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Paper short abstract:

How Ukrainian refugee women describe problems they had to overcome since beginning of active war phase. These are following challenges: to believe in beginning of a full-scale war, to safe children, to adapt in a foreign country. Conflicts on new place, personal achievements are little talked about.

Paper long abstract:

The active phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war caused extraordinary challenges for the Ukrainian people. Millions of women were forced to go abroad to save their children. People had to make decisions at a time of maximum uncertainty and threat. The purpose is to analyze how women describe the time they spent at a new place of residence. Source base of the report is interview recorded in Poland, France and Finland during the year, from April 2022 to April 2023. The obstacles mentioned by the women can be divided into three chronological groups: packing for the way, evacuation time, adaptation in a new place. In the first group, women talk a lot and in detail about preparing things for evacuation, about the impossibility of calling a taxi to get to the station for the evacuation trains, about how difficult it was to get on the evacuation train. Less attention is paid to the road itself, but it is mentioned without fail, with remarks that it was the hardest thing that had to be experienced. Until now, women gratefully remember random people, volunteers who helped at that stage. In stories about adaptation in a new place, the most difficult thing for many is the need to make decisions, care for children alone, without a husband. Women suffer from the devaluation of their career achievements, as their skills cannot be properly valued in a foreign country. People who lost their homes due to bombing are looking for ways to survive this loss.