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S&U interviews

War & peace

30 March 2023

5 min read

After the anniversary

Ukrainian musician Lyuba Reznichenko reflects on the war’s anniversary and on the aid given in so many ways. Interview by Peter Robertson.

Peter Robertson

Peter Robertson is Christian Aid's senior humanitarian journalist.

A woman sits on a chair in a field holding a large stringed musical instrument.

Lyuba Reznichenko playing her bandura.

Christian Aid.

Christian Aid first met Lyuba Reznichenko in July 2022 after the then-25-year-old had fled her home, and her studies at the music academy in Dnipro, for a remote village in western Ukraine. She was sharing a bungalow with three families, including a friend from her church in Dnipro.

Her parents, brother and three sisters were still in Kherson, under Russian occupation - they were safe but Lyuba could not get to them. She spoke about her worries and said she missed playing music but was enjoying the nature around her.

I caught up with Lyuba, in Lviv, via a Zoom interview. She updated us on the liberation of Kherson but explained her parents were under constant shelling from the Russians.

Lyuba plays the bandura – the national instrument of Ukraine. Her father advised her to take her bandura with her when she escaped, so if she ended up with nothing, she could still busk. She has since staged performances in Lviv city centre to raise people’s spirits and talked about how emotional people get: “They all want peace and victory,” she said.

She also spoke about her faith, the work she has been doing helping refugees and the support she received from Christian Aid’s partner, Hungarian Interchurch Aid.

Lyuba said when she looks back at the past year, she gets frustrated:

“It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.”

What was your life like before the war?

I was studying at the Music Academy in Dnipro. Before that, I went to see my parents in Kherson during the New Year holidays… I was planning to go visit them again in March, but 24 Feb changed everything. I was in Dnipro and my entire family was in Kherson.

What did you feel when you learnt about the Russian invasion on 24 Feb?

Like the majority of Ukrainians, I started getting phone calls at 4am from my friends who were saying: “get up, the war has started.” It was horrible, I was very scared as we heard the first air raids and explosions. Horror is the only thing I remember about that day.

What happened next?

I stayed in Dnipro until mid-March. To avoid plunging into panic and depression and as a believer, I will be honest with you, I prayed a lot. I do believe that God supports, protects and helps. The church I used to go to opened a centre for the first wave of refugees from Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhya regions. As my own family was in the area under occupation and I could not do anything to help them, I decided to start helping those refugees.

Then I learnt of an opportunity to evacuate to western Ukraine in March, I grabbed it. This is how I ended up in Transcarpathian Region.

What’s your experience of interaction with Christian Aid?

I stayed with a very kind and hospitable family in a village there. They have many children and helped other refugees and I helped them every time I could. Then, in May I learnt of the Hungarian charity HIA, Christian Aid partner, and registered with them…

They supported me financially. As a student, I did not have any means. I could not ask my parents for helps as they were living under occupation and banks did not work there…

How did you stay in touch with your family?

It was a very difficult situation. There have been protracted periods, like a week, two weeks and a half, when I could not get in touch with them as there was no phone connection, no internet in Kherson. I was horrified by the news I read: a strike here, an explosion there. I was thinking about my family all the time.

But there were moments when I could reach them on a chat app. The connection was bad, but still, and when you hear the voice of your nearest and dearest, that’s a great relief…

How is your family now?

Kherson was liberated on 11 November… But then the situation only deteriorated because the Russians were shelling it from the right bank almost non-stop. My parents tell me that it is going on almost without interruptions.

When did you move to Lviv and return to Dnipro?

At the end of August, I moved to Lviv where I met other believers who were actively involved in charity work. I worked with them, too. We staged performances in the city centre. I played bandura and sang patriotic songs to raise people’s morale.

Then I returned to Dnipro to complete my studies… I continued cooperation with this organisation there… We were quite active there, too. We toured the region with performances, I played bandura a lot.

What is people’s reaction to your performances?

The reaction is abundant. People do react to my songs. They cry, too. They become very emotional. They all want peace and victory.

What do you feel about the first anniversary of the war?

It is all very difficult. When it all started, there was hope that it would end in a week or two. And then a month passed, another… Still there was hope that it will just come to an end.

When I look back at the year, I just become frustrated. It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.

What do you think about the UK charity organisations helping Ukrainians?

First, I want to thank you from the bottom of heart for supporting us all this time. This is an awful situation and many Ukrainians need help. Especially those living in eastern Ukraine, in hot spots, which have seen fierce fighting, the newly liberated territories where people have no place to live, where they lost loved one… Those people need more support.

I would like to say that more aid is directed there. Still, it is impossible to live there. It is not safe at all because of the non-stop raids and explosions. Those people who evacuated to the west of Ukraine need help. But they sometimes cannot get it because all the attention is focused on the east.

