By Nathan M Greenfield
Recent interviews with Ukrainian students and a separate survey designed to extract information about the experiences of over 1,600 students since the Russian invasion reveal the psychological damage and the social fallout suffered by young Ukrainians as a result of the war.
To understand the psycho-social impact of a year of war on students since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I interviewed seven students at three different universities and used a survey of 1,685 students, “Ukrainian Students After a Year of War: Study-abroad experience, war, trauma, challenges, and needs”, conducted by Anna Ishchenko of Socioplus, the Scientific Research Centre of Applied Sociology at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (ISKPI), and Professor Olha Demydenko, who teaches in ISKPI’s faculty of linguistics.
More than 1,500 of the survey’s respondents were in Ukraine. To understand the impact of the war on professors, I interviewed five professors at VSPNU, KSE and ISKPI.
The survey was conducted between 22 February 2023 and 3 March 2023 – ie, after the heavy missile and drone bombardment that began in late 2022 had lessened. This fact might appear to explain why 46.5% of the students answered that they did not feel stress and another 22.5% answered that they couldn’t say if they felt more stress.
Yet, these results accorded with what they told me about their experiences earlier in the war. Yulia Tsuiryk, a first-year sociology student at ISKPI, for example, who is studying conflict resolution and mediation, went to the bomb shelter only twice: on the first night of the war and once in her home city of Khmelnytskyi (300km south west of Kyiv) where she went after the war began before returning to Kyiv in June 2022.
Even during the heavy bombings, she remained in her apartment building in the centre of Kyiv, avoiding the cold basement because, she said, “if the building collapses, they will not be able to save us”. Instead, she took responsibility for herself, making sure that when the air-raid sirens sounded, she went to her bathroom because it provides the protection of two walls.
More information:
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20230329113019701&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GLNL0733