Choosing the Islands to escape the bombs: Anastasia’s story as a Ukrainian refugee

It has now been a little over four years since the war began raging in Ukraine, after the Russian army launched a large-scale invasion of the country on February 24, 2022. Anastasia Kuian is among those who have fled the war: she arrived in the Magdalen Islands on August 13, 2022, along with her daughter and their two suitcases.

A few months earlier, she had been living in Kremenchuk, a city of 215,000 inhabitants in the heart of Ukraine, where she worked as a florist and raised her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter alone. Despite Moscow’s annexation of Crimea eight years earlier and the armed conflict in the Donbas region in the eastern part of the country, she did not expect to find herself suddenly under the bombs of the Russian army.

She considered following her brother to the front lines to defend Ukraine, but instead chose to stay with her child. After hiding for a few weeks in a basement with family members, she convinced them to flee the region.

She recounts how she could see the explosions in the distance from the train window as they traveled toward neighboring Poland.

Anastasia and her daughter eventually found refuge in the Magdalen Islands, where she now works as a childcare worker at the CPE de l’Est in Grosse-Île. She says she feels welcomed, but her permanent residency status remains uncertain due to the end of the Quebec Experience Program (PEQ). She and her new partner, himself an islander, are now considering moving to another province to facilitate her immigration application.

Nevertheless, she has no plans to return to Ukraine.

Translated from the french article with the help of Google Translate

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