The Refugees Who Don't Exist

On the morning of February 24, 2022, my friend and her husband put their children on a plane to Istanbul. It was the second time they had run from war. The first time was in 2014, from Luhansk. I want to tell the story of three families from Luhansk, mine and those of two friends. We fled the same war, to the same country, with the same hope. Our own country opened the door for us. Reluctantly. My husband and I got our first apartment in Kyiv on the fifth try, and only after we brought letters from work proving we already had jobs. It was on the 13th or maybe the 11th floor, with warped wooden floor-length windows, in a building in Darnytsia where the elevator didn't work. One friend, who came to Kyiv with her husband and son, couldn't rent either. The other, with her husband and two daughters, went "nowhere", to Odesa, and spent four months living in hotels with a nursing baby.

Twelve years have passed, and none of these three families lives where it fled in 2014. We've been scattered across the world. Some have moved a second time, some are already thinking about a third. One day we started talking about it and realized that science has studied the refugees of 2022 inside and out, yet knows almost nothing about people like us.

PTSD isn't "just nerves"

Post-traumatic stress disorder has nothing to do with a weak character, and the advice to "pull yourself together" doesn't work here. The brain has lived through a threat to life and keeps behaving as if the threat never left. Its safety system breaks down, and the breakdown has four faces.

Everyone knows the most famous one from the movies. It's intrusive re-experiencing. Dreams you wake up from drenched in sweat. Or the moment when a firework goes off somewhere on an American street, and for a second you're back in February. Good thing fireworks are banned in our village. But there's a military airfield or something like it nearby, and sometimes something very loud takes off.

The second face is quieter. A person avoids everything that hurts. They stop reading the news, steer clear of conversations about home, can't bring themselves to open photos of the old apartment.

The third is probably the most insidious, because thoughts and mood themselves change. The world feels irreparably dangerous, people unreliable, and you yourself to blame for everything. Joy goes numb, and even the people closest to you seem to end up behind glass.

The fourth is like an endless night watch. The body is on combat alert all the time. Insomnia, flinching at the doorbell, snapping at the kids and then feeling ashamed.

My psychologist says this is a normal reaction of the mind to abnormal circumstances, and that it can be treated. Therapy that works specifically with trauma helps, and medication when needed. People start sleeping again and stop ducking at every loud sound. The more insidious part is something else. PTSD knows how to wait. It can surface months or even years later, when you're already safe and the body finally allows itself to fall apart. That's why many people get worse not in Ukraine but in quiet America. That's how trauma works.

There is a more severe form too. When trauma repeats and drags on for years, as it has for those fleeing war since 2014, doctors speak of complex PTSD. Then a fifth face joins the four. A person stops believing they're worth anything, is very picky about whom they let close, and lives with the feeling that they've been left forever "not like everyone else". According to a study among displaced Ukrainians, many of them have exactly this form.

The numbers are in

Science knows a lot about the 2022 wave. Take a nationwide survey of three thousand Ukrainians published in The Lancet Regional Health. Signs of probable PTSD were found in 51% of those who stayed home, 55% of those who moved within the country, and 62% of those who went abroad. Quite the climax. The farther a person is from home, the worse they feel.

Stayed home51%Moved within Ukraine55%Went abroad62%0255075100%

Source. Nationwide survey, 3,173 participants, The Lancet Regional Health Europe, 2024

Mariia Mezhenska, a Ukrainian researcher at the University of North Texas, compared in a recent study how moral injury and PTSD hit those who stayed in Ukraine and those who left. The researchers surveyed 7,065 Ukrainians and built 235 pairs of "statistical twins" from them. Everyone who went abroad was matched with someone who stayed home and was as similar to them as possible. Same sex, same age, roughly the same experience. Those who left had stronger PTSD symptoms across all four faces, and the level at which a doctor is already needed showed up noticeably more often.

One more study hit me especially hard. Swiss researchers, together with Ukrainian colleagues, surveyed our refugees in Zurich and, alongside them, people from Zurich itself (the MAP project, BMJ Global Health). Among locals, signs of PTSD showed up in 11% at most. Among Ukrainians living on the same tidy streets, it was almost half, up to 45%. That's as high as in the most heavily shelled regions of Ukraine. In other words, you can live in one of the calmest cities in the world and carry the war with you. I never thought I had PTSD. Talking about how you felt just wasn't done. "The main thing is your arms and legs are in one piece," my grandmother used to tell me, "and you haven't lost your head. The rest will pass."

Another paper by Mezhenska's group showed that PTSD is closely tied to moral injury. That means shame and broken trust, the feeling that you've been betrayed. The authors advise doctors to work not only with the symptoms but also with this betrayal and the lost faith in people. Yet another study by the group, with 6,340 participants, shows that it is moral injury in particular that's linked to the feeling that what you went through has broken your life. For us, this explains a great deal of what came after 2014.

"It's your own fault" or "It's not our war"

We lived through our first war twice. The first time when we left Luhansk. And the second time when we arrived among our own.

Five tries to rent an apartment in Kyiv weren't bad luck. It was a system, and today it's described in reports by international organizations. In every survey of displaced people from those years, from OSCE monitoring to assessments by the International Organization for Migration, one and the same problem comes first. Nowhere to live. "We don't rent to people from Donetsk and Luhansk." Each of us heard it over the phone, and sometimes you could even see it printed in newspaper ads. Researchers would later write these words down in their notes hundreds of times.

