“I do not want to postpone my life”

On February 24, 2022, Olesia Kulyk woke to the sound of explosions. Within hours, she and her husband left Kharkiv. Eighteen months later, after a research stay abroad and with her thoughts constantly drawn to Ukraine and her family, Olesia returned. How has the war changed her professional and personal life, and her mindset?

Like many Europeans, Olesia Kulyk had not believed that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “This Thursday in February 2022 divided my life into before and after,” she says. Just a month earlier, in January 2022, the organic chemist had become deputy director of a research institute in Kharkiv, close to the Russian border—the Institute of Functional Materials Chemistry, which is part of the State Scientific Institution “Institute for Single Crystals” of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. After two years as a postdoc in Belgium and the UK and three years as an assistant professor at the Kharkiv National University, Olesia felt ready and excited to build her future in Ukraine.

Realize and escape

From the very first day of the Russian invasion, Kharkiv was bombed, and troops were advancing toward the city. Olesia only began to grasp what had happened several hours after the attack. Looking back, she believes that she did not pay enough attention to the conflict with Russia, which had begun in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. “I was aware of what was happening in the East, but it felt distant from that.” Her husband had been much better informed, she says. He had followed the conflict from the beginning and anticipated its escalation. Twenty-four hours before the attack, he had filled up the car with fuel, while she washed her hair in the morning of the attack because she was supposed to have an interview for a research project. “He told me that I do not have time to blow-dry my hair. The interview did not matter anymore—we had to leave right away.”

Olesia and her husband decided to leave Kharkiv without any clear plan. They ended up in Truskavets in Western Ukraine. Olesia fled to Poland then—with a female colleague who had her daughter with her. Olesia‘s husband, like other men, was not allowed to leave. From Poland, she applied to programs supporting Ukrainian scientists and got a position at the Ariel University in Israel‘s West Bank. “I thought I would go for two or three months, until the end of the difficult time in Ukraine.” She stayed one and a half years.

The time in Israel was an ambivalent experience. On the one hand, it meant a lot to her to be able to continue her research, and she was impressed by Israeli culture and Jewish traditions. She quickly found friends in the scientific community. On the other hand, integrating outside the university was more difficult, especially into Jewish communities that she perceived as rather close-knit. Without speaking Hebrew, it was hard for Olesia to build close relationships. And emotionally, the war never left her. She constantly thought about her family and friends in Kharkiv, worried about her husband who had been mobilized.

Then, in October 2023, the Islamist organization Hamas attacked Israel. Olesia realized: “It is simply impossible for me to run away from war, not only because of the attack but because the war had always been in my thoughts.” That was when she decided to return home to Kharkiv, a city under attack. Olesia has never regretted this step. In Kharkiv, with her family and her working group, she feels at home and much better than abroad.

Research brings resilience

Coming back to Ukraine, Olesia was impressed by the people who had continued their lives in Kharkiv: those who had tried to preserve the equipment at her institute and keep the city alive. That made her realize: “I do not want to postpone my life.” Just 20 kilometers from the front line, research has become a source of stability and resilience. Over 90 percent of the employees at her institute in Kharkiv come to work every day, sometimes after sleepless nights under shellfire. Work brings a sense of normality to days shaped by uncertainty and fear. “You get used to it,” Olesia says. Air-raid alerts and explosions, she explains, fade into the background—a form of self-protection.

For Olesia, science has acquired a different weight today. Experiments, papers and project plans are still part of the job, she says. But so is responsibility: for students, colleagues and the institution. She highly appreciates the solidarity and support from the international scientific community, including the possibilities to continue research abroad, open access to journals that usually require subscription fees, and money for research equipment, for example from Germany. Yet war does not only unite the scientific community but also drives it apart. International collaborations have become less reciprocal. “We may visit our collaborators—at least women can; for men, it is difficult to leave the country—but they do not visit our labs,” explains Olesia. Before the war, there were many foreign students in Kharkiv; they are gone now. And Ukrainian scientists had to stop all collaborations with Russians.

Despite all that, the war also made Olesia grateful for small privileges: that her institute is provided with electricity, even if she does not have electricity at home for several days; that her husband is not at the front line, but stationed at a military base, allowing him to come home from time to time.

And she is also grateful for the chance to share her story, even if she finds it difficult to explain what war really means. “You can follow the news, you can speak to people who live in the war, but you can only truly understand how it feels when you find yourself there.“ KK

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