From Kyiv to Glasgow - a Ukrainian family's desperate race to reach Scotland

IT was on the ninth day of the war that Vlad and Natallia decided they needed to take their six-year-old daughter Margarita and flee for their lives from Kyiv.

They had spent the previous days and nights living in an improvised bomb shelter in their hallway. “Warplanes were flying overhead. The explosions were so bad the house was shaking,” Vlad explains. “Natallia had to cover Margarita with her body and I covered both of them with mine.”

Life has been a blur since February 24. When Natallia woke up on the morning of the invasion, she jad no idea her country was at war. “A colleague texted me near six and said ‘what are we going to do?’. I didn’t understand what she meant.” Natallia went online and discovered Russia had invaded. “Later that morning the first Russian fighter planes flew over our home.” Since then, she has felt nothing but “anger and hate towards the Russian government”.

As the assault intensified, the couple had to tell Margarita what to do if they were killed in front of her. “It was hard,” Vlad says, in near-perfect English. “We explained what to do if we weren’t moving. It still hurts me now to think about it: looking in your daughter’s eyes when she’s asking ‘why won’t you be moving?’. I told her that would mean we were dead, and we couldn’t help her anymore, that she should call Natallia’s family and try to save herself. Don’t sit beside us, we said, save yourself.”

The Abramov family - Vlad, Natallia and Margarita

Today, the family is en route to Scotland as refugees. They have been offered shelter by a Glasgow family under the Homes for Ukraine scheme after Scottish refugee workers paired them up. The system, however, has been severely criticised for its complexity, slowness and unfairness. Britain is the only European country that requires visas for Ukrainian refugees.

While the family may be safely out of Ukraine, leaving home broke their hearts. Natallia’s father died shortly before the invasion. It is now 40 days since his death, Natallia explains. In the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, that is a significant date: a time when families pay respects to their dead.

The Abramovs had to rush funeral arrangements. “He was cremated because we were supposed to bury him in a different region of Ukraine, but we never received the ashes and he can’t be properly buried,” Vlad explains. Natallia begins to cry, the agony of grief etched on her face. “She doesn’t even know where the ashes are.”

Natallia has also left her brother behind. “He’s waiting his turn to join the army,” she explains. “He has to protect our country, risk his life.”

During their escape from Kyiv, the family drove for 12 straight hours to the border with the word “Child” pasted to their windscreen in case Russians opened fire. Margarita had to wear nappies as there was no possibility of stopping.

What made the journey even more terrifying is the fact that Vlad is a Russian national who settled in Ukraine years ago and married into a Ukrainian family. A Ukranian-Russian marriage is as common as an English-Scottish marriage so there are tens of thousands of couples in the same predicament as the Abramovs. Although Vlad loathes his homeland today, that wouldn’t have stopped Ukrainian military mistaking him for “a spy or saboteur”. Vlad, who is 42, is a law graduate but before the war worked in the organic food business. Natallia, aged 38, is an accountant. Margarita was just about to enter her first year at school.

When the family finally made it over the border into Moldova – the poorest country in Europe, currently sheltering 250,000 Ukrainians –people there were fearful. Moldovans believe they are next on Putin’s hit list.

So, the Abramovs travelled on to Romania, ending up in Timisoara. They were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply in Moldova as that was “the first safe country” they entered.

“It wasn’t safe at all,” says Vlad. The family felt unable to settle in Romania anyway, as they can’t speak the language. Both speak English -– though Natallia not as well as Vlad – and so they began looking for passage to nations like Britain, Australia or Canada.

It was at this point that they learned of the UK’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. They scoured the web, emailing organisations like the Red Cross, finally making contact with Glasgow’s refugee charity Positive Action in Housing. Its chief executive Robina Qureshi paired them quickly with the family of Dr Rachel Smith in Glasgow.

As Ukrainian citizens, Natallia and Margarita are able to apply for visas for safe haven in Britain. For Vlad, however, it’s much harder due to his Russian nationality. He is trying to secure the right to travel with his wife and child through visa application offices in Bucharest, involving 400-mile journeys to and from their base in Timisoara.

Natallia and Margarita could move on through Europe, to Germany or France, as Ukrainian refugees but until Vlad gets the right papers he can’t travel with them. “My girls are stuck here with me,” he says. “My Russian nationality is slowing them down.”

Even in Romania, the threat of war menaces the population, as the country neighbours Ukraine and there are fears fighting could spill over the border. “The Romanians are great people, they’ve helped us a lot, but we just want to go west as far as we can,” Vlad says. “I feel myself an anchor

– like a broken leg – holding my family back from going to the safest place. I hate to say this, but I’ve started to hate my identity, my nationality, my country. Russia is doing the same things they fought against in World War Two. It’s unbelievable.”