Work was no better. Employers hired us reluctantly, paid us less, fired us without explanation. My husband couldn't find a job for about four months. Then he went to work for people he knew; good thing they'd known us a long time.

The state paid a displaced adult about 440 hryvnias a month in assistance. At the exchange rate back then, that was roughly 16 dollars. How exactly it was paid out, and how much humiliation you had to go through to get it, is material for a separate piece. (I'll write it later, so I don't forget, because it still hasn't let go of me.)

A special program to employ and retrain displaced people, adopted in 2015, "remained a scheme on paper," according to the Centre for Eastern Studies. Money for it was never allocated. And in 2016, after mass checks of payments, about half a million people lost their benefits.

And over all of this hung suspicion. Every one of us was told at least once, in so many words, that we had "brought the war with us" and "couldn't be trusted". This isn't just my grievance. Sociologists devoted whole studies to it. The image of the displaced person as an "outsider" held on in Ukrainian society for years. "Your 'shto' and 'ghe' can be heard from the second floor, no mistaking you," my boss used to say. Sometimes it was worse. "You Donetsk people are used to 'schemes', it's in your blood."

Mezhenska doesn't write about who exactly betrays a person. That's my own conclusion, and to me it's obvious. You see? A missile comes from the enemy. It kills, but you expect evil from the enemy, so the world in your head doesn't turn upside down. But when your own people shut the door on you, it does. For the first wave of the displaced there were thousands of such doors.

Nobody counted me

A 2016 survey of 2,203 people displaced in the first wave showed that the hardest hit were those whose traumas piled up one after another. Trouble never comes alone, as they say, and each new blow lands on a wound that is already there. And one more number from that survey. 74% of those who needed psychological help never got it. Remember the cartoon about the little goat who could count to ten? The animals were offended that he counted them. Well, nobody ever counted me.

I saw with my own eyes what this looks like in real life.

The family of the friend who went to Odesa held on for five years. Five years of looking for a permanent home and work in their field, and trying to stop being "newcomers" in their own country. In 2019 they went back to occupied Luhansk. Then my friend stopped talking to me; only holiday greetings were left. I don't judge her. In five years Odesa (!) never became home for her, while Luhansk, even under foreign rule, never stopped being home.

The friend who stayed in Kyiv held on longer and more stubbornly. She had a second son and brought her mother over from Luhansk. It was hard, but life went on. Eight years of rented apartments, and at the end of 2021 she and her husband finally bought a place of their own, a new one. In Bucha. They barely had time to live in it. On the morning of February 24 they put the children and her mother on a plane to Istanbul. This time they fled faster than in 2014, without packing and without goodbyes. In the spring of 2022 the whole world learned about Bucha. Their first home of their own stayed there. Then came America. Now my friend reads the news about frozen immigration programs and expiring paroles, and asks me only one thing. Where do we run the third time?

My husband and I aren't in Kyiv anymore either. We left before the full-scale war, and the decision not to go back caught up with us here, in America. That's a parting with home too, just a quiet one, without goodbyes. We had our reasons, and they're still hard to talk about.

None of our three families ended up in any research sample. In all the studies I've mentioned, people fleeing war since 2014 are dissolved among the "2022 refugees", even though our trauma is already twelve years old. I found only one study of the twice-displaced. It was done at Oxford, thirty in-depth interviews with women from Crimea and Donbas. It came out only in 2025. But it's about what the word "home" means to these women. There's nothing in it about mental health. About the health of those who fled twice there is not a single number. Even though everything science knows about accumulated trauma suggests our risk is the highest.

And there are hundreds of thousands of people like us. Of the nearly one and a half million displaced in the first wave, most settled in eastern and southeastern Ukraine, exactly where the war came a second time in 2022. Now these people are scattered across the world again, and nowhere do doctors count them separately.

Third time's the charm. One more test of strength

Australian studies of refugees compared people who had survived equally terrible wars. Among those whose status was temporary and guaranteed by nothing, severe depression and anxiety occurred up to five times more often than among those who were allowed to stay for good. And if one temporary status is swapped for another, slightly more reliable one, the mind doesn't feel any better. Only real certainty helps. Well, that much was clear even without science. It's hard to grieve and rebuild a life when you don't know whether you'll still be here in six months.

And here's what's happening in America now. The Uniting for Ukraine program was frozen for new applicants back in January 2025. Parole extensions take months to process and now cost 1,580 dollars per person. TPS was extended until April 2027, but only for those who had already applied. And people with twelve years of war behind them hear for the third time, "prove you deserve to be here."

A mind that has survived a war and two moves is thrown, instead of into peace, back into waiting for a threat. If you feel anxious, you're fine. It's a normal reaction to real uncertainty, the third in twelve years.

One request to scientists. Count us. Because society needs to know that a person who flees war twice is normal. They just need calm, stability in their life, and time.

In place of an epilogue

Twelve years ago three families left the same city. One went back under occupation because in five years it couldn't feel at home in the new place. The second spent eight years working toward an apartment of its own, bought it in Bucha a few months before the world learned about Bucha, and is now asking where to run the third time. The third, mine, lives in America and helps those who are arriving here now. I remember all too well what it's like when no one opens the door for you.

How society receives a refugee decides whether their wound heals or deepens. This is proven just as firmly as the harm done by shelling. And it decides whether they become a support for others or remain someone who has to be rescued.

And I've come to understand that home isn't a city or an apartment. Home is the people who didn't ask where you're from before letting you in.

But sometimes, when I can't sleep, I walk the steppe in my mind and gather puzharyky.