KYIV, Ukraine — Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Iryna Schestova had made a home in Kyiv with her husband. She had family all around her. Her sister lived in the city, as well as her two daughters. But now she lives alone, her family dispersed by the war.
Schestova's husband was killed while serving in the military in eastern Ukraine. Her youngest daughter moved to Canada. Her sister lives in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Her eldest daughter is back from living abroad, but only temporarily. And she prefers to stay in the suburbs and not at her mother's apartment — to avoid the sounds of war.
Originally displaced in 2014 by fighting in her hometown of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, Schestova lived in Kyiv until Russia's full-scale invasion forced her to flee again — this time to Romania. But like it is for many Ukrainians, living abroad wasn't what she wanted, and she returned to Kyiv last year.
"Even if I would stay there [in Romania], I didn't know exactly what to do there further. And I decided that it's going to be better for me here not to know what to do yet," 50-year-old Schestova says.
She is one of the more than a million Ukrainians who have returned to their country after fleeing the 2022 invasion, according to United Nations figures. More than 5 million Ukrainian refugees remain outside the country. In a survey of Ukrainians abroad published in March by the Centre for Economic Strategy, a think tank in Kyiv, 43% of respondents said they would like to return.
Ukraine, with its low birth rate, has been struggling with population loss since long before the Russian invasion, but the war accelerated the problem. Now there are groups working to help bring refugees back.
Ksenia Gedz, advocacy coordinator of Right to Protection, a Ukrainian charity that helps refugees and others affected by war, emphasizes how difficult it is to generalize about their experiences.
The refugees are spread primarily throughout Europe, with some in the United States and elsewhere. The countries offer different protections and rights, as well as different opportunities for employment and eventual citizenship.
Some people's homes back in Ukraine were destroyed, or they have no job prospects, having lost many of their connections to the places that they left over three years ago. Russia controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, while some parts remain under heavy attack and others less so.
Right to Protection is trying to prepare for a future when millions of returnees come back, in hopes that the charity can make that process as easy as possible. "We need to understand what we are going to do with them, whether we have housing for them ..., whether we have employment opportunities, and what will be on the community level when we are talking about social cohesion," Gedz says.
"I believe that this process could be smoothly, seamlessly facilitated, but we do not have such. This is a problem because we do not have a holistic, systematic, comprehensive approach on how to engage with Ukrainians abroad ... what opportunities they will have here upon their return," she says.
This year, the Ukrainian government launched a program to help bring displaced people back. The government office responsible for the program did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Despite the chance at a new life in Romania, Schestova says she came back for economic reasons: Her work as an entrepreneur and real estate agent was easier in Kyiv, where she speaks the language and has connections. Although she enjoyed the capital, Bucharest, she says, integrating into a new place was difficult. "Every time you change the country, it drains you a lot. Like every time you try to reintegrate [into] another society, it takes a lot of effort from you," she says.
With the support of the U.N. refugee agency, known as UNHCR, Right to Protection has conducted research about the needs of individuals returning to Ukraine, which it has yet to publish but shared with NPR.
The group found that many people face similar struggles with job opportunities in their new locations. Plus, learning a new language is a big challenge. More than half of Ukrainian refugees (56%) want to return because they have relatives still living in Ukraine.
Schestova's sister lives in Lviv, about 350 miles west of Kyiv. Her husband, who was in a combat brigade, stayed behind in Kyiv, while she left with two daughters and four cats in a car. Later he was killed.
Now that Schestova is back, it's at least easier to visit his grave, at a cemetery outside Kyiv. Her eyes get glassy and she doesn't want to dwell on the details of his death when she speaks of him. She says she is lucky to have closure; she was able to identify his body and have him buried.
But neither of Schestova's daughters moved back to Ukraine with her. The youngest lives in Canada, where she's going to college in Toronto, and the oldest, Liia Kazakova, 26, was living and working in the Czech Republic until she needed back surgery and decided to come home to get it in Kyiv, where her mother is adamant that the hospitals are much better.
But Kazakova isn't ready to stay. She says she can't sleep at night at her mom's apartment in the city. The air raid sirens and sounds of military activity, both incoming and outgoing, cause her too much stress.
Schestova laughs at the differences between herself and her daughter, saying, "I sleep while she sits and scrolls. Oh she, she cannot have a peace of mind."
Kazakova responds to her mother's teasing with seriousness. "You can be safe in any country in this world, but not in Ukraine, and this is a very big problem for me. I don't sleep if I listen to these sounds," the daughter says.
"Lot of Ukrainians who moved to foreign countries starting from 24th of February, 2022 — they are not used to the sound of air raid alerts and explosions," says Gedz, as she talks about mental health services as one of the many things to consider in supporting returnees.
Yet more than any support, an end to the war would be the biggest reason for people to move back. The concern about security is the main factor that stops people from returning, according to Right to Protection's research, with over half of people who want to return saying that they would do so if hostilities in Ukraine cease.
"The main factor to return is security issues. So I believe that we need to keep it in mind that until we [don't] have this air raid alert for like eight, six hours and every day drone and missile attacks, it's very difficult to say and to communicate to Ukrainians to return," Gedz says.
And Kazakova agrees with this sentiment. "If the war would be over, I would start thinking about, you know, a good plan, what it means to return," she says.
But the war hasn't ended. For now, Kazakova is staying at a house deep in the Kyiv suburbs. There are trees on either side, and the birds are chirping in the fresh air as she sits on a beanbag chair in the yard. Here, away from the sounds of war, she can actually sleep at night, while waiting to recover from her surgery and get her documents organized to return to Prague. In the meantime, she has left a lot of belongings and her cat with her ex-boyfriend in Poland.
But she doesn't want to stay away from Ukraine forever.
Kazakova compares the feeling of being displaced to being a puzzle piece in the wrong box.
"But … come back to your own box and you fit there," she says. "This is when you realize that this previous box was wrong. It wasn't yours."
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