The Putin regime was part of the reason Vlad came to Ukraine, but it was love which made him settle. “I met Natallia, we fell in love, we got married and I stayed.” Contrary to Putin’s propaganda, Vlad says he has experienced no discrimination whatsoever during his years in Ukraine as a Russian national. Many of his family in Russia, however, are “poisoned with propaganda” and believe the Kremlin’s lies. As the war intensified, and his family heard first-hand reports from Vlad of what was happening, “they started to believe us and were shocked”.

Although the idea of separating horrifies them, if Vlad is unable to get a UK visa there is a chance they will have to part. “Obviously we don’t want to separate, but if the situation became dangerous here, I’ll send them to safety because it’s easier for me to survive,” Vlad says. “We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We can’t sleep properly anymore. It’s very hard for Margarita – she couldn’t even take her toys with her.”

Yesterday, however, as they settled into temporary accommodation in Romania, Margarita smiled for the first time in days when her parents took her to a playground. Any loud bangs, though, still make the little girl jump. Natallia was able to go to church and pray for her father. “It’s taken a toll on us all,” Vlad says. Every phone call home involves conversations with friends who tell them “do you remember that house? This shopping centre? It’s gone now”.

The visa application process has been tortuous. “It’s very confusing,” Vlad says. Official documents needed to be translated, and the website kept crashing while the application form was being filled in – it took days to complete, and money is running out.

The Abramovs have spoken online to the Smith family who will be sheltering them in Glasgow. There is relief in their voices as they describe how kind the Smiths have been. “They have a daughter the same age as Margarita and there’s a good school nearby,” Vlad says hopefully.

Vlad knows Britain quite well – he lived here as a student and learned English. Natallia, though, has never been here. She does, however, have a fondness for Scotland – thanks to being a fan of the Outlander series. One of the few times she smiles is when the couple joke about her crush on the lead character played by Sam Heughan.

Although they want to go back to Ukraine once war is over, Vlad fears he might never be able to return due to his Russian roots. Certainly, he will never go back to Russia. An “iron curtain” has fallen again, he says.

“It depends on how the war ends. If the Russians win we can’t go back, if Ukraine wins it may be impossible for me to live there. Kyiv might have been destroyed and the people might tear me apart, and they’d be right because they’re angry with Russia, I understand that.” Natallia, however, is intent on returning to pay respects to her dead father.

For now, they wait anxiously to hear if their visa applications are successful. “If we’re lucky and we can get to Scotland, I think for the first few days we’ll all just sleep,” says Vlad. “Then it will be time to think about jobs and an education for Margarita.”

The Scottish family

The Abramov family aren’t the first refugees Dr Rachel Smith has given a home. To date, the 46-year-old linguistics lecturer at Glasgow University has sheltered 10 people from nations like Iran, Zimbabwe, China and Somalia.

However, those she has helped before were very different to the Abramovs. Ukrainians are welcome here if they have the right paperwork. However, Smith’s other guests weren’t wanted by the British Government. They were all desperate to have asylum applications approved and were, says Smith, “victims of the Home Office’s policy of putting people into forced destitution”. Refugees not yet granted asylum are forbidden from working – a policy which reduces many to homelessness while “they’re ground down by bureaucratic violence”.

Although few Ukrainians have arrived in Britain so far, the difference with which they are treated by the Government – compared to those fleeing war in places like Syria – is telling, Smith feels. “This refugee crisis has been framed so differently from previous ones.” The entire asylum system, she believes, “is a deeply, desperately, fundamentally racist process”.

dr rachel smith

Smith and her family – she and her partner have three children – have previously worked with Positive Action in Housing, providing refugees shelter. So when chief executive Robina Qureshi contacted them about the Abramovs, the Smiths quickly agreed to help.

Smith, however, is troubled by the Homes for Ukraine scheme. It feels like a “scam” by the Government, she says. Finding homes and matching refugees with families is being done by ordinary people, charity workers, and refugees themselves. Smith says it feels “dangerous” – anybody could offer rooms to vulnerable women and children fleeing war, without first going through safety checks.

When it comes to helping refugees, the Government, she says, has “privatised it, outsourced it”. Conservatives are leaving the public “to fill in the gaps”.

Smith also feels the scheme “has been made as difficult as possible”. At one point, she waited nearly four hours on the phone for information from the Home Office. It took the Smiths and Abramovs days of talking together on WhatsApp to complete documentation. “We must have exchanged hundreds of messages,” she says. Given Vlad has near-perfect English, it raises the question how refugees with no English or online access would cope. Once the forms are completed, they go to an outsourced private company for processing.

