Serhiy Morgunov; Alice Zoo; Caroline Gutman for NBC News

Forced from their homeland after Russia's invasion, some Ukrainians fear they may never return

"Ukraine feels like it was a different life, a different reality, and sometimes I don't even identify myself with that reality anymore," one Ukrainian in London told NBC News.

March 14, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT

By Elmira Aliieva

With bombs raining down and Russian forces rapidly approaching Kyiv, Taria Blazhevych made the difficult decision to flee Ukraine with her children and move abroad.

She was far from the only one, and many like Blazhevych believed they would one day return. But after the war entered its fifth year last month, some are not so sure they will leave their new lives behind and return to Ukraine.

“There’s no end in sight for this war. I’m afraid it will drag on forever,” Blazhevych told NBC News in a telephone interview last month from her home in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her sons, Artem, 9, and 7-year-old Denys.

The 31-year-old, who left Ukraine five months after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, is among the nearly 6 million people who have left the country during the war, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. While many have since found work, education and a degree of stability in their host countries, some like Blazhevych fear their children will forget their homeland or struggle to adapt if they return.

Taria Blazhevych and her sons in Washington, D.C, earlier this month.Caroline Gutman for NBC News

“Most of my fears are about my children, because for them it will be enormous stress to readapt again,” Blazhevych said, adding that her sons are now used to American culture and speak English better than Ukrainian.

“Even small differences, like traffic lights: Here, you cross on white, not green. It takes months for children to internalize that,” she said. “Such a small thing, but after so much stress, it matters.”

Returning home would be hard for them socially, said Blazhevych, who spoke English before she moved to the U.S. and now works as a personal assistant. “In five years, they may completely forget that they were once born in Ukraine,” she added.

As Russian forces keep up pressure along the eastern front and repeatedly target civilian and energy infrastructure beyond military sites, those who remain in Ukraine are facing daily drone and missile strikes, rolling blackouts, sleepless nights, waves of mobilization and deep uncertainty about their future.

“I’m too frightened to return to that society. What people are going to be like after all this trauma, after all these horrors?” said Blazhevych, who had already been forced to flee Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region shortly after Russian-backed rebels threw off Ukrainian central rule in an armed uprising in 2014.

As she made her way out of the region on foot, she said, “two of my friends were blown apart by landmines along the way.”

UKRAINE — Taria Blazhevych takes refuge in a metro station in Kyiv in March 2022.Erin Trieb

To this day, her hometown of Kostyantynivka, in the north of Donetsk, sits on the front line of the war and stands in ruins.

For others, like Dmytro Zviahintsev, adapting to life in a new country has proved more difficult.

The 49-year-old, who is 11 years under Ukraine’s maximum age of conscription, said he attempted to enlist as soon as Russia invaded but was rejected because of medical issues.

A senior electrical engineer and small-business owner in Ukraine, he said the language barrier had prevented him from getting similar jobs in Germany, where he moved with his wife, Lyudmila, and 10-year-old son Ivan six months after the Russian invasion.

Instead, he said, he had been forced to take on lower-skilled jobs to make ends meet.

Dmytro Zviahintsev, pictured at bottom left with his wife, Lyudmila, in Bremen, Germany.Serhiy Morgunov for NBC News

“I’m forced to break myself everyday, but at the moment I have no choice,” he said, adding that he found it hard to adapt. “At my age, because of the habits and principles I have already established, I have no willingness to change,” he said.

Germany has taken in the highest number of Ukrainian refugees in the European Union, hosting over 1.25 million people, according to data published last month by the 27-nation bloc.

While Zviahintsev was grateful to Germany for the support he had received to set up his new life, he said his heart remained in Kharkiv, a city around 20 miles from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine that has been regularly bombarded by Russian forces.

“All my thoughts are about home, and it breaks my heart to see it bombed,” Zviahintsev said. “I really want to return back to Ukraine. Because that’s where I was born, where I belong, where my parents’ graves are.”

Dmytro Zviahintsev in his bedroom.Serhiy Morgunov for NBC News

Refugees like Zviahintsev hold on to Ukraine because “they are, by definition, forced migrants,” according to Olga Pyshchulina, who is a social programs expert at the Razumkov Centre, a Kyiv-based think tank.

“They never planned to leave forever, so they didn’t prepare themselves for it mentally,” she said. “This is why language and cultural integration is so difficult, especially for older generations,” she added. “But there are also refugees who considered migration before the war, so they are adopting aspects of other cultures more willingly.”

A December study by the think tank found that Ukrainian refugees are increasingly less likely to view returning home as their only option.

Mariia Kulia said in an interview last month that she had always wanted to build a career elsewhere, because “there are more opportunities abroad” and corruption was less endemic than in Ukraine, where scandals have engulfed senior levels of government, business and the military, even during the war with Russia.

Mariia Kulia in London. Alice Zoo for NBC News

So she moved to London from Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa in October 2022 and is now studying to be a lawyer. “It is extremely difficult to achieve something in Ukraine because of all the nepotism and corruption,” said Kulia, 21.

Whether Ukrainians will be able to stay in their adopted homelands remains to be seen.

Temporary protected status afforded to Ukrainian refugees by the Council of the European Union will expire in March 2027, although it has suggested a transition to a more permanent status after that.

In the U.S., the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian program rolled out by the Biden administration was suspended for new applicants after President Donald Trump took power in January 2025, and applications for humanitarian parole extensions were frozen, leaving many Ukrainians in legal limbo. Many now fear they could soon face deportation back to an active war zone.

Blazhevych said that after temporary legal status expired for her and her sons in July 2025, she lost the right to work and survived on tinned food while her extension was pending, and she ran up a large debt.

That status has subsequently been extended until July 2027, but she said the new rules were designed to make “people give up and leave, but I have nowhere to go.”

“I saw the death tolls,” she said of her hometown of Kostyantynivka, which has been under evacuation orders for over a year now. “Children are not supposed to be there.”

Mariia Kulia moved to London from Odesa, Ukraine, in October 2022.Alice Zoo for NBC News

While Kulia, the law student, said she had returned to Odesa to visit, she didn’t “feel at home in Ukraine anymore, at least not in the same way as in the U.K., because this is where I formed my personality.”

“Ukraine feels like it was a different life, a different reality, and sometimes I don’t even identify myself with that reality anymore,” she said, adding that while some of her relatives remained in Odesa, “it is hard to stay in touch with them.”

“I am ashamed to tell my family about any happy moments in my life,” she said. “Because I know that their reality is so different to mine.”