to fight.

Now the family is back together in Ukraine, living under curfew just 60 miles west of the city of Bakhmut, the site of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war so far.

“Missiles can fly to any town, so we are just hoping it won’t be ours,” Yahodkina said.

The 29-year-old faces a dilemma as the conflict with Russia drags on: safety in a foreign land or the familiarity of home even if it has become a war zone.

Around eight million people escaped Ukraine when full-scale war broke out in February 2022, an exodus many hoped would be brief. As the conflict eats into its second year and Ukraine pushes back against Russian advances, around 6.2 million Ukrainians remain abroad, according to the United Nations, a figure that suggests around 1.8 million have returned to their home country.

A survey conducted by the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration between May and June 2023 estimated about a million Ukrainians who were abroad had returned to their place of origin to pay a visit or stay. Another 353,000 returned from abroad but remained displaced within Ukraine.

The surveyed returnees from abroad overwhelmingly cited family reunification as the reason.

Their arrival has bolstered Ukraine’s economy and morale and is critical for the country’s long-term prospects.

“Without people coming back, we will not have a strong economy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

The Ministry of Economy said Ukraine’s projected gross domestic product drops by 0.5% for every 100,000 Ukrainians living abroad. Ukraine’s GDP shrank by a third in 2022, ministry data show.

The pull of family, financial security and social and job satisfaction is winning out over safety, the main factor that pushed Ukrainians to leave, say returnees and those working with them.

At the outbreak of the conflict, Yahodkina went to Poland, where she and her children stayed with a host family in a small village. Without a car or driver’s license, she couldn’t travel to find a job.

After her husband was injured in battle, she returned to Dobropillia, a town with a prewar population of some 28,000 inhabitants, in eastern Ukraine to take care of him in May. There is limited water supply, early curfew and “constant missiles overhead,” she said, but “I am among my people who fully support and understand me.”

The current wave of Ukrainians going home mostly consists of those who haven’t managed to secure stable employment and housing abroad, said Kseniia Gashchak, who works with Ukrainian refugees in Berlin. There are also those with aging family members or males who aren’t permitted to leave the country.

Olga Dyvynska, 36, wanted to be closer to her husband serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, help her mother take care of her paralyzed grandmother and send her daughter to a Ukrainian school.

She left Poland in May as Kyiv suffered a barrage of Russian airstrikes and remembers asking herself: “Why did I do this?”

For her, it was her 5-year-old daughter’s joy when she had returned to kindergarten during brief visits to Ukraine. “She would run there. I couldn’t get her to come home despite air-raid alerts,” Dyvynska said.

Attractive job opportunities are also central to the Ministry of Economy’s strategy to rebuild its workforce, even as the war has caused openings to dwindle. In the first half of this year, Ukraine had 172,000 vacancies, down from nearly 235,000 registered during the same period in 2022 by the State Employment Service.

Government programs provide grants for businesses to stimulate job creation in sectors ranging from IT startups to winemaking.

These are designed to achieve the broader ministry goal of attracting 4.5 million people to the labor market in the next 10 years. “Recovery of the labor market is not a consequence of the victory, it is a path to victory,” Deputy Minister of Economy Tetyana Berezhna said in July.

Life in Ukraine is also more affordable than living overseas, returnees say, especially for the many who remained on a Ukrainian salary while working remotely.

“A thing that calmed me down after I returned to Ukraine is that I can provide a life for myself here,” said Sofiia Zubova, 22, who hails from the central city of Kryviy Rih where Russia launched a deadly missile strike on residential buildings in late July.

Working for a Ukrainian company while in the Czech Republic didn’t allow Zubova to earn enough to live independently from her host family. “I felt like a teenager with a bit more pocket money,” she said. Now, when she is scared by explosions, she sleeps in the hallway and said the fear is less acute at home.

Some Ukrainians began returning in late spring last year, before Russia’s winter campaign against the country’s power grid took hold and paused re-entry plans.

As the conflict has stabilized along the front lines, more have headed home leaving life as refugees behind.

Sofiia Kaluhina, 22, had been living in the Netherlands in old office space converted into free housing for Ukrainian refugees.

“We had to put wallpaper over the glass walls but the gaps would remain, and you could hear everything,” said Kaluhina, a freelance artist.

She found companions among curators and painters but missed running into friends in her favorite bar in the Ukrainian capital. “Kyiv had places where I could go and feel at home. In the Netherlands, I could not find anything similar,” she said. The sense of safety didn’t compensate for the life she missed in Ukraine, Kaluhina said.

For some, returning home has involved adjustment. Olena Bychkova, 35, faced financial challenges without the guard rails she had as a refugee such as free housing with hosts and government financial support. She also lost the income from leasing her Ukrainian apartment while abroad. Bychkova has taken a job as a fundraiser for a Ukraine-based nongovernmental organization, which she said makes better use of her university education than the position at a gas station cafe in Lithuania where she worked after fleeing the war.

“I had to start everything from scratch. I did not know the language in the country at all, it was difficult,” said Bychkova.

Her 6-year-old daughter, Janelle, also seems more at ease in Ukraine. “She sings when she is happy,” Bychkova said, “And here she sings every day.”

Write to Anastasiia Malenko at [email protected]