So if you can it would be good to distribute all the assistance among those staying in the east and those who moved here, to the west.

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Change

Development

Migration

13 November 2024

5 min read

Travelling in a world of refugees

Reconciling the contrasting journeys of travellers and the migrant.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Migrants on a freight train reach for food bags held aloft by people on the track side.

Migrants on La Bestia being passed bags of food and water.

Pequeño Mar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll never forget the sight, 10 years ago this month, as I hitchhiked north through Mexico, of dozens of migrants hanging off the side of a goods train as they made their own journeys towards their Promised Land.

Like me, these migrants - of whom there must have been at least 30 - were heading for the United States. Unlike me, they were doing so not for fun but for their futures.

“Come with us!” some shouted, as my wife and I lugged our backpacks towards what we hoped would be our next successful hitchhiking post, having begun our journey seven months prior at the southern tip of Argentina.

We declined the offer, but I wondered then - and still do - whether they had known we were in a different position to them, or had simply assumed us to be in the same metaphorical boat.

Around the same time, a new wave of refugees were making their way westward across Turkey and Europe, in a reversal of my first hitchhiking adventure, which took me eastward from the UK to Malaysia. And again, I found the contrast between the respective circumstances of our two journeys confronting.

There I had been, a post-university thrill-seeker, taking to the road with my best mate to open my eyes to the big wide world beyond these shores, and now six years later, these poor souls were moving in the opposite direction - again, not for fun, but through sheer desperation.

Many were fleeing ISIS, who took control of Mosul while I was hitchhiking through Brazil at the time of the 2014 Football World Cup. My chief concern during those days were the occasions hitchhiking proved less straightforward. On some days, we had to wait hours for a ride. Sometimes, night would set in as we waited, and we were forced to call it a day.

There were times, too, when we fell foul of the law, such as in the States, where a policeman told us off for hitchhiking on the freeway. But undoubtedly the most challenging moment of that trip was the time we ended up back in the same hotel we had been in two days prior, having done a 1,000km round trip only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This came about in Prince George, Canada, after we had been encouraged by a trucker on the so-called “Highway of Tears” to take a different route to our final destination: Alaska. I can still remember the feeling, as I woke up early the next morning, in the very same room of the very same hotel, of such a lot of effort wasted and a deep desire to get moving again as swiftly as possible, if only to enjoy a sense of progress.

No doubt, there have been many refugees who have experienced the same emotions - only, one imagines, with much greater intensity. Perhaps they have been deported back to where they began their journey, or simply sent back to the last country from which they arrived, in the process undoing in their minds and hearts all of the efforts that went in to getting them there.

No doubt, many of these refugees will also have fallen foul of the authorities. Some, will have been detained; others deported. Perhaps some will also have been told off for walking on a highway, or illegally crossing a border, as I myself tried to do between Bangladesh and Myanmar back in 2008 - only to be picked up by a border patrol and taken back to where I’d started again.

Yet, unlike me, I doubt many refugees were offered helping hands by strangers along their way, or at least not so frequently, and I expect many more of them experienced harsh words from passersby than the few jokey thumbs-downs or shouts of “gringos!” that I received on my own journeys.

And while I, with my Great British passport, was able finally to arrive at my goals and to feel the joy of that completion, many refugees will not have been so fortunate. And while I was able eventually to return home and continue my life - in whatever way I saw fit - for many refugees, their own journeys will still be ongoing, and there will still be a lack of clarity regarding what the future may hold.

I always used to say, standing beside the side of the road, that if only we knew how long it would be until the next ride, we needn’t worry. If someone could tell us that in four hours we’d be picked up, or that although we wouldn’t get another ride that day, that on the very next we’d be adopted by a lovely family who would end up taking us with them for 10 days (as happened in northern Argentina), then all our worries would melt away.

I felt the same way during the years in which my wife and I struggled to conceive, post-adventure. Were someone to have told us then that in a few years, we’d have three beautiful boys, we need never have suffered such heartache.

So too for refugees: if only someone was able to tell them when, where and how their journeys would end, they would be able to come to terms with what lay ahead, and to stop feeling so anxious about the many unknowns.

But of course that’s not how life works - whether you’re lucky enough to have been born with a British passport that enables you to see all the world has to offer without a second thought, or whether you’ve had the misfortune of being born in a country within which you find yourself unable to remain.

I have long wrestled with the question of whether my travels were simply a selfish waste of time. Not that they didn’t bring me great joy and truly opened my eyes to the big wide world - they most surely did - but whether I might instead have used that time in some nobler endeavour.

I find encouragement today in knowing that my love of people of different countries - and especially Iran - was birthed during those travels, and that I probably would not be doing the job I am now, had it not been for those experiences. But it doesn’t make it any easier to reconcile the contrasting journeys of travellers and refugees, which although they may share many parallels, also exhibit some stark differences.