Ukrainians in Lebanon Feel War Following Them Everywhere

The last time Kcenia* visited her home city of Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, she dreaded what was to come. For months, Russian forces had been amassing troops and arms along the border with Ukraine. A huge invasion — part of a long-simmering conflict since 2014 — seemed imminent. For Kcenia, who has been living in Beirut with her Lebanese husband since 1995, the trip felt like her last chance to see family in Kyiv before the unknown. 

“She visited because she feared something would happen. She wanted to see her mom, to give her some money,” Kcenia’s daughter, Miriam, tells me. “It was the same time that a lot of ministers were visiting Ukraine from all over the EU and NATO, so she figured it was safe to go, nothing was going to happen while all these ministers were there.” 

Fearing Russia’s invasion would come soon, Kcenia’s travel agency moved her flight back to Beirut from Tuesday to Monday, a day earlier than planned. “And then on Thursday, the war started,” Miriam says. 

That was Feb. 24, 2022.

Russian troops streamed into eastern Ukraine as Vladimir Putin’s forces fired missiles into the country, in what would come to be the largest attack on a European country since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would quickly declare martial law. Citizens who in previous weeks had been living normal lives suddenly joined the frontlines. 

“My mom was heartbroken about both sides,” Miriam says. “Not only the Ukrainians being killed, but also all these young Russian soldiers, being sent to die.”

*

Today, three years on, 6.8 million Ukrainians have fled their home country, with four million internally displaced, according to the United Nations’ latest count. Russia now occupies swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, a move the European Union condemns.  

Almost immediately after leaving all that behind and arriving back in Beirut, Kcenia started to fall ill. A sharp pain began to take hold in her chest. 

It is a story repeated thousands of times over for the children of Eastern European mothers and Lebanese fathers: In the 1990s, Miriam’s father went to study at a university in Ukraine. There, he met Kcenia and fell in love. 

In their case, Kcenia was an Orthodox Christian while Miriam’s father was a Shia Muslim with roots in south Lebanon. Kcenia would end up converting to Islam. Back then, there were precious few mosques in Kyiv — and no halal grocery stores. 

“They got married in a mosque there, the only one that was available!” Miriam tells me. “My dad and some other student friends would also save up some money every now and then to go buy a sheep or a cow from a farmer, and agree with the butcher to do it such-and-such way so they could do the prayer [over the animal] to make it halal. Eventually, the butcher learned how to stand and even what to say.” 

The couple would later move to Lebanon, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, to raise Miriam, now 24 years old, and her 19-year-old brother. There are still the threads of memories from childhood summers spent in Ukraine: hedgehogs at the family’s dacha holiday home outside Kyiv, butterscotch candies.

*

Now, there are about 5,000 Ukrainian citizens in Lebanon, Ukraine’s Charges d’Affaires Ovcharov Oleksandr tells me, “mostly Ukrainian women and their children.” That’s on top of the many Russian and other Eastern European citizens who came here via marriage, or are the children of such relationships.

“I feel Lebanese and I feel Ukrainian,” says Roger*, who grew up in Soviet-era Kyiv, where his mother was born. He and his family later moved to Lebanon, his father’s home country, in the chaos after the Soviet Union dissipated in 1991. “And I feel the pain of both.” 

I met Charges d’Affaires Ovcharov Oleksandr this past weekend, at a gathering in Ukraine’s embassy just south of Beirut marking three years since the Russian invasion. Some attendees wore blouses adorned in traditional vyshyvka embroidery. Craft-paper signs drawn by children in scout uniforms thanked Ukrainian soldiers for fighting on the frontlines.

At least two Lebanese-Ukrainians have reportedly been killed while fighting Russia on the battlefront: Hussein Mahdi and Omar Zakaria, both of whom were born to Ukrainian mothers and Lebanese fathers.

There are other, quiet forms of resistance, too. 

*

Miriam, whose maternal relatives speak Russian, began Ukrainian-language classes last year, at a Ukrainian cultural center not far from her house. Her friend Angelina, a young pharmacology student, last visited Ukraine in the weeks just before Russia’s invasion. 

Angelina remembers her awe at the stacks of Ukrainian-language books in her grandmother’s library in Kharkiv. Her grandmother, a Russian who had married a Ukrainian man and settled in Kharkiv, had only recently passed away. 

“She was passionate about philosophy and psychology and literature. I was amazed to discover so many books there about learning Ukrainian, books by Ukrainian authors.” 

