The Road from Melitopol to Manchester

By Matthew Parish

Friday 23 October 2026

In February 2022, the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol fell under Russian occupation. For thousands of its inhabitants, the invasion represented not merely a change of government or a territorial dispute between rival powers, but the destruction of the ordinary assumptions upon which human lives depend. The familiar streets remained, the buildings were largely the same and the shops sometimes continued to open, but the relationship between the individual and the state had been transformed beyond recognition.

In this interview, we explore the experiences of a young Ukrainian who escaped the occupation, survived an attack in the vicinity of a gathering of civilian vehicles near Zaporizhzhia and eventually found refuge in northern England, where he now earns his living as a driver. The conversation considers not only the violence of war but also the peculiar loneliness of exile, the differences between Ukrainian and British society and the difficult question of whether a person who has lost his home can ever truly recover it.

Matthew Parish: Let us begin before the war. Tell me what Melitopol was like when you were growing up, before the Russian invasion changed everything.

Interviewee: Melitopol was not a particularly remarkable place, at least not to somebody who lived there. We had our friends, our schools, our cafés and our ordinary disagreements about politics and football. When you are young, you tend to think that the city where you grew up is rather boring, and you imagine that somewhere else life must be more interesting.

Now I realise that this ordinary boredom was a privilege. We did not think about whether we could leave our homes safely in the morning or whether we would have enough food next week. We worried about girlfriends, jobs, money and whether we were doing anything useful with our lives. I would give almost anything to have those stupid little worries again.

Matthew Parish: Do you remember the morning of 24 February 2022? Did you immediately understand that the world you knew was coming to an end?

Interviewee: I remember the confusion more than anything. Everybody was looking at their telephones, calling relatives and trying to work out what was true. We knew there were Russian troops moving towards us, but knowing something intellectually and believing it emotionally are completely different things.

I had never imagined that Russian soldiers would occupy my city. The Russians had always been there in our lives in one way or another. We spoke Russian, watched Russian films and had relatives who lived in Russia. None of that meant we wanted Russian soldiers telling us how to live. I think many Russians have never understood this distinction.

Matthew Parish: What changed when the Russian military arrived? Was there a moment when you realised that you were no longer living in a free country?

Interviewee: The first thing that changes is the atmosphere. You begin to think before speaking, even with people you have known for years. You stop discussing certain subjects in public because you do not know who might be listening or what might happen if somebody reports your conversation.

A soldier with a weapon does not have to threaten you directly to change your behaviour. His presence is enough. You start imagining what he might do, and soon you are doing the work of frightening yourself without him having to say anything.

That is something people who have never lived under occupation find difficult to understand. Freedom is not just the right to vote or to read newspapers. It is the ability to walk down the street without constantly calculating what might happen to you.

Matthew Parish: Were you frightened of the Russian soldiers themselves, or of the system of occupation that was developing around them?

Interviewee: Both, but in different ways. An individual soldier might be polite, aggressive, drunk, nervous or just bored. You never knew which kind of person you were going to encounter. But the larger problem was that there were no reliable rules.

In a normal society, you assume that if you have done nothing wrong, the police will generally leave you alone. Under occupation, you cannot make that assumption. You can be perfectly innocent and still find yourself in trouble because somebody dislikes you, misunderstands something you say or decides to demonstrate his authority.

The uncertainty is exhausting. You wake up tired because even when you have done nothing, you are always thinking.

Matthew Parish: How did you decide to leave Melitopol? Was it a sudden decision or something that developed over time?

Interviewee: It developed gradually. At first you tell yourself that the situation cannot last very long. Then you begin to realise that you have no idea how long it might continue, and that you could waste years waiting for somebody else to restore your life.

There were also practical difficulties. People needed food, medicine, money and information. Travelling between occupied territory and Ukrainian-controlled areas became a matter of enormous anxiety. Some people were trying to escape permanently, while others had relatives or possessions they could not simply abandon.

