Student Tobias de Saint Laurent made a documentary about how Ukrainian students his age divide their time between attending lectures and helping the army. ‘I don’t just want to observe – I want to make the world a better place.
‘Our professor went to the front line to work as a doctor. He still recorded his lectures for us, but we could hear explosions in the background.’
‘I’ve stopped going out and drinking. Instead of partying, we go to shooting ranges to learn how to use guns.’
‘I thought I would spend my student life going on lots of trips abroad. Instead, I visit many places within Ukraine.’
These are the words of Ukrainian students featured in the half-hour documentary Between Life and War, made by Leiden security studies student Tobias de Saint Laurent. He hopped on a Flixbus from The Hague to Warsaw before transferring to a bus to Kyiv.
‘In my programme, we study a lot of geopolitics and security issues’, explains De Saint Laurent. ‘But it feels like we’re not part of the world: we’re just observing. I want to be someone who makes the world a better place.’
MILITARY EQUIPMENT
In his film, he speaks with students from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The documentary was screened last Wednesday in a packed hall in the Wijnhaven building, followed by a panel discussion.
‘I was lucky because I was there at a time when the Russians weren’t bombing much’, De Saint Laurent says of his trip. ‘The night after I returned to the Netherlands, they intensified their attacks.’
The war has a major impact on their lives, but the students talk about it in a surprisingly light-hearted way. Maks (19), a history and archaeology student, says that lectures are the same as before. But when the air-raid alarm goes off, they briefly go to the shelter. Kateryna (19), an international relations student, says that sometimes classes continue down there.
Kateryna shares that she collects supplies for the army in her spare time. Ivan, a second-year master’s student in finance, spends his free time building military equipment. ‘We make drones and bombs for those drones’, says Maks.
Galia (22), who studied finance and insurance, saw many of her friends leave. ‘It was very lonely. I was with my family, but all my friends were abroad.’ A large part of education has moved online, as before during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Throughout my entire bachelor’s degree, I only went to the university three or four times’, says Ivan.
The students’ outlook on the future also changed. Galia was eager to study abroad, but felt guilty about leaving her family behind. Ivan also wanted to go abroad, but was stopped at the border because he is a man.
The documentary has had an impact on its creator as well, De Saint Laurent admits during the panel discussion. ‘I feel less pressure now to perform as well as possible at university. I think it’s very important not to take our safety and peace for granted and to enjoy life as much as we can now.’
‘Leiden University’s policy is that we don’t encourage students to travel to war zones’, jokes Antoine Lopez, a tutor at Security Studies. ‘I was Tobias’ mentor during the introduction week’, says Janthe van Schaik, director of the organisation OSINT for Ukraine (Open Source Intelligence, Ed.). ‘He called me at night to tell me that he was going to Ukraine. Everyone told him not to go, and above all, not to tell his parents.’
PANIC
‘I was staying in the cheapest hotel in Kyiv that I could find when I called my parents’, says De Saint Laurent. ‘They panicked.’
In everyday life, he noticed that people took the attacks in their stride. ‘No one really cared when the air-raid alarm went off. They would go to the shelter and then carry on with their day. No one was stressed. Eventually, I installed an app that tracked the air raids.’
‘When the alarm goes off, buses are not allowed to leave, and then everyone gets irritated’, adds Anastasiia Poberezhna, who is doing PhD research on Ukrainian refugees in the Netherlands. ‘Did you also notice everyone sighing in annoyance?’
‘It doesn’t matter whether you have to go to university or to the doctor, all public transport has to come to a standstill during such an alarm’, says Kseniia Ivanova, a European Studies student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.
‘We've become used to the air-raid alarm’, says Ivanova, who fled Ukraine in 2022. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but in the end, we stopped going to the shelters and lectures just continued. But that was also because on some days, the air-raid alarm went off every half hour. Going to the shelter every single time just wasn’t workable. We tried to assess the danger a little: are they drones or just aircraft?’
But her little brother, who was born during the war, reacts less calmly to the threat, says Ivanova. ‘My parents and I notice that he’s afraid of the sound of engines and air conditioners because they sound like drones or missiles.’
TRAUMATISED
‘People in the Netherlands need to realise that many young people in Ukraine are traumatised’, she continues. ‘I work a lot with international students myself, but if someone asks me to work with people from Russia, I refuse, of course. Westerners don’t understand that sensitivity and expect us to stay friendly to the people who are killing us. I propose asking Ukrainian students how they are doing more often.
Poberezhna: ‘When I’m at a party and I tell people I’m from Ukraine, they always immediately ask: “How is your family?”. You know that your distressing stories will ruin the mood, so instead you start explaining events in a light-hearted way. That doesn’t do justice to how bad things really are, but you don’t want to scare people away either.’
And war or no war, the number of students in her home country has only increased. ‘Ukraine is one of the most highly educated countries in Europe’, says Poberezhna. ‘Despite the war, the number of students has only grown: almost 900,000 in higher education. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that 170 educational institutions have already been destroyed. Access to education is becoming increasingly difficult. That really says something about students’ resilience. The need for education grows in times of war.’