Sofia Kapushchak, and Vira and Ivanna Klietsova
Life might be safer, quieter, and more peaceful in the UK and Ireland than Ukraine, but displacement comes with its own significant stressors: after moving, many Ukrainian children experience post-traumatic stress behaviours, a struggle to adapt, and intense loneliness.
These two stories of children whose families sought refuge in the UK and Ireland – Sofia Kapushchak, 13, who lost her older sister to cancer just as she was acclimating to Ireland, and Vira and Ivanna Klietsova, 12 and 17, who brought to England their trauma from experiencing life in the Russian-occupied city of Sumy – demonstrate the integrative power of two weeks spent learning English at UK- and Ireland-based summer school programmes.
One experience of the Ukrainian war
There is sometimes a mistaken assumption that Western Ukraine – like the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, where 13-year-old Sofia Kapushchak lived with her older sister, Alla, her mother, Karina, and her father – was a relatively safe place to be during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“No one in Ukraine slept the night of 24 February 2022”, Karina says now, about the widespread panic that swept through the whole country the night that bombs started falling over Kyiv and beyond. When explosions began to occur at nearby Ivano-Frankivsk airport, which shrouded the city’s streetlights in black smoke, chaos reigned: citizens flocked to grocery stores to stock food, ran to pharmacies to stock medication, queued at ATMs to withdraw savings and petrol stations to get away. Sofia, then 11, grabbed her dog and went to the car, begging her mother to leave: “Please mom, I’m so scared.”
After temporarily fleeing to the mountains nearby, the situation in Western Ukraine calmed down enough for the family to return home, but the war “made us into lunatics”. The family were glued to their phones to hear critical warnings. Shopping, Karina says, was a terrifying ordeal: “I always took my kids with me wherever I went because leaving them somewhere, anywhere, was not safe”; she had seen how Russians were now targeting civilians.
In August, when the local schools called for a return to in-person lessons, Karina couldn’t bring herself to make Sofia vulnerable to bombings and air raids. The family decided to leave: because she wanted her children to keep learning English, and because Ukrainians didn’t need a Visa to enter, they headed to Ireland.
And another, very different experience
Nearly 1000 kilometres away – and only 25 from the Russian border, in Sumy – Vira and Ivanna Klietsova woke up to a very different experience of the invasion. The city was surrounded by militants, one of the first cities to be occupied by Russian forces. “We didn’t have any possibility to escape, to run”, explains their mother, Nataliia.
All schools in the area were shut. Within a week, shops were emptied of their food: the last piece of bread was shared; one Milka bar was rationed to serve two families. Families quickly moved into the basements of their homes, unable to sleep amidst the constant bombing. Whole rows of houses disappeared at a time into fiery explosions.
Ever a patriot, Nataliia told Ivanna, “we have to save our town” – but a “nightmare” on 8 March 2022 changed her mind. The Klietsovas were staying at a house with no electricity, “washing our hands with snow”. At 1:00 a.m., shelling began, closer to the house than ever before. In distress, Ivanna ran into the snow, in -7C weather, to hide in the nearby forest, when a bomb fell so close to her that Nataliia feared the worst. When she finally found her daughter, miraculously unscathed, Ivanna’s hands were trembling and she said, “Mom, I don’t want to be patriotic anymore. I can’t do this.”
Already planning their escape, reports began to reach the Klietsovas of the massacre in Bucha, in which 73 innocent civilians were murdered; survivors reported torture and rape. By June, having arranged a place to go with the UK’s Homes for Ukraine scheme, the Klietsovas were in a car heading to safety.
Adapting to the UK and Ireland
Here, the plight of the Kapushchaks and Klietsovas begin to resemble one another. Despite a move to peace, quiet and safety, the transition is never easy for survivors of wartime, and many families experience post-traumatic stress behaviours, intense loneliness, a struggle to adapt and to make ends meet. Displacement affects one’s sense of self.
Karina Kapushchak wondered if she had done well for her daughters – “You can never be sure if you made the right decision to move or to stay” – and Sofia struggled to make friends at first. She didn’t like going to school, and her sister Alla, who was helping her cope, moved to America for university.
Ivanna and Vira Klietsova found not just the new language but the multiplicity of accents extremely difficult to understand. Not to mention culture shock: Ukrainian directness came across, in their new country, as impoliteness. Ivanna was used to being sociable; now in the UK, she felt desperately alone. “I used to dream to visit this country,” she wrote in her journal, “but I’m nothing here.”
Karina noticed a shift in Ivanna’s demeanour after time under occupation, in which she has swapped her usual warmth for a survival-first attitude: “She’s comparing everything with the war now. If you want to get success, if you want to survive, it’s like the war. You want to enter a good university, it’s like the war. You have to survive.”
Tragedy for the Kapushchaks
On a trip home from America for Sofia’s birthday in May 2023, Alla Kapushchak fell ill and lost consciousness; she was diagnosed with a grade 4 cancerous brain tumour. For ten months she struggled, undergoing ten hours of surgery, and 30 chemotherapy sessions. Yet, Karina says the family were relatively happy: they were together, sharing a routine, and the community in Cavan, Ireland, had gathered around and supported them.
Sofia had just started to feel at home in her new country when, on 18 April 2024, Alla finally passed away, at the age of 18.
“It was a terrible period of darkness”, says Karina. “Me, my husband and our youngest daughter were just like shadows. We cried all the time, sat at home. When we went out, everything reminded us of our beloved Alla.”
Education, community, and healing
It was around this time that Karina saw an announcement about BHSU’s Summer Schools initiative, which in 2024 offered free or discounted residential summer programmes to 180 Ukrainian students in the UK and Ireland, displaced by the war.
Karina worried her daughter would spend the summer alone, grieving, and was overjoyed by the news of her acceptance to the programme. Sofia was worried: she wondered “‘Will I be alone sitting there and crying?’ So, it was both exciting and scary.” The memory of Alla helped inspire her. “After Alla died Sofia said, ‘I want to experience summer school.’”
Two weeks at University College Dublin, courtesy of ATC Ireland, changed Sofia Kapushchak. Surrounded by girls her age, and improving her English day by day, Karina says, “she started to smile again. She became more independent. During this difficult period, the camp helped Sofia blossom. She communicates with friends from the camp to this day.”
Vira and Ivanna Klietsova experienced a similar blossoming at Wycombe Abbey, where they spent two weeks immersed in English lessons, as well as a host of academic subjects also taught in English. Their improved grasp of the language allowed them fuller expression of their thoughts and emotions; it also helped them acclimate to their new home country, which they no longer find scary.
Vira, just 12 still, is still showing trauma from the occupation, but she’s managing better in her day-to-day; and she has Ivanna, who Nataliia says is softening again, to help guide her. “Ivanna is back to the Ivanna she was before. It took years, but not everything is about survival; she feels safe now.”
Soon to be 18, Ivanna understands the nature of her new situation. “Vira’s asking all the time, ‘When we will go back to Ukraine?’ Ivanna tells her, ‘No one knows’. So she is understanding that we don’t know what will happen later.”
Taking after her mother’s patriotism, Ivanna knows that her experience abroad can help her help Ukraine from a place of safety: “You can live in any country in the world, and you can still help and support Ukraine.”