Ukrainian refugees make a home in neighboring Moldova

Mere weeks after Svetlana Vovchuk fled Odessa under fire in southern Ukraine, Chișinău — the capital of neighboring Moldova — became a place of safety and stability for her and her children. She got a job in a kitchen within weeks, and is now a cook at an Italian restaurant. She’s even had the chance to teach her borscht recipe to actor and celebrity chef Stanley Tucci at the beginning of the war.

Vovchuk said she’s grateful to everyone in the country who’s helped her family — from the taxi driver who took them from the border to the capital and gave them homemade jam to the woman who helped her find a new apartment. She pulls her strength from her children, even in tough times, because they need her.

“Even now, sometimes I cry in the night, but the responsibility towards my children is what moves me,” she said.

Moldova is full of stories like Vovchuk’s. The Moldovan government has also recently made it easier for Ukrainian citizens to get work in the country long term.

Sociologist Petru Negura from the Moldova State University said that Moldova battles widespread brain drain, and Ukrainian refugees, many of whom have unique skills and higher levels of education, are helping to fill the gaps.

“Moldovan enterprises quite strongly need Ukrainian people,” he said.

Negura said that the countries’ shared history as part of the Soviet Union and shared bilingualism also help Ukrainians to adjust. Russian is the second most common language in Moldova after Romanian. And while unemployment for Ukrainian refugees remains high, often due to other vulnerabilities, the cultural similarities allow some Ukrainians from Russian-speaking southern cities close to Moldova find work quite easily.

Mixed feelings

For some Ukrainians, the shared language provokes mixed feelings. It’s a useful tool — but it’s also a reminder of their fight at home.

When Yanina Polovich fled the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv with her three children, they stayed in Moldova, in part because of the ease of using Russian. But when it came to the language of her children’s education, she drew a line in the sand.

“I reached the Russian school and turned around, I could not give them the documents,” she said through a translator.

Now, her students study online in Ukrainian, taking lessons in common areas of the refugee shelter where they all live together. While her children can speak Russian, they are thinking first in Ukrainian, she said proudly. Polovich will speak Russian to Moldovans to get her point across, but she said she won’t play a single Russian-language song on her phone.

Polovich and her family are rebuilding their lives in the one room they share at the refugee shelter in a Soviet-era sanatorium in southern Chișinău. Her 23-year-old son Dimitry, who has cerebral palsy, is returning to the powerlifting routine that he perfected in Ukraine, and recently lifted in a tournament wearing the Ukrainian colors against Russian athletes in the occupied, pro-Russian region of Transnistria. Their family is not alone in Moldova. The country is home to double the number of Ukrainian refugees who have a disability, per capita, than the average European Union member state.

Moldova is also home to a higher number of elderly refugees and refugees with serious medical conditions. These experiences might be explained by the shared language, or by proximity to some of the most strategic southern cities on the war front — Chișinău is only a few hours’ drive from cities like Kherson and Mikolaiv in Ukraine, which have experienced occupation, heavy shelling and the evisceration of critical civilian infrastructure.

Psychological trauma

Regardless of the reason, refugees who arrive from such key cities can also be expected to face a heavy psychological burden, said Ludmila Popovici, who runs the organization Memoria, which supports trauma and war atrocity survivors.

And this can pose yet another “problem in Moldova,” Popovici said, because “we [don’t have] so much professional strength in trauma at [the] university.”

Currently, she’s trying to encourage the medical schools to develop more attention to trauma and its impacts on both mental and physical health. In the meantime, she’s working with NGOs in the city to create short workshops to help people build the resilience of the refugees they meet.

There was another reason Polovich chose to live in Moldova: It was close enough to bring her children back to Ukraine to see their father, who has been fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2017, and give him a few days off from the front.

She said that the trip makes her shake with stress, but she reminds herself that her sacrifice also allows her in-laws to see their son. But the routine has still taken a toll.

“I hate [the Russians],” she said through a translator. “They deprived me of a calm life. I look in the mirror and, three years later, I don’t recognize myself.”

While Moldovan organizers try to scale up their small country’s capacity to help, divisions in the country over whether it should take a pro-Russian or pro-European direction are also played out in people’s opinions on the Russian invasion.

Sociologist Negura explains that people who are more supportive of Russia in the war also tend to be skeptical of financial support for refugees. In addition, the country has also found itself to be the site of increasing Russian interference, leading some experts to worry it could be the next front in an expanded Russian war.

Recently, Moldova accused Russia of flying decoy drones into its airspace to confuse Ukrainian anti-missile defense systems, a charge the Russians have denied. And previously, a narrow presidential election and EU referendum held in Moldova were marred with accusations of Russian meddling and an alleged vote-buying scheme. The Kremlin has again denied involvement. 

Vovchuk said she’s only been treated well by people there, and has no worries about her safe haven becoming another war zone. But being so close to her home city, the war is neither far from Vovchuk’s mind nor her travel plans.

Early in the war she went back to check on her husband and her mother — and their house after Russian airstrikes blew out its windows. During a more recent visit a few weeks ago, she saw the resignation in people’s eyes.

“Even if, at the beginning, they were enthusiastic [about] winning the war, of being heroes, now … they are tired,” she said. “They don’t have any hope.”

Nonetheless, Vovchuk only has one place she wants to settle when the war ends: back across that border, at home.