Until a year ago, if you asked Yevhen what his nationality was, he wouldn’t hesitate to say he was Portuguese. Or actually more Portuguese than Ukrainian. But that February 24, 2022 changed everything. At the time, he envisioned his future in the country that welcomed him and his family, and in recent years has often failed to return to see family and childhood friends. “After the invasion, I feel a rebirth of what our origins are. And the suffering caused by the invasion also makes us feel closer to our roots, to who we are.”
At the age of 30, this mechanical engineer living in Seixal has very vivid memories of his great vacations in Ukraine, in the town of Berezhany, in Ternopil. He arrived in Portugal when he was just over 10 years old, but he returned to his homeland every summer. In adulthood, however, these trips became less frequent. “Before the invasion, I hadn’t been there for about five years,” he tells DN, as his brother (who had stayed there) had since joined the family in Portugal.
Yevhen Doloshytsyy returns to 2014/15 to recall “a rapprochement of the Ukrainian people to European values” which coincided with his entry into adulthood and the attainment of more maturity. “From that moment on, I became much more patriotic. And when the invasion happened, it brought with it the awareness that somewhere in Ukraine there is a person like me who just wasn’t lucky. Who is not in a safe country, like me. “.
Yevhen’s feeling is the same for many young people of his generation, who emigrated to Portugal at a young age and spent their entire lives – and education – here. The parents arrived in the early 2000s, alone at first, in an unprecedented wave of immigration from eastern countries. “Portugal was a very attractive destination at the time, it had jobs and good conditions for immigrants. And my parents had to have the means to educate me and give me good conditions in the future”.
After all, they did it. The son graduated in mechanical engineering and is now one of the employees of one of the largest energy companies in the country. This was also his father’s education and profession in Ukraine. Like thousands of fellow citizens, he and his mother, a chemical engineer, “had to opt for unskilled jobs upon arrival in Portugal”, meaning that truck driver and wife [de limpeza], respectively. “They had a stable life, with a certain status in society, and suddenly they had to go to a completely foreign country, work in jobs that are not what they aspired to”.
“For a young person whose parents are immigrants and in this situation, there is a great motivation during school and university not to let them down,” confesses Yevhen, who never tires of assessing the performance of the public school in all of its courses. Prices.
The war has been a rollercoaster ride, however unfortunate the expression may sound to you. “I think at the beginning we were all more pessimistic about the Ukrainian resistance, but over time we realized that the conflict was going to last longer. [a guerra] has taken makes it very unpredictable. And now that it has managed to prove that Europe can survive the winter almost regardless of what Russian gas was, there is a prospect of a war that does not seem to be short-lived,” he told DN.
Portugal’s “impressive” response
The reaction of Portuguese society was overwhelming to him. “What happened was impressive, from the welcome to the mobilization of support. Portugal has also always been at the forefront of the political response. This Portuguese-Ukrainian says he was “very lucky to have my parents in a country like Portugal”.
Nataliya Bekh’s son will say the same, now that he is a doctor and has started his own family. She, who has been working with refugees and migrants in the central region for several years, never imagined she would experience that of her own country. In addition, having been on sick leave for three years – due to an accident at work – he has not been able to do everything he would like, from Coimbra, where he lives, and has created the Pacefull Paralell Association, dedicated to welcoming migrants .
Nataliya became known to the media in 2015, when she led the process of welcoming the first Syrian refugees, through ADFP, an institution in Miranda do Corvo. Born in Kherson, on the border with Crimea, he is a rare example of someone who managed to advance his career in Portugal. When she arrived here, almost 30 years ago, she was still a primary school teacher. After a language course in Portuguese at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, he went on to do a Masters in Public Administration at the Faculty of Law.
“I finished with an 18. I’m still considered the best student,” she recalled to DN, adding to a time when she worked as a maid at the same time. In 2012, he came across migrations at CES (Centro de Estudos Sociais), where he meanwhile started working, in services, when he decided to do a PhD in Sociology of Law, in defense of the thesis “Law, Justice and Citizenship in the 21st century”. She eventually became technical director at ADFP, leading the process of hosting a group of 13 refugees in Penela, with whom she still maintains contact. She left that association and founded one herself, in Coimbra.
For a year she has been concerned about her father, who is over 80 years old, and her brother, a soldier, always on the front lines of the war. Around here, she is now worried about the 15,000 or so children who are still out of school. He believes there was a lack of leadership in the process. But that doesn’t mean he disdains Portugal, where “our integration model is the best in the world,” he says.
Businessman Roman Kurtysh, 37, was one of the interlocutors with official entities in Portugal, on behalf of the association he founded a year ago, the Ukrainian refugees – UAPT, a non-profit organization that restores an old seminary, near Ourém , transformed become the first
Support for war wounded
Born in Novodnistrovsk, near Chernivsti, he arrived in Portugal in September 2003. He came for a year (the university leave), with the idea of attending Euro 2004 and spending time with his parents and brother. In the end it stayed. Today it owns several civil construction, import and export companies in the Lisbon region. “In 2022, we carried out 6 humanitarian flights, which allowed us to bring 1,615 refugees to Portugal, 462 of them children,” he tells DN. “When I saw the images of women alone with children crossing the border, with temperatures below freezing, and when I saw the conditions in which they were assigned, I realized I had to do something”.
He never imagined the war would last so long. As the months passed, the revolt was not appeased: “Russia is waging war against civilians. If you want to show that you are strong, show it on the battlefield”. Roman believes that with the support of Europe, Ukraine will be able “to launch a counter-attack and defend our territory”.
“I believe that we will leave and win this war,” says the businessman, proud of the way Portugal has handled the whole process, whether it be in terms of shelter or support for the Zelensky government.
Source: DN