Due to the system’s complexity, Smith says, “it’s a hope rather than an expectation” that she’ll see the Abramovs soon. If – when – they arrive, the Smiths will provide a “base camp” for them to find their feet.

There is one treat the Smiths have in store for the Abramovs, though. They discovered that Natallia is an Outlander fan, so they plan is to take the family “out into the hills” when they arrive in the hope that the beauty of the Scottish countryside might help to begin healing the psychological wounds of war.

The campaigners

IT was Qureshi who brought the Abramovs and Smiths together. Her charity, Positive Action in Housing, has more than 400 Ukrainian families it is trying to settle in Scotland. So far, none have had visas approved -–even though the charity has 5,000 Scots offering homes.

The messages Qureshi receives from Ukraine are heartbreaking and desperate. There are mothers in ruined cities literally begging for their children to be taken to safety; children whose parents are staying to fight hoping for a home in Scotland. On and on the list goes with people trying to reassure Scots that they will make good guests and cause no problems when they arrive. It is hard to read.

Qureshi, who years ago pioneered the idea of ordinary families hosting refugees, is furious with the British Government. Why, she wants to know, is Britain the only European country insisting on visas for Ukrainian refugees?

Her small team is exhausted trying to match refugees with families – a job the Government should be doing if it cared, she says. “The Government has offloaded its responsibilities.”

Ukrainian families are being asked to fill in lengthy, complicated forms in the middle of war zones, and if they have non-Ukrainian family like Vlad, then they must travel hundreds of miles to application centres with money running out. “The process is tortuous,” she says. One family living in a war zone contacted her saying they had all the relevant paperwork for visas, like Ukrainian passports, but their baby didn’t. “They asked ‘will we be able to get the baby a visa?’. What happens in a situation like that? We don’t know. The Government is endangering people lives.”

Qureshi says Britain should change the rules so Ukrainians can come here with their passport or birth certificate, or proof that they have Ukrainian family. She also worries about poor Government oversight and desperate Ukrainian families ending up in homes where they face exploitation.

At the time of writing, the UK Government refuses to say how many Ukrainians have come to Britain under the Homes for Ukraine scheme. The first refugees are only beginning to trickle in whereas in Ireland, where visas aren’t required, 10,000 have already found homes.

“I don’t know of a single family that’s been let in,” says Qureshi. “Yet the UK is saying look how wonderful we are letting refugees in. Look in the mirror: we’re only giving the impression we’re helping … The UK Government has unleashed mayhem.

Qureshi says the Scottish Government should be putting constant pressure on the UK Government to lift visa requirements. UK officials should also be at the Ukraine border helping refugees get to Britain as quickly as possible, she says. “There’s no presence whatsoever. An investigation will one day have to take place into what the hell has happened.”

Sabir Zazai, Scottish Refugee Council chief executive, says the current system is “too little, too complex, too confusing and too late”. He says: “Imagine there are bombs dropping and you have to flee, then the next thing is you have to fill in a form and find a sponsor in the UK to invite you over. That’s not right. It’s not reflective of the gravity of the situation in Ukraine or the upwelling of public generosity. The responsibility the state has under the Refugee Convention has now been passed on to the public. It shows a lack of leadership – it’s basically ‘here’s your £350, now take a refugee’.”

Zazai is himself a refugee who fled the Taliban as a teenager, entering Britain terrified in the back of a lorry. His family remains stuck in Kabul, but he is now an honorary doctor from Glasgow University and one of the leading figures in UK charities.

Refugee workers point to the grim irony of the passage of the UK Nationality and Borders Bill amid the Ukraine crisis. The new legislation, says Zazai, “would have criminalised people like me”. The Bill has been condemned as draconian, and among its measures are plans to send refugees to third countries for “processing”.

“At a time when we’ve a war in Europe … the UK has a Bill going through Parliament that will shut the door on people seeking asylum.” Zazai also wants visa requirements removed for Ukrainian refugees so they can get here quickly. The entire asylum system is “broken”, he feels, with refugees from wars around the world trapped in poverty because they aren’t allowed to work, fearfully awaiting decisions about their fate and facing deportation. “Imagine living on £5 a day and you’re worried for your family back home and you don’t know what your future holds. We need a system in place that treats people with fairness, compassion and humanity, no matter where they’re from.”

The disparity is also striking in the way Ukrainians are being treated compared to Syrians or Afghans, he feels – where one is criminalised for coming to Britain, but the other could, if they have the necessary visa, just take the Eurostar to London. “War doesn’t discriminate and so shouldn’t we,” Zazai says.