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© 2024 Anna Liminowicz
20.01.2024, Dublin, Ireland.
Yevhen, 28, and his wife Anastasia, 25, in their apartment in Dublin. They came to Ireland from Mariupol in 2023 and Anastasia has found work at TAMI, a
Dublin-based high-tech company. She works for a Ukrainian firm online and TAMI helped them rent a flat.
Home is where you make it, so the saying goes. So why not 4,000 kilometres away in Dublin?
Their parents joined, too. They left Mariupol.
The reunion was everything Anastasia and Yevhen had hoped for. But as weeks and months passed, the parents had second thoughts.
Anastasia’s father worried about his mother in Mariupol, who had been diagnosed with cancer, and Yevhen’s mother fretted about her mom, who was well into her 80s and frail.
Their parents didn’t see their future in Ireland. They couldn’t speak English and their prospects in Dublin were slim. Their lives, their identities, were wrapped up with Ukraine and the place they called home: Mariupol. Yes, the Russians occupied the city, but they couldn’t control people’s hearts or their minds.
So just before Christmas, they said a tearful goodbye to their children and boarded a flight to Finland. They crossed the border into Russia, caught a bus to St. Petersburg and then another one to Mariupol.
Anastasia was heartbroken when they left, but she understood their decision.