Lviv in western Ukraine is 1,000km from the front line, but the war reverberates through a historic city that endures Russian air strikes, buries fallen soldiers nearly every day and offers a new start to easterners driven from their homes by fighting and occupation.
Some five million Ukrainians fled to Lviv after Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022 and, while the vast majority moved on to European Union states, at least 150,000 have settled here – some with the intention of staying forever, and others in the hope of going home if Ukraine can reclaim swathes of the east on the battlefield or through diplomacy.
Oksana Dubyk and her elderly father left besieged Mariupol on foot a month into the full-scale war, as Russian forces pummelled the industrial port in Donetsk region from land, sea and air.
A stranger escaping in his car stopped and drove them, under shelling, to the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, from where an evacuation train took them across the country to Lviv, just 70km from the Polish border.
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“I had a small backpack of belongings and in it was a little jar of caviar that I ate on that train with a spoon,” Dubyk (58) recalls. “I realised that I had another chance at life. Many people who have been forced to leave their hometowns have a strong sense of injustice. But I promised myself that I would not focus on the bad things.”
But there were hellish times ahead. Her husband, Ihor, had joined the defence of Mariupol as a volunteer, and after weeks without news of his fate she discovered that he had been badly wounded and seized by the Russians when the city fell.
Ihor, then 60, was released in a prisoner exchange in December 2022. As a survivor of captivity and severe injury he was not obliged to keep fighting, but he returned to his unit and died in battle in October 2023. 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. “At first I thought I would go home after two or three months,” she adds. “Now I have accepted that I will not go back. My husband is buried in Lviv, I have relatives here and I feel comfortable.”
Dubyk’s family links to the Lviv area made her adaptation easier, but many people arrived from the largely Russian-speaking east with no experience of or personal ties to western Ukraine, which is a stronghold of Ukrainian language and culture.
“I left with an emergency bag of documents, some medicines and a few belongings. The main thing was that I had my mum and my two children with me,” recalls Hanna Kutepova of their escape from Lysychansk in April 2022.
“I had never been to Lviv or western Ukraine,” she says of fleeing her largely Soviet-built industrial hometown in Luhansk region for a Unesco-listed city founded in the 13th century,
“It was all scary and strange at the start. We left under shelling and we were in shorts and T-shirts. When we got to Lviv on the train we saw people were still in coats and hats – it was still so cold here,” Kutepova says. “And it was interesting to see all the old buildings and little lanes, but hard to find your way around – like being in a labyrinth.”
The family had spoken Russian together in Lysychansk but the children already knew Ukrainian well from school. Within about six weeks they were calling Lviv home, says Kutepova, who teaches at a kindergarten close to the prefabricated housing where they and about 1,500 other displaced people live rent-free.
“We are very grateful for it,’ she adds. “We have one room for four of us, and when you think of the apartment you had before it is hard, but you have to forget that and accept how things are – it’s fine to make plans but this is the situation for now.”
Iryna Kulynych, Lviv’s deputy mayor for humanitarian issues, estimates that rental prices have doubled in the city due to the wartime influx of people. At the same time, schools and hospitals have coped with the new arrivals because many women and children have gone abroad, and there is a drastic shortage of workers in some sectors: “Anyone who wants work can find it,” she says.
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.
“Now it’s often hard to tell who’s a local and who’s a displaced person. I have colleagues on the council who came from the east,” she says. “But of course many people still hope to go home. Everywhere in Ukraine is good, but home is best.”
Dubyk has studied business management in Lviv and is now preparing to open a small bakery, which was her husband’s dream: “It will have a plaque on the wall,” she says, “saying that the bakery is in memory of him”.