Like Miriam, Angelina grew up visiting Ukraine every summer, when school let out. “I felt reassured, thinking I could read them when I returned in the summer,” she recalls. “So I took a few books … and that was it.” 

Kharkiv would soon come under intense Russian fire, with swathes of the city reduced to rubble.

Within weeks of that invasion, after coming back to Beirut, the pain in Kcenia’s chest grew. A year later, doctors finally told the family what it was: stage four lung cancer. 

As the war in Ukraine dragged on, so did Kcenia’s chemotherapy. But Lebanon, too, would soon become a battlefront.

On Sept. 17 and 18 last year, Hezbollah members’ pagers, which Israel secretly implanted with explosives, detonated one after the other, killing and maiming hundreds — and humiliating the once-powerful group. I remember it well: the sounds of ambulance sirens swelling in the southern Beirut suburbs, where many of the booby-trapped pagers were, and where I had spent the day interviewing children. 

*

Within weeks the buildings around us would become targets, too. On Sept. 27, Israel dropped 80 bombs at once on longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killing him and dozens of other bystanders. Israel would soon rain airstrikes all over Lebanon, especially in the south and in southern Beirut, where Hezbollah maintains a strong presence — including in Miriam’s neighborhood. Apartment blocks would be reduced to dust-laden craters in the middle of the city.

More than one million people would be displaced in a matter of weeks, in a country of just several million. Israeli bombs would go on to kill nearly 4,000 people. At one point in the chaos, Israeli warplanes bombed the building across from Miriam’s apartment, damaging the family’s house.

It all mirrored Ukraine too closely. “I went from one war to another,” Oleksandr, the Charges d’Affaires, recalled.

His embassy would soon evacuate Ukrainian-Lebanese families from south Lebanon. Some would go on to flee Lebanon altogether, others applying for asylum in Canada. But with Ukraine still crushed by a war and invasion of its own, the evacuees couldn’t go there for safety. Instead, the chartered flights simply went to other countries in Eastern Europe. 

“We had always known that if anything were to happen in Lebanon, we always had a second home in Ukraine,” Youssef Tohme, a 25-year-old at Saturday’s embassy event, told me. “I never thought that, down the line, things might be reversed,” adding: “Now you have two countries and both are bleeding.” 

The violence would force Miriam to flee with her family.

Their possessions and lives scattered across various apartments in Lebanon, and later in Baghdad, where Miriam’s father works. They stayed in the city for two months. 

*

Miriam felt lost. “Something as simple as a gym membership was something I had to think about  like ten times before doing it.” She went on, “When you sign up for a gym, you sign up for a month or two. When I was there [in Iraq], I realized — do I want to stay here longer than a month or two? When I joined a gym finally, it was a sad moment. Would I ever go back to my routine in Lebanon? Would I see my friends, or go to parties on the weekends?”

Eventually, though, they’d have to pack their suitcases yet again, when Kcenia lost access to her cancer treatment in Iraq. 

That’s why, two weeks ago, the family decided to finally come back home — back to their Beirut home, that is.

For now, Miriam is cautiously rebuilding a routine back home in southern Beirut, after cleaning up debris from her damaged house. 

She skipped the past weekend’s commemoration at the Ukrainian embassy. “I used to go, but I stopped.” The past few years have seen pro-Russian online trolls bully and harass Miriam for posting in support of Ukraine. It’s why she requested a pseudonym for this article — she simply doesn’t want the emotional pain of it anymore.

All that comes amid growing uncertainty about the near future of Ukraine, with the US’ newly minted President Trump chasing rapprochement with Putin and publicly decrying Zelenskyy. 

*

At the moment, at least, Lebanon is under relative calm since a ceasefire agreement came into effect back in November — one that Israel still violates with near-daily bomb attacks on southern Lebanese villages.

For now, at the very least, Miriam hopes Kyiv will be safe enough this summer for her to visit, alone — she plans to transfer some properties from Kcenia’s name to her own, “just in case.” Until then, she still has some Ukrainian sweets left from the luggage that Kcenia brought from Kyiv in February 2022, and she’s hoping to rejoin her favorite gym. 

She’s also comforting her ailing mother, who has watched her home country fall under attack from afar, all while undergoing treatment for her lung cancer.  “I tell her, ‘Someday you’ll be able to go back.’” 

*Some interviewees spoke on condition of anonymity as they have faced bullying for their support of Ukraine.

** All photos by João Sousa, a photojournalist based in Lebanon and focused on social issues.