On the morning of February 24, 2022, Yevgeniia Pasichniuk He didn’t know where he was going when he put his two children, ages three and 12, in his car and left his house, an hour from kyiv, while he heard the first Russian bombs fall on Ukrainian territory. I also didn’t know how long that trip would last, just as I didn’t know Look Bunz, that at that same time she put her four daughters in another vehicle and left for the Polish border, leaving behind her husband and the restaurant businesses she ran with him in the capital of Ukraine.
Heading to the border with Romania they left from Kharkiv Andrii Onofriichuk, his wife, his two school-age children and their 79-year-old grandmother, also without a defined destination or scheduled date for return, just as the university professor was unaware of that date. Natalia Lytvynwho had arrived in Barcelona with his students five days before the war began and could not return. Yevgeniia, Olha, Andrii and Natalia ended up settling in Spain, like the almost 250,000 Ukrainians who have taken refuge in our country since February 2022, and are still here four years lateras long as a conflict lasts that broke their lives forever and forced them to start a new one 3,000 kilometers from their home.
The Ukrainian exile residing in Spain constitutes an astonishing case of resilience for their ability to adapt to a country and a language very different from their own without that cultural distance having prevented them from getting ahead, finding work, setting up businesses and allowing the youngest to continue training. It is also an example of tenacious resistance against oblivion of a war that no longer makes the big news headlines or is heard in public conversation, but that continues to be present in their lives through an unstoppable impulse to search news of his country on his mobile and a diffuse “feeling of guilt”easily detectable in their voices, for being able to live in a country “peaceful and happy like Spain” while theirs is devastated every day by a rain of Russian missiles and drones. be here “with my heart there” It is their particular way of punishing a war that, after four years and thousands of dead, there is no end in sight.
Living on pause
“At first I didn’t know what to do, but I saw that this situation was getting longer and I decided to look for my happiness and that of my children in Spain, although every minute I remember my country. “I can’t keep my life on hold waiting for the outcome of a war that I don’t know when it will come,” he says. Yevgeniia as a summary of his four years of stay in our country – “I chose it because it was the most away from the Russian border and because my son had started studying Spanish at school and I thought he could help us as a translator,” he clarifies, and where he has only found “shows of support and empathy”first in the woman from Castellón who welcomed them into her home, and then in the company Catalan pharmacist who has hired her and made possible her return to the professional sector she worked in when she lived in Ukraine.
Divorced two weeks before the war began, at 40 years old her main concern is that her children see her happy. And he is: “I’m glad to hear you speak Spanish and Catalan perfectly and see that they already have many friends here. “I also studied to learn the language and now I have signed up for bachata classes,” he says from his home in Ripollet (Barcelona). The other thing, the uprooting of exile, is carried inside: “I feel like a cut flowermy previous life only exists in my memory and I know that I can’t do anything to get it back. Today I am not thinking about my return to Ukraine, but about watch my children grow healthy, safe and happy here,” he confesses.
Yevgeniia Pasichniuk. Ukrainian refugee in Spain, donating blood on a recent visit to kyiv. / EPC
Today I am not thinking about my return to Ukraine, but about seeing my children grow up healthy, safe and happy here.
A Look Bunz She was also distressed by the fact that her four daughters, who were between three and 13 years old when they fled Ukraine, they saw her weak or scared, and she has had to face two wars during this time: the one being fought in her country against the Russian troops and the lymphoma that they detected him shortly after settling in Spain, “a result, probably, of the emotional burden of those first months as a refugee,” she ventures.
In the memory remain the nights that they had to sleep in the car upon her arrival – “who would want to rent a house to a Ukrainian refugee with four girls in her care?” she assumes – until she managed to find accommodation in The Garriga (Barcelona), where the five live today.
Also left in memory are two years of treatment what he had to face to overcome cancer and the impact that hearing the russian drones exploding next to their house on one of the visits they made to kyiv to visit their family. “Drones are a lottery, They can kill you or your neighbor. my country it’s not a safe place to raise four girls,” he acknowledges.
What is not part of his past, but of his everyday presentis the dread with which he awaits each night emoticon that his relatives send him from Ukraine to confirm that they are still alive. “It’s already part of my routine, you get used to that restlessness,” he says. She has had to reinvent herself: from a restaurant businesswoman to oncological psychologista profession that he will begin to defend shortly. “War and cancer have taught me that the future does not exist, only the present existsand mine and my daughters’ is in Spain, not in ukraine”, he states.
Olha Bunz. Ukrainian refugee in Spain / EPC
The war has taught me that the future does not exist, only the present exists, and mine and my daughters’ is in Spain, not in Ukraine
The permission of Temporary Protection that protects Ukrainian refugees in our country is renewed every year – the next update will come into force in March and will provide coverage until spring 2027 – and gives the right to legal stay and access to social aidbut the majority of the adults who arrived four years ago – six out of ten are women -, they are working or have set up a business. “Ukrainians are very entrepreneurial, we don’t like to live off subsidies, we immediately embark on some project,” he points out. Andriy Kushnir, who has been in Spain for 20 years and during this time has been part of the Association of Ukrainians of Alicante, a province that concentrates the largest community of refugees in the Slavic country.
Andrii Onofriichuk and his wife, Tetyana Makushenko, are proof of that Ukrainian entrepreneurial spirit: in Luhanskwhere they lived until the war broke out in 2014, he worked as a civil engineer and she ran a marketing company; in Jarkovwhere they later settled, they set up another business; and now they lead from Reus an online floral services store and an events agency.
In the summer of 2022, after spending six months in Romania, they headed to Spain motivated by an intuition: “On vacation, we could feel that people here are kind and treat children well,” he says. The three and a half years they have been in our country have confirmed that suspicion: “We are very grateful to Spain for giving us the opportunity to live in peace, for our children to receive a good education and to be able to develop and work,” they say. Their future plans do not include the idea of doing the suitcases back home: “We feel that this could be the country for us where we can build our future,” they confess.
Andrii Onofriichuk and Tetyana Makushenko. Ukrainian refugees in Spain / EPC
My wife and I feel that Spain can be for us and our children the country in which to build our future.
Dumps with Ukraine
Spain is, after Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, the fourth state of the European Union which has welcomed more Ukrainian refugees since 2022, far above other neighboring countries such as France or Italy. “Some came because they had relatives here, others because the Spanish They dedicated a lot to Ukraine at the beginning of the war and the Government gave many facilities, and others because Spain has a very good image in Eastern Europe,” he says. Viktor Kazmiruk, president of the Association of Ukrainians of Tarragona ‘Khortytsya’, to explain the enormous number of his countrymen who arrived in our country fleeing the war.
The historian and university professor Natalia Lytvyn She did not choose Spain, but it was the destination that chose for her: she was in Barcelona on a study trip with her students from the kyiv University when the Russian invasion began and he could not return. “I came with a backpack for a week and I’ve been here for four years,” he summarizes.
At first she continued teaching her classes remotely, but the University ended up confronting her with a dilemma: either he returned, or he lost his professorship. At that time, in Spain he had begun an emotional relationship and had gotten married, and after a visit he made to kyiv in May 2025, during which he took the opportunity to film a documentary, he saw clearly that his place was no longer in Ukraine. “There they had gotten used to living in a war zone, but I didn’t sleep at night hearing missiles and drones near my window,” he says.
Natalia Lytvyn. Ukrainian refugee in Spain / EPC
I came with a backpack for a week and I’ve been here for four years. When the war is over I don’t see myself living in Ukraine but between the two countries
Lytvyn lives today in Vila-real (Castellón), She has a research scholarship at the Jaume I University and is homologating his academic degrees to be able to teach in Spain. “I’m happy here, but only half. We Ukrainians will never be well.” while the war lasts“, he is sincere. And when the bombs stop? “I don’t see myself returning to Ukraine, I see myself living between the two countries“, he responds, appealing to a proportion, “half and half” that he believes will mark the fate of the Ukrainian refugees who currently reside in Spain. “Many will return when the war is over, but at least half of the community, those who are already working in Spain, they will stay to live here”, he predicts.
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