The focus of the majority of the coverage of the conflict from Ukraine has been on movement. Families hauling bags across the Polish border as trains depart Lviv. Berlin children dozing off on the floors of gymnasiums. It makes sense that the displaced have emerged as the conflict’s most visible face. However, a recent study conducted by Natalia Bekassow and her colleagues and published in Scientific Reports shifts the focus. It examines those who stayed. Even after the tanks passed through Bucha and Irpin and the world’s focus turned elsewhere, there were those who remained in the Kyiv suburbs.
The results are less dramatic than you might anticipate. less dramatic. And more unnerving in certain respects. Using nineteen in-depth interviews and the standardized PCL-5 trauma assessment, the researchers attempted to comprehend how civilians who stayed behind manage protracted insecurity. What shows up is a picture of resilience that doesn’t neatly fit into the traditional psychological frameworks, which frequently treat coping as an internal trait, like a muscle that needs to be worked. According to the study, resilience is more relational than that. more organized. more entangled in the routine, minor details of everyday existence.
The paper contains a specific detail that sticks with you. Grit, personality, or some abstract inner reserve did not distinguish the two case vignettes that the researchers chose—one with the highest PTSD symptom load and one with the lowest. It was the way their surroundings were textured. To whom they spoke. What customs they maintained. Did their neighborhood still feel like a neighborhood? The authors trace resilience across micro, meso, macro, and even transnational layers using Michael Ungar’s multisystemic social-ecological model, which is a fancy way of saying that surviving a war is rarely a solo act.
This calls into question many of the long-held assumptions of Western trauma research. Previous research, such as Piotr Dęosz’s 2023 study on Ukrainian refugees in Poland, revealed that approximately 73% of participants had symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, or depression. Contrary to popular belief, younger refugees frequently fared better because they organized, took action, and did something. The Bekassow study’s non-displaced civilians appear to be acting similarly, albeit without the disruption of departing. They take care of gardens. They quarrel over generators with their neighbors. They prepare the same borscht dishes that their grandmothers prepared decades ago during a different conflict. This continuity itself may be the remedy.
Reading the paper gives the impression that the researchers took care to avoid romanticizing their findings. By definition, staying is not noble. Some stayed because they were elderly, impoverished, or afraid of the trip. Some stayed because they felt that leaving would be a betrayal of something they couldn’t quite put their finger on. In a field that frequently favors tidy variables, the qualitative interviews capture that ambivalence without flattening it.
Observing the expansion of this body of research, it’s remarkable how slowly the academic community has caught up to the observations made by relief workers in Kyiv since 2022. Being resilient is not a quality. It’s a network. It’s a school that reopens even though half the windows are still taped over, a bakery that operates on the corner, and a friend who calls every Tuesday. Although this has been suggested by Kimhi’s 2023 work and Kovalenko’s follow-up studies, the Bekassow paper advances the discussion by posing the question of what happens when the war continues and people simply carry on.
It’s difficult to ignore how drastically this reframes the entire discussion. Stories from the displaced are worth sharing. The ones who stayed also do. It’s possible that we have only listened to half of them over the past four years.