Eventually you reach a point when staying seems more dangerous than leaving. That does not mean leaving becomes easy. It just means you have run out of good choices.

Matthew Parish: Let us discuss the journey towards Zaporizhzhia. Why would people take such a dangerous route merely to obtain food and other necessities?

Interviewee: Because ordinary necessities do not stop being necessary when a war begins. People still need bread, medicine, clothes for their children and fuel for their cars. If the normal arrangements for buying these things collapse, people start taking risks that would previously have seemed absurd.

You have to understand that a convoy of civilian vehicles does not look like anything military. There are old cars, family cars, vans, people carrying bags and people asking one another whether they have heard any news about the road ahead. Most of them are thinking about very simple things. They want to get somewhere, do what they need to do and return alive.

It is strange how quickly war turns the ordinary act of going shopping into an adventure that might kill you.

Matthew Parish: You found yourself among civilian vehicles gathered near Zaporizhzhia when explosions began. What do you remember about those moments?

Interviewee: The most frightening thing about a sudden explosion is that you do not immediately understand what has happened. You hear something enormous, and for a moment your mind refuses to interpret it. Then everybody seems to move at once, but not necessarily in the same direction.

Some people instinctively run. Others freeze because they are trying to understand where the danger is coming from. You suddenly discover that the plans you made five minutes earlier are completely meaningless.

I think we imagine that in a crisis we will behave rationally, but that is not always how human beings work. Afterwards you can construct a perfectly logical account of what you should have done. At the time, you are just trying to remain alive.

Matthew Parish: Did the experience change the way you think about death?

Interviewee: Yes, although not in the way people might expect. I do not spend every day thinking about dying. In fact, I probably think about it less than people who have never been close to violence, because there is nothing useful in being frightened all the time.

What changed was my understanding of how arbitrary death can be. We grow up imagining that the important events in our lives will somehow reflect our decisions, our abilities or our characters. But sometimes the difference between surviving and dying is simply where you happened to be standing.

That is a very difficult thought to live with. It is also a reason not to waste too much time being angry about small things.

Matthew Parish: Do you feel anger towards Russia? Or has that feeling diminished with time?

Interviewee: Of course I feel anger. My city was occupied, people lost their homes and lives were destroyed for reasons that I still cannot understand. I do not think anybody should be expected to forgive those things simply because time has passed.

But I try to distinguish between anger and hatred. Anger can remind you that something terribly wrong has happened. Hatred can become something that controls your entire life, even when the people you hate are thousands of kilometres away and have no idea who you are.

I do not want the Russians to occupy my thoughts for the rest of my life as well as occupying my hometown. They have already taken enough.

Matthew Parish: How did you eventually come to Britain, and why did you choose the Manchester area?

Interviewee: Britain seemed very far away from everything that had happened. That was part of its attraction. I wanted somewhere where the roads were safe, where people could make plans and where I would not have to listen for explosions in the middle of the night.

I did not know much about Manchester before coming here. I knew about the football clubs, the rain and the fact that British people drink an extraordinary amount of tea. What surprised me was how ordinary everything seemed. People went to work, complained about the weather and worried about the price of petrol.

At first I found that reassuring. Later, strangely enough, I sometimes found it depressing. It is difficult to explain to somebody who has never experienced war why their perfectly normal problems can seem so small to you, while your own problems are often impossible to explain.

Matthew Parish: You now work as a driver. What is that like, having travelled such an extraordinary distance from your former life?

Interviewee: Driving is good because it gives your day a structure. You have somewhere to go, something to deliver or somebody to collect. When you are working, you are concentrating on the road rather than thinking about everything you have lost.

Sometimes I drive through beautiful countryside, and I wonder whether British people realise how fortunate they are. There are villages with old churches, green fields and houses that have stood for hundreds of years without anybody trying to destroy them. Of course, Britain has had its own terrible history, but its people have not experienced a foreign army occupying their towns in recent generations.

