The long exodus

A Ukrainian refugee's car parked outside a hotel in Central Chisinau. Photo: FrimuFilms/Shutterstock

The Mustiats family symbolises a larger, growing trend of Ukrainian war refugees settling in Moldova for the long term. It is a far longer time than they might have expected, or wanted, at the time of their arrival.

Growing numbers

According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more Ukrainians are settling down in Moldova than came in the first few months of the war, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. In April of last year – the first full month of the UNHCR’s data on Moldova’s Ukrainian refugees – the total number of Ukrainians was just under 97,000. In 2023, that figure has exceeded 100,000, while rising every month since April. The most recent monthly total, available for August, shows a figure poised to surpass 110,000. That is more than four per cent of Moldova’s total population of about 2.5 million.

The same data shows that the “Ukrainians arriving” category outpaced “Ukrainians leaving” for 13 months, beginning from July 2022. This breakdown regarding the overall picture is to be expected, as the number of refugees remaining in Moldova has grown each month since then. Nonetheless, the rising total of Ukrainians staying longer points to a deeper, and more long-term, picture of war-related patterns of asylum in Moldova.

In this way, Ukrainians in Moldova are planning a longer exodus. The war at home continues, and with few alternatives, displaced Ukrainians are increasingly confined to a future in Moldova that could span years. The Moldovan government appears to have recognised as much, and in January approved a one-year, temporary protection regime for Ukrainian asylum seekers.

Similar dynamics are at work at a regional level. On a cost-of-living index for Central and Eastern Europe from 2021, which details pre-war prices, Ukraine comes in last of the ten countries listed. In contrast, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – all EU members – occupy the top three places. Many Ukrainian refugees cannot afford more expensive countries in the West, given the stark difference between foreign costs of living and the modest incomes many Ukrainians earn. Perhaps this is why, according to the data, more than 23,000 Ukrainians now in Moldova – about 21 per cent of the total – came there via Romania, an EU member country whose average cost of living ranks above both its eastern neighbours.  In other words, Romania may have been too costly for most Ukrainians to live in – but close enough, in more figurative terms, to bridge the distance between danger and safety.

Mustiats, who in Odesa worked as a beauty products salesperson, provides a compelling example of the longer displacement phenomenon. She and her daughter, Sonya, reside in a charity home, given their difficulty in affording Chișinău rents. The family is able to live rent-free at the charity home, and Mustiats volunteers there, performing “simple work” as part of her place in the community. She runs the communal laundry and sometimes cleans the rooms for when her fellow Ukrainians come to Chișinău, for periods as undetermined as her own, before they leave again.

The Mustiats family’s experience is just one story among the many thousands of Ukrainians settling into longer-term plans for living, or at least surviving, in Moldova. And many Ukrainians, the Mustiats family included, had much to lose when the war came to them.

“At the beginning of our stay [in Chișinău], I was almost in shock. Gradually got used to it. It took the most effort to adapt to the fact that I live as a ‘guest’ and not in my apartment, to accept the rules of residence”, Mustiats said. “It is really difficult to change a stable, good life for a refugee life, without a definite plan of action for the future.”

One day at a time

Mustiats’s status as a female refugee reflects other prevailing trends in the UNHCR data. Women, and those with children who have travelled to Moldova with them, make up the strong majority of arrivals and those remaining in-country. At 37 per cent, women are the single-largest group by gender and age. Boys and girls make up 24 per cent and 22 per cent respectively of all Ukrainians currently in Moldova, almost half the total. Far behind are male refugees to Moldova, given wartime laws barring men aged 18 to 60 from leaving Ukraine. Just 17 per cent of all Ukrainians now present in Moldova are male.

Any silver lining in the Mustiats’ Chișinău experience is hard to find but real. Sonya has shown progress in speech and development, her mother said. The girl has also made many friends among the Moldovan and refugee children at the school she attends. Sonya likes her time at school so much, in fact, that weekends are a source of disappointment. “Sonya gets so upset on Saturdays, when she can’t go to the kindergarten,” her mother said.

As for the future, no one in the Mustiats family can know when, or even if, they might be able to return to Odesa. The outlook darkened this summer, when on June 23rd a Russian rocket attack damaged part of Transfiguration Cathedral, a historic church in Odesa’s downtown. The site has suffered aggression in the past, when in 1936 the Bolsheviks destroyed the structure completely. The residents of Odesa rebuilt the church in the post-Soviet period and consecrated it in 2010. Odesa since June has suffered further attacks, including an overnight set of drone and missile strikes between August 13th and 14th.

Strikes on symbolic sites like the Transfiguration Cathedral, where Ukrainian culture is as much the target of aggression as are human beings, further compel Ukrainians to remain abroad for longer.

To a query about her plans for the years ahead, Mustiats’s response was shorter than the question. “That’s difficult to answer,” she said. “I still don’t know how everything will turn out.”

 From dangerous Mariupol to Moldovan safety

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Moldova’s large refugee population, the country’s Ukrainians have also settled beyond Chișinău. The town of Orhei, 50 kilometres north of the capital, has offered refuge, and in some cases employment, for the town’s new arrivals. Two women interviewed for this story, from the south-eastern city of Mariupol and the Donetsk region respectively, understand the ongoing effects of displacement from their own difficult personal experiences.

