How three Ukrainian scientists are surviving Russia’s brutal war

Olena Prysiazhna fled Russia’s invasion twice. On 25 February, the 35-year-old plasma physicist raced out of Kyiv to her home village 80 kilometres away, hoping to escape the coming attacks on Ukraine’s capital city. Two weeks later, Russian shells began raining down on the previously peaceful village. A rocket exploded in her neighbour’s back garden.

“It broke our windows, doors, roof, but no one was hurt, thank God,” says Prysiazhna. “After that, there were several attacks and we had to act.”

Prysiazhna knew it was time to get out of Ukraine. With her sister Oksana, her mother and her German shepherd puppy Tokay, she set out to leave. After several days traversing the country, they walked across the border to Poland with no clear plan as to where they were going.

In the 10 weeks since the Russian invasion, an estimated 3,100 civilians have died in Ukraine and more than 5 million Ukrainians have fled the country — creating Europe’s biggest refugee crisis in a generation. The war will indelibly alter the lives of tens of millions of Ukrainian people at home and abroad.

Among them are the country’s estimated 95,000 researchers. Until now, they were part of a modernizing scientific system that was beginning to throw off its Soviet-era shackles and integrate more closely with European research. Six months ago, there was a lot of interest in Ukraine and young people were heading up research departments, says George Gamota, a Ukrainian-born US physicist who left in 1944 and helped Ukraine to develop its scientific system after it gained independence in 1991. Now, the war has destroyed science centres in cities such as Kharkiv, Sumy and Mariupol and “a complete reconstruction will be needed once the war ends”, says Gamota.

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It is not yet possible to say how many researchers are casualties or have fled the war, although Gamota suggests that some 22,000 — mainly women with children — have left. Scientists worldwide have stepped up to help their colleagues through grassroots efforts such as #ScienceForUkraine, which has collated thousands of job offers at labs worldwide for Ukrainian researchers in need. Governments, universities and organizations such as CARA, the Council for At-Risk Academics in London, are also helping refugee scientists to resettle.

“There’s a lot of pressure in universities from academics and students” across the world, says Stephen Wordsworth, CARA’s executive director. “There’s a great awareness that there are people like them in other countries that are under considerable threat.” CARA is currently helping to place around 100 Ukrainian academics in research positions, mostly in the United Kingdom. “Many of them are optimistic in the circumstances. They’re thinking in terms of, ‘Maybe in six months’ time I’ll be able to go home again’,” he says.

And, in many cases, research and university teaching is continuing where possible at Ukrainian institutions, led by scientists who have remained at home or by refugee researchers who continue their work from overseas. “There’s quite a lot of work being done to keep universities functioning,” says Wordsworth.

Nature spoke to three Ukrainian researchers whose lives have been upended by Russia’s brutal invasion. Here are their stories.

‘I wanted to return power to my hands’

Olena Prysiazhna, plasma physicist, fled Ukraine for the Netherlands.

When the Russian invasion started, Prysiazhna didn’t think it would last. “We didn’t want to believe that this was happening. We always thought, ‘It’s going to be one or two weeks and this madness will be over’,” says Prysiazhna, who works at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Leaving their village, where her family had spent most of their lives, was difficult — emotionally and logistically. “We didn’t have a plan,” she says. “It’s an unusual feeling, when you don’t know where to go or what to do. Usually you have control of your life, but in war, you lose control of your life no matter what you do.”

Without access to a car, after about a week travelling inside the country, they found a driver who helped them get to the Polish border. They walked across and were helped by volunteers and taken to a refugee centre. From there, they took the next bus — regardless of destination — that would allow their dog on board. (“He’s part of our family,” says Prysiazhna. “We couldn’t leave him behind.”)

They ended up in the Netherlands on 16 March. The first days were hard, says Prysiazhna. The trauma of war completely drained their energy, and she and her family initially managed only essential tasks, such as walking the dog. But after a while, Prysiazhna wanted to do something useful. “I wanted to return power to my hands.”

Prysiazhna contacted a Ukrainian scientist in the Netherlands, medical physicist Oleksandra Ivashchenko, who had studied at Prysiazhna’s university and had reached out to her to offer support. Ivashchenko, at Leiden University Medical Center, was helping to coordinate the #ScienceForUkraine effort.

With Ivashchenko’s help, Prysiazhna and her sister, who is also a physicist, have begun visiting and talking to researchers at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research in Eindhoven. It’s still early days — Prysiazhna is exploring which direction her research could take and whether an arrangement might be formalized. One option might be to continue her work on optical emission spectroscopy analysis, a technique that can probe the properties of plasmas. “If we want to make everything better, we have to work. We have to make our small steps and do everything we can,” says Prysiazhna.

‘I thought I had forgotten this horror’: Ukrainian scientists stand in defiance

She continues to teach online classes to her students in Ukraine. “Even during some research, I make a small break of one or two hours and conduct classes.”

But there are challenges ahead — Prysiazhna is still trying to sort out her visa and work documents before she can settle in earnest, and the future is deeply uncertain. She follows news about Ukraine daily and hopes to return, but doesn’t know whether she’ll still have a home if she does.

Amid the trauma of the war and her flight, Prysiazhna has found some comfort in the people who have helped her. “I was surprised by how people can behave in a good way — how much good I got from people who I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t even express how important it is.”

But the brutality that this war has surfaced has shocked her deeply. “What’s happening right now to some cities, I can’t believe that someone can do that.”

For now, Prysiazhna wants people to know about the horrors of this war. “I’d like to remind people, because silence is participation,” she says. “The most important thing is being human. Don’t ever forget.”

‘I will do anything to help Ukrainian scientists’

Taras Oleksyk, genomics researcher in Michigan, assisting people from Ukraine.

This year, Taras Oleksyk is hoping to welcome to his laboratory a person with an unusual CV. Valerii Pokrytiuk, a young data engineer, has been accepted to do a master’s in bioinformatics at Oleksyk’s lab at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. But first, Pokrytiuk will serve his nation on the front line as a medic in the Ukrainian army.

Pokrytiuk won’t be the only Ukrainian in the lab. Oleksyk was born in the country and left in 1992 to finish graduate school in the United States. A genomics researcher, he has since the early 2010s spearheaded an effort to chart the genome diversity of Russia and Ukraine, which he calls a “desert” in population genetics. (Tensions between the two nations have doomed that project, says Oleksyk, leading him to create a new one focusing on Ukrainian genomics.) But since Russia invaded his country of birth on 24 February, Oleksyk has devoted his work and personal life to a different purpose: helping Ukrainian researchers in any way he can.

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When the war broke out, the first challenge was assisting one of his graduate students, Khrystyna Shchubelka, to get out of Ukraine, where she was organizing a genomics collaboration with a lab there. Shchubelka, who is Ukrainian, had also taken her baby to visit relatives. Her flights were cancelled and she had to walk across the border to Slovakia, says Oleksyk, who helped to raise money for flights to get her back to the United States.