I also enjoy the independence. When you have lived somewhere that other people controlled your movements, the simple act of driving wherever you are legally permitted to go can feel like freedom.

Matthew Parish: Have you found the British welcoming? Do people understand what has happened to you?

Interviewee: Most people have been kind. The British are perhaps not always very emotional in the way they express themselves, but they can be generous and practical. Somebody will help you with a document, explain how something works or give you a lift without making a great speech about it.

The difficulty is that there is a limit to how much people can understand an experience they have never had. If you tell somebody that your hometown is occupied by Russian soldiers, they will probably say how terrible that is. And they mean it sincerely.

But then the conversation moves on. They have their own lives to live, and you cannot reasonably expect them to carry your memories around with them. You have to learn to live in two different worlds: the ordinary world in which you work and socialise, and the other world that exists inside your head.

Matthew Parish: Do you feel more Ukrainian now than you did before the war?

Interviewee: That is an interesting question because I never felt that I had to demonstrate being Ukrainian before the invasion. It was simply what I was. I could speak Russian, enjoy Russian literature and have Russian-speaking friends without thinking that any of those things contradicted my nationality.

Now nationality has become something much more personal. I understand that Ukraine is not just a place on a map or a collection of government institutions. It is the idea that we should be able to decide how to live without somebody arriving from another country and making those decisions for us.

I think many Ukrainians have discovered something similar. We have learned that independence is not an abstract political concept. It is something you can lose, and when you lose it you understand exactly how valuable it was.

Matthew Parish: There is a curious irony here. You have escaped from a country at war to one of the world’s oldest democracies, yet you are living in a society that has no real understanding of the sacrifices necessary to defend democracy. Does that ever trouble you?

Interviewee: Sometimes, although I do not blame British people for having peaceful lives. That is what we wanted in Ukraine as well. Nobody should have to experience occupation or war in order to appreciate freedom.

What surprises me is how much people take for granted. They complain about politicians, the police and the government, and sometimes they are perfectly right to complain. But they can express these complaints publicly without expecting armed men to arrive at their homes.

I would never tell a British person to stop criticising their government. Quite the opposite. I would tell them that the ability to criticise their government is one of the most important things they possess.

Matthew Parish: Do you find that people in Britain are becoming tired of hearing about Ukraine?

Interviewee: I think people become tired of every war eventually, especially when it is happening somewhere else. At the beginning there is shock and sympathy. Then the war continues, people become accustomed to it and other problems take over the newspapers.

I can understand that psychologically, but it does not make the war less real. The fact that somebody has stopped reading about an occupation does not mean the occupation has ended.

Sometimes people ask me whether I think the war will finish soon. I have no idea. I wish I did, because uncertainty is one of the most difficult things about being a refugee. You cannot make a proper decision about your future because you do not know what the future of your country will be.

Matthew Parish: Let me ask you about your family and the people you left behind. Does distance make those relationships easier or more difficult?

Interviewee: Both. When you are far away, you do not have to witness every difficulty your friends and relatives experience. You can go to work, come home and pretend for a few hours that you have an ordinary life.

But then somebody does not answer a message, and immediately you start imagining terrible things. You have to remind yourself that perhaps their telephone has simply run out of battery or they are busy.

The hardest part is being unable to do anything useful. You can send money, make telephone calls and offer advice, but you cannot sit beside somebody when they are frightened. There is a kind of helplessness in exile that never completely disappears.

Matthew Parish: Do you ever feel guilty about having escaped?

Interviewee: Yes, and I think that is quite common. You are grateful to be safe, but you know that other people are not safe. You see photographs of destroyed buildings and wonder why you have been given the opportunity to begin again when somebody else has not.

At the same time, I know intellectually that feeling guilty does not help anybody. I did not cause the war, and remaining in danger would not have made anybody else’s life better. But human emotions are not always logical.

