The danger ? “Of course I feel it, look at what’s happening in Khmelnytskyi…” Svetlana Kravchuk pulls out her phone and shows the notification of an anti-aircraft alert broadcast in this region of western Ukraine. This is where Svetlana used to live, until the Russian invasion forced her to take refuge in neighboring Poland with her two daughters, Amalya and Aryna. It is also there that she is about to set course again.
On this warm May evening, the three are waiting on platform number 10 at the Zachodnia bus station in Warsaw. Seven-year-old Aryna leans on a large suitcase with a Wolna Ukraina (Free Ukraine) pin. A few buses heading for the country at war are already lined up on the departure lane, and the one they are waiting for will soon arrive.
After two months of exile in the Polish capital, Svetlana made the choice to “return home” to Ukraine. Even if she knows that over there, on the other side of the border, the threat still hovers, that the Russian bombs continue to fall. “But I’m so tired of being here. So I prefer to go back to Ukraine to help weave camouflage nets for our soldiers. Indeed, in Warsaw, Svetlana Kravchuk “could no longer wait, do nothing”. She even says now that she prefers the discomfort of bomb shelters to the feeling of helplessness that inhabits her being far from home.
His stay in Poland was punctuated with inconveniences. First, the rent: the owner of the accommodation where she was staying demanded of her no less than “1,500 US dollars per month”, three times more than the average rental of an apartment in Warsaw, where the capacities of accommodation are, it is true, reaching saturation point. Then, when she learned of the refusal of the American embassy to issue visas to her and her children, it was too much: the same evening, she packed up.
In Ukraine, this 36-year-old mother will find her husband, engaged with the Territorial Defense Forces, those civilians who have consented to take up arms voluntarily. Khmelnytskyi is still spared from the fighting, but Svetlana will remain on her guard. “The situation may be relatively calm in our city, but there is no completely safe place in Ukraine. Especially since near where we live there is a nuclear power plant. »
“Certainly, I am worried, how could it be otherwise? But I can’t sit here forever, I’m mentally exhausted. It’s hard to leave your husband when you don’t know if you’ll find him alive. We thought there would be a war, but no one could imagine it would be so terrible. »
Leave your life behind
Ola Spychak, too, wants her life back, or at least what’s left of it. “Seeing how my loved ones in Ukraine are enduring the ordeal gives me the strength to go back, I want to be among them. At the bus station in Warsaw, on this Thursday evening, she accompanies her sister who will soon be returning home to the Lviv region. The next day, Ola will join her with her children. Aware of the risk “like everyone else”, she admits her concern about setting foot in her country, which she left two months earlier. But she misses her husband terribly
“What matters to me now is that my children find their father, and that we are reunited despite the circumstances. My husband even made our bomb shelter more comfortable in case we needed to hole up there,” she says. “The most difficult thing about being war refugees is leaving behind a whole life built over the years, a house in which we have invested… All of a sudden, when fleeing, we realize that we have nothing left, just a suitcase. Being separated from his family in this way causes a great feeling of loneliness. »
Many Ukrainians imitate Svetlana and Ola. It must be said that, for some, exile is sometimes just as painful as the anguish of war. Since the beginning of the war, more than 5 million Ukrainians have fled their country, the majority to Poland. But the number of Ukrainians now taking the opposite route, after having taken refuge for a few weeks in a border country, continues to grow. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over the same period, some 1.1 million refugees have already returned to their country.
At Zachodnia station, for several weeks already, the hum of coaches heading for Ukraine symbolizes this crossover. It was, in the first days of the conflict, one of the centers of the Ukrainian exodus; it has become that of Ukrainians returning home. As the sun sets, mothers with their babies board a coach bound for Ternopil in the west. On the neighboring platform, others are loading luggage into the trunk of the bus going to kyiv, Vinnytsia, Ivano-Frankivsk… From morning to evening, departures take place dozens of times a day.