Before the war, Lyudmila Omelyanenko, 64, served as head lawyer of the social protection department at a Mariupol metallurgical plant. A proud mother and grandmother, Omelyanenko remembered having “everything a person could dream of” – not least a spacious apartment, a career and a seemingly stable future. When rockets began falling and Russian soldiers invaded the city, Omelyanenko took shelter in basements along with her husband, son and grandson. Their situation, like that of thousands in the famously besieged city, grew increasingly dire as food, water and safety ran short. Her family survived in part by gathering food and fluids themselves, often under cover of darkness to avoid confrontations with the occupying forces.

“We went out at night and collected dirty snow. We filtered it through rags and drank it. We also drank water from muddy puddles,” Omelyanenko said. She maintained a shred of hope until learning that a Russian rocket had hit their apartment building, destroying the home of which they had been so proud.

After her apartment’s destruction, Omelyanenko remembers simply wanting to die. “I was looking to kill myself. I was searching for the right tree branch,” she said.

Sensing their conditions would soon become impossible, even deadly, the Omelyanenko family chose to flee Ukraine altogether. A winding journey from Mariupol, in Ukraine’s southeast, to Moldova would require a total of three months, with their escape from the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine taking up a month of that period. The family finally arrived in Moldova last May, eventually settling in Orhei.

Omelyanenko remembers feeling a renewed sense of hopelessness once in Moldova, given her deepening realisation of all she had lost. She began attending a new, small Baptist church in the city, where church workers prayed with her, read encouraging passages from the Bible and offered her a sense of hope for whatever may yet lie ahead. Meeting the church workers and listening to their Bible readings “brought me back to life”, Omelyanenko said.

As her time in Moldova stretches well past the one-year mark, she and her husband continue to attend their Orhei church, while her son and grandson have since settled in Western Europe.  Omelyanenko, the onetime head lawyer, now survives on humanitarian assistance.

 From Donbas to helping others

Lyudmila Kulikova, 58, fled the town of Kurakhove, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk oblast, arriving in Moldova last April with her husband, two daughters and three grandchildren. Formerly a staff member at a secondary school, Kulikova lives in Orhei, like the Omelyanenko family. She has found a job working at a cannery in her adopted town.

Kulikova already knows her sojourn in Moldova will be a long one. She has made up her mind not to return to her Ukrainian town in the next year or so, given the hostilities in the Donbas especially. Like Omelyanenko and many other Ukrainians, she has no physical home to return to.

“Our houses were razed to the ground,” Kulikova said. Kulikova’s decision to leave her country stems directly from the demise of Mariupol, some 120 kilometres from Kurakhove. She, too, endured a time hiding in basements, spending nearly four weeks without easy access to food or water, under shelling and the strain of surviving underground.

She said that “After the Russians took Mariupol, we decided to run away, because living in basements with three small children was no longer bearable!” Their departure from Donbas brought them face-to-face with the human wreckage of the early war. “Everywhere was the sickening smell of burning and decaying corpses,” she recalled. “I don’t even understand how the [grand]kids survived this.”

Kulikova decided with her family to flee their town, despite the fact that her husband and one of their daughters have mobility issues. Travelling mostly at night – when bypassing Russian checkpoints is easier, according to Kulikova – they ultimately found their way to helping hands. The family encountered a patrol of Ukrainian soldiers.

“Thank God they were ours,” Kulikova said. If the soldiers had been Russian instead, “they would have killed us.”

Once the Ukrainian patrol understood the urgency of the family’s needs and how long they had been travelling, they arranged transportation for them as far as Odesa. From there, amid a mass of fellow refugees, the Kulikova family entered Moldova, and later received permission from Moldovan authorities to settle in Orhei.

The Kulikova family likewise attend the Orhei church that helped the Omelyanenkos. They work as volunteers as part of the church’s activities. They also volunteered for three days – they were “lucky enough to help,” in Kulikova’s words – at a children’s festival in Orhei. Thus Kulikova and her kin appear to be making the best of an extraordinarily challenging time. Once settled in safety, they have turned to help others. They seem prepared to do so for some time, since a return home is impossible for now.

Observers of Moldova’s refugee situation may find a dose of encouragement by looking ahead. Amid the few certainties of Russia’s war on Ukraine, one is that Moldova’s more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees are safer in their host country. Moldova, as a pro-western state still shaking off the poor governance of its Soviet past, may have in its midst a group of Ukrainians with much to offer, such as a burst of new labour, a bump in a declining population, and a slice of the populace grateful to a country that welcomed them in a moment of greatest need.

While Ukrainian forces fight a physical war across their country, Ukraine’s refugees continue to wage their own daily battles in their host countries around the world. And if the Mustiats, Omelyanenko and Kulikova families are managing to survive, then perhaps the rise of longer-term stays in Moldova suggests a path for survival for the Ukrainians who have made Moldova home. 

William Fleeson is a writer and journalist. His writing has appeared or will soon in BBC Travel, National Geographic, The New York Times, Newsweek, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated, most recently, for The Best American Essays anthology. www.willfleeson.com

European Union, Moldova, Russia's war against Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees