Dunn crossing the border into Ukraine. (Courtesy Elizabeth Dunn)
As the war in Ukraine enters its third month, IU professor Elizabeth Dunn is traveling to Kyiv to continue her research in the area.
Dunn is director of the IU Center for Refugee Studies and is studying the humanitarian aid response in Europe, where an estimated 15 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the war.
She traveled to the area in March to study how Polish citizens were helping Ukrainians during the initial rush to leave the country. Now, Dunn is back on the Polish border and will be traveling throughout Ukraine for further research.
Mitch Legan talked with her earlier this week over Zoom to discuss her research and the latest on the ground in Ukraine.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
ML: Can you set the scene for me, what it’s like there? I can’t even imagine.
ED: People are going, passing through the border point at Medyka, (Poland), which is like Marrakech – it’s like being in a Moroccan bazaar with people handing out coffee and tea and sandwiches and clothes and phones. And then they go onwards to the rest of Europe: to Germany, to France. A lot of people going on to Britain to wait out the war.
But what’s really important is that a lot of people are feeling like they need to get back, they need to support their husbands who are fighting, because men ages 18 to 65 are not allowed to leave. So people are going back there, trying to support the war effort inside Ukraine, and we’ll be checking in with them.
ML: What were your big takeaways from the initial trip that you took?
ED: My initial takeaways are the same now, which is how important volunteer response is. Overwhelmingly, the help that Ukrainians got and really needed as they crossed the border into Poland came from local people. We’ve been talking to people who are part of the rural women’s circles, local volunteer firefighter groups, just stray volunteers who showed up here at the border. (To) give the Ukrainians the help they needed in terms of shelter, medicine, food, getting their kids in school and so on.
What I’ve learned is that when things get really bad, the people you need to count on are your neighbors. Don’t wait for the international aid agencies. Don’t wait for the government to respond. You’re going to have to rely on your neighbors.
ML: Are people starting to come back into Ukraine more? Is that where more of the aid’s focused on now?
ED: Yeah, most of the aid response now has gone into Ukraine, particularly to the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, which has never been occupied by the Russian military. So that’s now the center of aid. We’ll be following the international aid agencies in. We’ll look at how they’re helping people who are internally displaced inside of Lviv or inside Ukraine.
And then we’ll be going to the capital Kyiv, especially to interview people at the Kyiv School of Economics. And this is a group of academics who have raised $30 million for emergency needs, particularly for the territorial defense. The Russians were eventually pushed out of Kyiv by everyday people who had signed up for the territorial defense. So it’s kind of a miracle story. We’ll be talking to people at the Kyiv School of Economics who raised millions and millions of dollars to do this.
ML: The European, maybe international refugee network – how would you say it’s done handling this incredible influx of displaced people?
ED: I think that the international aid community has done very little, frankly, to help this enormous refugee movement, the biggest since the end of World War II. The bulk of the work here has done been done by local Polish people, Polish volunteers, with some aid from the Polish government – particularly government at the local level and at what would be like the state level for us.
But the overwhelming bulk of the work has been done by ordinary people who took Ukrainians into their homes, who have helped feed and clothe and shelter people and transport them throughout Europe. And just the enormous outpouring of support and empathy and care from the Polish people has been an amazingly beautiful thing to watch.
ML: I assume you’re speaking with Ukrainian people. Have there been any conversations that stand out? What kind of impact has this war had on these people?
ED: I think it’s had a very different impact on different people. There were people from the west who of course were terrified, but didn’t experience the war themselves. Now we’re seeing people who spent two months underground in a steel plant in Mariupol, and they’re extremely traumatized. We’re seeing people who were subjected to brutal attacks by Russian soldiers, people whose houses have been destroyed and looted by Russian soldiers. So there are people who didn’t experience very much. And there are people who have experienced the most horrific parts of war you can imagine. And supporting those people over the long run is going to be a very big project.
ML: A lot of our viewers will obviously be familiar with the influx of Afghan evacuees that we got (last year). Is there any comparison for these two events?
ED: I think Afghans actually experienced a lot less trauma than the Ukrainians because they had to leave so suddenly and so fast. The Ukrainians, many of them, spent months inside Ukraine experiencing the war before they could get out of a territory that had been occupied by the Russians. So we’re seeing people coming from Ukraine who are much, much more traumatized. But the similarity is the open hearts and the open hands of neighbors and friends.
I spent today (Tuesday) in Rzeszów, Poland, which is a town I’ve been working in for 30 years. And what I saw was the same thing I saw in Bloomington: I saw everyday people who literally just opened their doors, gave their spare bedrooms, gave people clothes and food and a warm welcome. And they didn’t treat them like the beneficiaries of charity, they treated them like neighbors.
Trying to figure out better ways to connect people so that we can do person-to-person aid instead of institutionalized aid is what the Center for Refugee Studies is going to be focusing on.
