Eve Battle | Valencia (EFE).- Among the Ukrainian refugees displaced by the war, a large community of researchers, scientists and university professors continue their work outside their country with the hope of returning the knowledge they are acquiring to reconstruction when the conflict ends .
This is the case of the university professors Kateryna Khvostenko and the couple formed by Iuliia and Denys Gorkovchuk, three of the nine researchers hired for a year by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), with the help that the Generalitat Valenciana allocated to the reception of Ukrainian research staff and university students.
Kateryna Khvostenko, associate professor at the Odesa National University of Technology, works in the laboratories of the University Institute of Food Engineering for Development of the UPV, in the FoodiHelath Research Group, directed by Ana Andrés.
The Ukrainian researcher reminds EFE that before the conflict she had “a normal life” with her husband and daughter, and combined the classes she taught at the university with international research projects on functional foods. Her life changed at four in the morning exactly one year ago, with the first explosions of the Russian bombs in her city.
Let the Russian bomb kill me and not my daughter
“The first days we were very afraid, we did not know what was going to happen and every night I thought: that the Russian bomb will kill me and not my daughter”, she recalls with tears in her eyes.
At the beginning of March Kateryna and her daughter left Odessa, en route to Romania, in a flight that “millions of women made to protect children from Russian bombs,” he says. There she continued her teaching work with her university students electronically, because the classes did not stop.
Immediately, numerous proposals arrived from European regions and universities that offered job opportunities to the Ukrainian scientific community displaced from their country, among them the one from the Universitat Politècnica de València, where he had been in a stay with an Erasmus program for university workers just before the pandemic.
“I knew the city and its proximity to the sea reminded me of Odesa,” he says, and he decided on the Valencian university, which he thanks for providing all the documentation and helping him with the procedures to find a flat and send his daughter to school. “I arrived as a tourist, just with a suitcase,” she recalls.
Kateryna has returned to Ukraine several times, on very short trips. She talks about the emotion she feels when crossing the border to be reunited with her relatives and about how difficult it is to live the separation with her husband: “This is being a test for our relationship and if you are strong you understand why you make these decisions,” she says. as if convincing himself that he was the right one.
pending their families
The researcher lives pending an application that allows her to know in real time the areas that are under Russian attacks, she talks daily with her husband to make sure that he is okay, that he is in a safe area and ask him to “be careful”.
“He tells me that they have gotten used to living with bombs and alarms, and that he needs to work and continue his life so as not to go crazy” and above all to “not give a victory” to the Russians in the war, also psychological.
At 36, Kateryna does not talk about the future: “Our plans are for the day to day”, and her hope and what gives her strength is the conviction that this experience, the knowledge she is acquiring in Spain, will help her to return them to their country and help in their reconstruction when the war ends.
“Each one must fight in this war in their field, find a way to help win it,” he defends.
The couple formed by Iuliia, 36, and Denys Gorkovchuk, 32, specialists in geographic information systems and photogrammetry, respectively, the start of the war caught them outside Ukraine, in Slovakia, where they were with their two children, who are now 2 and 5 years old.
Denys had completed a master’s degree at the Polytechnic University of Valencia ten years earlier, and contacted Professor Luis Ángel Ruiz, from the Higher Technical School of Geodetic Engineering, Cartography and Topography.
Safeguard the lives of children
Ruiz informed them that there was an aid program for teachers and they decided to come to Spain, thinking above all of safeguarding the lives of their children.
Iuliia also combines her work at the Valencian university with support for the Ukrainian scientific community, preparing proposals for joint projects within the framework of European grants, such as Erasmus+ training in higher education.
In the short term they do not expect to return to their country. The contract they have with the UPV ends in October and they still do not know if it will be extended, but they are clear that their intention is to remain in Spain for the well-being and safety of their children, who have already integrated and are learning Spanish and Valencian. “Everything we do and have done is for them, so that they have a better life,” says Denys.
Their relatives were the first to support them and to ask them not to return to the country. “But many times it is difficult to talk to them, to tell them about a festive moment of the children at school, to share this happiness when they are experiencing a situation of so much stress”, says Denys, who admits: “We try to look for the positive things, to relativize everything , but there are days when it is very difficult”.
The couple hopes in the future, like Kateryna, to return their knowledge to the rebirth of their country.
