“I will never forget that Saturday evening when I first saw Russian tanks on the streets of my city,” says Viktoriya Voropayeva, a systems engineer and vice-rector at the Donetsk National Technology University (DonNTU). In 2014, after Russian-backed forces took over Donetsk, the unofficial capital of Ukraine’s Donbas region, Voropayeva and many of her colleagues chose to leave, setting up their university in exile. “We hoped that it would be one semester or one academic year,” she says about the university’s relocation to Drohobych in western Ukraine. “Nobody thought that it could be forever.” Her family left with only their documents, family photos and their cat.
The university’s first new home was in Pokrovsk, a small city about 60 kilometres away from Donetsk, still in the Donbas region, where it already had a sister institution. About one-third of its students and staff members moved into three academic buildings and two dormitories. “Most of the teachers who stayed in Donetsk did so not because they supported the Donetsk People’s Republic [the separatist government created by Russia-backed paramilitaries in 2014], but because they could not find the strength to leave everything — homes, elderly parents, hospitals, schools,” says Voropayeva.
In April 2022, two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the university moved again. It went to Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, to a building offered by Lutsk National Technical University. Then, seven months later, it moved to its current base in Drohobych in the Lviv region, about 1,050 km from its original home. The city council offered several buildings to turn into offices and classrooms. The space is much smaller than the facilities in Donetsk, but since the war started, most classes are now held online. DonNTU went from an 18,000-strong student body and more than 2,000 staff members in 2013, to 1,180 students and 116 staff members in 2024.
How the invasion of Ukraine is affecting Russian expat researchers The European nation is not the only place where war or political unrest has forced universities and their staff members into exile. Others around the world, including in Sudan and Myanmar, have also had to relocate. Some institutions have instead moved teaching online and found new ways to reach students and faculty members. What unites scholars is a will to keep education and scholarship alive, retaining a sense of community and, in some cases, the hope that they can return and be part of a better future in their homelands.
Voropayeva says DonNTU continues to maintain close ties with local schools and the community in Donetsk, organizing webinars and courses for schoolchildren and teachers. But it, and other displaced universities in Ukraine, are now also serving local students from their new locations and recruiting local staff members. More than 50% of DonNTU first-year students are from the Lviv region.
Checkpoint challenges
Illya Khadzhynov, an economist and vice-rector for scientific work, was last in Donetsk in July 2014, when his institution, Donetsk National University (DonNU) was taken over by the pro-Russian separatist government. Students and academics protested to the Ukrainian government. It authorized the university’s roughly 700-km move west to a former jewellery factory in Vinnytsia, in the west-central region of Ukraine, a building with no lecture theatres or laboratories. DonNU’s plight prompted an unofficial motto that “the university is not only the walls, it’s the people”, says Khadzhynov. But with support from international donors, including US$350,000 from the International Renaissance Foundation, a Ukrainian charity founded by Hungarian-born US philanthropist George Soros, DonNU refurbished the factory building and re-established a campus there, including labs for research and teaching.
Khadzhynov estimates that about half of the university’s 12,000 students moved to Vinnytsia. In 2016, the institution changed its name to Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University, honouring its alumnus Vasyl Stus, a poet who died in a labour camp after going on hunger strike after his arrest for anti-Soviet activity in 1980.
Serhii Radio, a chemistry researcher at DonNU, says that back in 2014, not everyone felt able to leave everything behind. Those who did took only “the most necessary things that you can carry in two hands”, he says. He was unable to take any lab equipment that might stand out at the checkpoints they had to pass, controlled by armed pro-Russian separatist groups. “They checked personal belongings, scrolled through the contents of smartphones, examined saved photos and music, and even reviewed social-media accounts,” he explains.
I fled the war in Ukraine. Now I work on ways to help the country’s soil heal Khadzhynov says that the arrival of DonNU initially created tensions in Vinnytsia because the institution was larger and therefore had been allotted many more student places by the government than had local universities. But now, the institution is more integrated into the local community and DonNU students are mostly from Vinnytsia and neighbouring regions. Their current 650-strong staff includes 180 who have been displaced from other cities.
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