Opinion | ‘We Have to Live Now’: Stories of a Home Out of Reach

For almost two years Tania Drobot, a 53-year-old math teacher from Kyiv, Ukraine, has lived in the home of Fiona and David Ion, in Moorhaven, Devon, on the southwest coast of England.

They have questions about each other’s cooking. Tania likes steamed meatballs, considers a plate of hot vegetables a salad and uses a lot of sumac; Fiona and David disagree on all counts. They have different tastes in clothes. She likes faux leather; they like comfortable rainwear. And they navigate daily life without really sharing a common language, occasionally gesturing to be understood.

On a weekend in March I sat in Fiona and David’s kitchen while Fiona made a cup of tea and talked about their plans to renovate Tania’s bedroom when she leaves, though they don’t know when that will be.

Tania sat at the kitchen table, stroking one of the household’s tortoiseshell cats, unable to understand much of our conversation.

In March 2022, a few weeks after Russia crossed into Ukraine, the British government, like several other countries, asked members of the public to volunteer to host Ukrainians in their homes. It was one of the first times that ordinary Britons had been given the opportunity and the financial assistance to house refugees. Sponsors had to commit to hosting for at least six months and agree to a home inspection. By September, 72,000 households had applied.

Six months has stretched, in some cases, to more than two years. By January 2024, more than 140,000 Ukrainians had come to stay in Britain. The British government maintains that its position is for them to eventually return — many were initially granted visas for up to three years, and those were extended by 18 months in February. For Ukrainians and their hosts, it’s been two years of being stuck in a liminal place between waiting and beginning, of plans made and abandoned, and expectations adjusted.

Moorhaven’s imposing, gothic architecture juts out of the rugged and open moorland of Dartmoor. The population is around 350. There is no school, no supermarket, no post office. Some locals are retired; some work in agriculture, law or education. The nearest bus stop is about a 20-minute walk.

About a dozen households in Moorhaven decided to offer their homes at the same time so that new arrivals wouldn’t be isolated, and Ukrainians, mostly women and children, started arriving in March and April of 2022. The children began attending a school in a nearby town. Some people found jobs, bought their first cars and found their own homes in nearby towns. Some went back to Ukraine. Some are still living with sponsors.

I’ve visited Moorhaven and the surrounding towns and villages several times in the past couple of years. At first I met women who were relieved to be out of harm’s way. On more recent visits, I could see that they were worn down by life lived in limbo — waiting for the war to end while not knowing if home is here or back in Ukraine.

“My soul is in Ukraine. But physically, it would be easier to stay here,” Olena Bilokrenytska said.

Olena, 48, came to Ivybridge, a small town next to Moorhaven, with her 74-year-old mother, Polina Zherdieva, and her dog, Asia, just over two years ago. They live with their sponsors, Jane Hitchings and Jonathon Haigh, who are retired.

Olena speaks English well. But Polina has found adapting particularly tough. Her attempts to learn English have been slow going, and her days consist of cooking, walking Asia and keeping up with news from Ukraine.

I first visited them in the summer of 2022. On that visit, I sat on the living room sofa with Polina, who told me in English that she was “waiting Putin kaput,” letting her hands, clasped in her lap, fall open.

On a more recent visit, in the spring, Olena was shut in her room preparing for an English exam, and Asia yapped at my ankles while Jane and Jonathon cooked. Polina was sitting on the sofa listening to Ukrainian news.

For some people, the fatigue of enduring a life away from home is too much. Many of the Ukrainians who fled the country in the wake of Russia’s invasion have returned in spite of the war. From what I’ve seen, those who don’t go back seem to reach a turning point, when home stops being the memory of a place that is out of reach and becomes the accumulation of recent experience. Questions people don’t have answers to are abandoned in favor of what is possible right now.

Valentyna Odnoviun, 61, arrived in Moorhaven from Kharkiv in April 2022 and stayed a little over a year before moving to the seaside city of Plymouth, about 15 miles away.

Her days are often spent on long walks past the gray stone buildings on the harborside. I joined her for a walk one weekend this spring. Despite the language barrier, we managed to talk a bit about her daily life: her English lessons and her new neighborhood, with its large warehouses that remind her of Kharkiv.

She volunteers in a nearby garden and sings with a local choir. Her main goal is to improve her English. It is the only goal that makes any immediate sense for someone who doesn’t know how long she will be here.

Back in London I got a WhatsApp message from her in Russian, which is commonly spoken in Kharkiv and which I had translated. “If you think about the future, you can drown in fantasies,” she wrote. “When you live in the past, the people around you hate you, don’t understand and don’t accept you. Therefore, there is only one way out: step by step, drop by drop, squeeze your past out of yourself. Replace it with new daily skills and work. Eventually, accept it, come to terms with it, find the positives, and enjoy life. Unfortunately, this process takes a lot of time.”

Homes for Ukraine, as the program is known, has not been perfect. Some relationships between sponsors and refugees have broken down. Some Ukrainians have even been left homeless. Yet it remains an example of something in recent British history that has largely worked well. Just weeks after the war began, and after years of polarizing debate about migration and tens of thousands of lives lost in the Mediterranean and English Channel, the British government asked ordinary people to open their homes to people fleeing conflict, and they did. The conflict in Ukraine has seen some seven times the amount of refugees coming into Europe than during the 2015 refugee crisis, without the same fatalities en route or political backlash. And, according to a study, many sponsors say they are up for doing it again — regardless of where that person is fleeing from.

Indeed one of the chief criticisms of the program is that it has been offered only to Europeans and that nothing similar has been offered to the refugees fleeing brutal wars in Gaza and Sudan, despite calls to do so. In May the government passed a controversial law to allow it to permanently deport thousands of asylum seekers who arrive in Britain by illegal means to Rwanda, regardless of whether they’ve ever been there.

Is the response to Ukraine an example of how differently refugees are treated when they look like the people who help them? Or an example of how far people will go to help others when they are given a direct means to do so? Either way, now that we know what a successful program looks like, shouldn’t we use it to help more people?

After more than two years of missing her sons and grandchildren in Ukraine, Tania lives in moments. I have seen her chase sheep on the moorland and splash in the cold, dark sea. Her phone is never out of reach, documenting the small details of her day. She continues her painstaking efforts to learn a language that doesn’t come easily and that she might have no use for in the future.

Fiona and Tania’s relationship is not uncomplicated. But when I asked Fiona how she thinks she’ll feel when Tania leaves, she didn’t waver.

“I know I’d miss her very much,” she said.