This kind of scene, at first, destabilized Aleksandra, 41 years old. “But after a few weeks, you get used to the fact that they are heading back to Ukraine,” admits this volunteer who, for the past two months, has been helping Ukrainians passing through Zachodnia station. “They never really wanted to leave Ukraine, it was the war that forced them to flee. »
Nor does the phenomenon surprise Dominika Pszczółkowska, a political scientist affiliated with the Center for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. “In the last weeks of April and at the beginning of May, 16,000 to 21,000 people per day crossed the border from Poland to Ukraine. Some days there are even more people arriving in Ukraine than the other way around. After a large flow of refugees to Poland in February and March, the number [d’arrivées] is more or less stable,” she explains. A reversed wave which would be explained above all by the withdrawal of Russian troops from the kyiv region, since they are now confined to eastern and southern Ukraine. While Ukrainians know full well that no one is safe from sneaky bombardments, even in the west of the country, many are taking the calculated risk of returning home.
The general mobilization decreed at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine also prevented men aged 18 to 60 from leaving Ukrainian territory. So many husbands, brothers, fathers separated from their families who fled the bombs in border countries. “After a few weeks or two months, many families want to reunite. Many people also have elderly relatives who remained in Ukraine, most of whom did not want to undertake the long and sometimes perilous journey. They may need help,” continues M.me Pszczółkowska.
Find your home
Reluctant exile, Kateryna Gavrylova, too, could not endure for long. Originally from Mykolaiv, in the south of the country, this 36-year-old woman took refuge in Poland two months ago. However, at the beginning of May, she made the choice to return to Ukraine, not at home, but in Kovel, in the west of the country. “We are going to live there with my husband and my children, we will return home as soon as everything is better. »
In Poland, the adaptation was not easy for the one who had never set foot abroad before. “I never managed to find a job during my stay in Warsaw, and when the employers learned that I had two dependent children, they didn’t even want to talk to me anymore. ” In March, The duty had met her at the Centrum Wielokulturowe (Multicultural Center) in Warsaw, where she hoped to find a job. Kateryna finally had to act as housekeeper for a few hours a week.
Anna Zadvorna was luckier. Also arriving in Poland at the start of the war, this Ukrainian kindergarten teacher was able to be hired as an “assistant-translator” in a public school in the suburbs of Warsaw, and her children were able to continue their education in the Polish system. But the decision was made to return to Ternopil, in western Ukraine. Not that she discredits the solidarity of Polish civil society, which has welcomed the Ukrainian exodus with open arms since February 24.
“But my daughter wants to find her room and her toys and, to tell the truth, we simply miss everything, our house, our friends, our loved ones…” enumerates the thirty-year-old mother, leather jacket on her back and pile of luggage to her feet. In the school where she worked in Poland during her stay, she noticed that over the last few weeks, several Ukrainian children no longer came to class: they too, one by one, went back to Ukraine.
At the station in Zachodnia, one also encounters exiles traveling to even more eastern and more dangerous destinations. Maryna Prokobenko, for example, is preparing to return to Kharkiv, her hometown, savagely shelled for more than 70 days. Her bus will arrive in about fifteen minutes: she will go first to Lviv, then, from there, Maryna will take the road back to Kharkiv. The 26-year-old woman with long black hair laughs nervously as she talks about the curfews she is about to find, or the “daily bombings that no one knows where they will land”. Between “anxiety at the idea of returning to war and the joy of finding her home”, Maryna is torn.
As for her niece and her sister, with whom she arrived in Poland a day after the start of the Russian invasion, they will remain in Warsaw. “For my part, I feel that it is time to return. Over there, in Kharkiv, I will be more useful,” says this ENT doctor working in a hospital in her region. “I miss my family, and my mother is in occupied territory, I haven’t heard from her for a month. I hope to see her again. I have a house in Kharkiv, but here I have nothing. It is not surprising to see all these people returning to Ukraine. When you leave your landmarks unexpectedly and in a hurry, you quickly realize one thing: there is no better place than home. »
With Yuliia Kromido and Nadiia Khrustalova