Ukrainians who came to the UK after Russia’s 2022 invasion fear they may never return home as the war passes its 1,000-day mark.

Today marks the 1,000th day since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. In Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, people laid thousands of their country’s blue and yellow flag in Independence Square to honour the soldiers who have died in the conflict.

In the past few months, Russia has made significant advances on the eastern front, and Ukraine’s top generals and politicians have admitted that their forces are under severe pressure.

Since the election of Donald Trump to be the next US President, Russia has escalated its attacks, with North Korean troops now believed to be fighting alongside Moscow’s forces.

Western allies fear that Trump will cut off aid for Kyiv and force both countries to the negotiating table, resulting in a deal that hands large swathes of Ukraine to Russia.

Since February 2022, around 210,000 people have arrived in the UK from Ukraine, mostly via the Homes for Ukraine visa scheme set up by the Government, according to the Migration Observatory.

Nearly three years after the invasion, many of those who settled here as refugees say that they hope to return one day to Ukraine with their families. Some have returned already. According to the Office for National Statistics, some Ukrainians who arrived in the UK may have left within a year, since long-term immigration to 31 December, 2023 was only 108,000.

However, many Ukrainians in Britain doubt they will be going home any time soon.

Serhii Burenko, 40, from Poltava, near Kharkiv in the north-east, arrived in the UK with his 11-year-old son, Marat, in May 2022. Although men of fighting age are generally not permitted to leave the country, as a single father separated from his partner, Mr Burenko was allowed to take his son abroad.

He vividly remembers the first days of the invasion. “Every day, hundreds of missiles arrived and destroyed everything. You couldn’t be safe anywhere. Every morning, my friends and I, we woke up and texted each other like, ‘Good morning. How are you? Are you still alive?’” he tells the i Paper.

After hearing about the Homes for Ukraine scheme, he contacted a British family from the south-west of England who were volunteering to sponsor Ukrainians. The family, who had two boys around Marat’s age, agreed to house them.

Mr Burenko and Marat arrived in the UK on 14 May 2022, and since then they have lived in their hosts’ home in Uplyme, near Lyme Regis in Dorset.

Mr Burenko, a former sales manager, initially found a job as a housekeeper at a small pub and hotel. “It was a hard and dirty job, but in our situation, we have to survive,” he says. He used his first salary to pay for English lessons so he could find something more suitable. “Since that day, I’ve changed few jobs, all of them I found myself. Now I’m a Tesco delivery driver, for example, and I passed my driver’s licence test, theory test, all of it.”

Marat, now 13, has settled into a local secondary school, and father and son have become friends with their host family. “We are so lucky. We went to very good place, and the people near us are very kind,” Mr Burenko says.

Although he misses his friends and parents back in Ukraine, he doubts he will be able to go back soon.

“I want to just visit them, but what is the reason to go there and then some random missile arrives somewhere on your way? What was the reason to keep your son in a safe place and then just try to [take] some risk? That’s why I don’t want to visit it, because it can be dangerous. You can lose everything in one second.

“The war is still going. Generally, if we speak about, ‘am I going back or staying here’, my question is, when can the war stop. Nobody can answer on this question.”

Even in the longer term, Mr Burenko does not know if  he will ever be able to go back.

“If I can build a good life here, I will be happy to stay because, for example, I’m 40. If this war finishes, for example, in the next 10 years, I’ll be 50, can I build new life? I would say [it’s a] new place, because it will be a different country from the beginning,” he says.

“We don’t have a timeframe. I’m quite an optimistic person, but I don’t have this vision [of returning]. It is so difficult. It is so painful.”

Valentyna Osborne, 62, originally from Kharkiv, came to the UK in 2018 after marrying a British man. Since 2022, she has been helping the Ukrainian community in England’s South West, putting refugees from Ukraine in touch with potential host families, and hosting Ukrainian cultural events.

She estimates that about 70 per cent of the people she speaks to want to return to Ukraine. “People in their forties, fifties, sixties, they want to go back. They’re thinking about it every day, they’re always sending parcels to friends, helping them, sending money,” she says.

Olga Patiuta, 38, originally from Kyiv, left their village home in the central Cherkasy region for the UK with her children, Dmytro, then aged 11, and five-year-old Viktoriia, in April 2022. Despite having escaped the war, however, their time here has been difficult, she says, having had to change accommodation and jobs numerous times, and with little certainty around their future.

“It was extremely tough. There was no opportunity, no houses coming up to rent. I couldn’t find a job… [then] I was working in retail, then I was working at a bookshop, then later on I was trying to build my own food business. I was doing three jobs, volunteering to supply first aid kits to Ukraine and trying to be there for the kids,” she tells i.

“Initially it was the worst decision ever, because I urgently needed help, and I couldn’t understand that, and I was just trying to hide behind hard work, just not to stay long on my own with my thoughts,” Ms Patiuta says.

In addition, she and her children were also suffering from trauma in the aftermath of Russian bombing. In Ukraine, Dmytro, now 14, needed medication to cope with the horror of the attacks, she says, while Viktoriia, now eight, is still afraid and hides when she hears loud sounds such as fireworks or helicopters. They both miss their father, who stayed behind in Ukraine. “My kids desperately want to return and hug their daddy,” she adds.

The family finally found a home of their own in August, which they are renting in Bridport, near Dorchester, and Ms Patiuta has begun work as director for marketing and public relations for a new company. She says she hopes her family has now finally turned the corner.

“I miss Ukraine a lot. I miss Ukraine so badly, I already have tears on my cheeks. I love the UK, but I want to return home. We have been only once since then, and I’m not risking doing it again, because it was a terrible experience. I was scared to death for the kids and trying to make it safe for them.”

“I have to feed my kids. I have to give them an education. My task right now is to create for them that sort of future and stability that will allow them to have their life.”

She says: “Honestly, I’m lucky. Not in everything, but I am lucky because I’ve managed to meet people with a huge heart. Most of them are the elderly generation, people who are post-war kids, or who were born during the war, so they have the memories of a tough life. I was welcomed and I was cheered. Sometimes it was enough just to have hugs.”

She adds: “Within all my close circle of friends, I’m the only one who is not a widow. Everyone else are widows in their forties.”

Maryna Dovbysh, 37, from the city of Zaporizhzhia, was on holiday with her family in Sri Lanka when Russia invaded in 2022. Knowing she could not take her children, Vira, 13, and Nickolas, 10, back to Ukraine, she contacted a friend in Weymouth who put her in touch with a local family who offered to sponsor them.

After arriving in Britain, they lived in an annexe belonging to their host family for about seven months before moving to rented accommodation near by.

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“They were great,” says Ms Dovbysh. “We’re still good friends. We live near by now, and it was a really very warm welcome for us, for the kids.”

She has since become involved with charity work for refugees through the county council and local organisations. Although she feels settled in Britain now, she says she and her children still miss their home.

“At first when we came, I was thinking that it’s only for summer, and then I thought, okay, maybe it’s till Christmas, and then it’s not ending and not ending. And sometimes it’s really hard. You really just want to go home, because you read all this news, and you feel that your heart is there, and you feel that it’s something you belong to,” she says.

For her, as for so many Ukrainians who came to Britain, the most important thing is to give her children a stable childhood away from war. “My kids already had one trauma of leaving everything,” she says. Returning to Ukraine would be starting again from scratch, she adds.

“I think the most important thing is to have a choice, because already Russia took away our choice to live safely in our homeland, and the choice of having a stable childhood.

“But for me, maybe I have more opportunities in Ukraine, to feel closer anyway to your land and help, somehow. But no one knows what will happen. It will depend how and when the war finishes.”