Oksana Dubyk, a former resident of Russian-occupied Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, is preparing to open a small bakery 1,200km away in Lviv. It took months to recover his body, and he was buried in Lviv’s historic Lychakiv cemetery only the following summer. “It’s hard – and harder for older people than for the young,” Dubyk says about the experience of displacement. Hanna Kutepova fled with her mother and two children from Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine in April 2022 and has settled in Lviv near the Polish border. Kulynych says the upheaval of the war has forced easterners and westerners to integrate more deeply, and that most displaced people have settled well in Lviv.

Source: The Irish Times October 27, 2025 21:31 UTC