Perhaps that is one of the things I am still learning. You can be grateful for your new life without pretending that your old life no longer matters.

Matthew Parish: Do you expect to return to Melitopol one day?

Interviewee: I hope so, but I do not know whether I could live there again. Even if the city is liberated, it will not be the place I remember. People have left, families have been separated and everybody has experienced things that will change them.

There is also the question of what I will have become by then. If I spend another five or ten years in Britain, I may have built a career, established friendships and perhaps started a family. Returning to Ukraine would then mean leaving behind another life.

That is one of the cruellest consequences of war. You lose your home, but when you finally have the opportunity to recover it, you may discover that you have become a different person.

Matthew Parish: What would you say to those who believe that Ukraine should simply agree to whatever territorial concessions are necessary to end the war?

Interviewee: I would ask them to imagine that the question concerned their own homes. It is easy to discuss territorial concessions when you are looking at a map and the places being discussed are somewhere you have never visited.

But those places contain people’s childhoods, their parents’ graves, their schools and the streets where they first fell in love. They are not empty pieces of land that politicians can exchange like objects in a market.

Of course I want peace. Everybody who has experienced war wants peace. But there is a difference between ending the shooting and creating a situation in which people can live without fear that the shooting will begin again.

Matthew Parish: You are still a young man. Do you think the war has made you older than your years?

Interviewee: In some ways yes, and in other ways no. I have experienced things that many people twice my age have never experienced, but that does not mean I have become wise. Sometimes I think it has made me more serious than I should be.

Then I go out with friends, laugh at something stupid or watch a football match, and I remember that I am still young. I do not want the rest of my life to be defined only by the worst things that have happened to me.

That is something I would like people to understand about Ukrainians who have escaped the war. We are not merely victims. We still want to enjoy ourselves, make mistakes, fall in love, earn money and have ordinary futures.

Matthew Parish: Finally, if you could speak to the young man you were in Melitopol on the evening of 23 February 2022, before the invasion began, what would you tell him?

Interviewee: I would tell him to spend more time with the people he loves. I would tell him not to worry so much about money or about whether he has achieved enough for his age. Those things can be repaired or changed, but there are moments that never come back.

I would also tell him that he is stronger than he thinks. Not because he is especially brave or clever, but because human beings are capable of enduring things they cannot imagine beforehand.

And I would tell him to remember his home carefully. The trees, the streets, the smells of the city in summer, the places where he met his friends. I would tell him to remember all of it, because one day those memories might be the only part of Melitopol he can carry with him.

Editorial reflection: the geography of exile

The experience of the Ukrainian refugee challenges many of the conventional assumptions upon which European political discourse is founded. We discuss migration as though it were primarily a question of economic incentives, immigration regulations and the distribution of public resources. Yet for those displaced by Russia’s invasion, migration is frequently the consequence of a profound political catastrophe: the sudden removal of their ability to determine the conditions of their own lives.

The distance between Melitopol and Manchester is considerable in geographical terms, but the more important distance is moral and psychological. One city represents the experience of arbitrary power, where ordinary human existence has become dependent upon decisions made by an occupying military authority. The other represents the mundane security of democratic government, imperfect certainly, but sufficiently reliable that its inhabitants may spend their days worrying about the weather, the price of electricity and the performance of their football teams.

There is something almost absurd about the juxtaposition, and yet this absurdity lies at the heart of modern European civilisation. Two young men of approximately the same age may inhabit the same continent, share similar tastes in music and popular culture and possess comparable hopes for the future, while one enjoys the privileges of a peaceful society and the other must confront the destruction of everything he has known. Nothing about their personal merits explains this difference. It is the consequence of history, geography and the political choices of other people.

For those who have escaped occupation, the recovery of freedom does not necessarily entail the recovery of peace of mind. The individual may be physically removed from danger while continuing to inhabit a private world of apprehension and memory. His work, friendships and ambitions may gradually establish the foundations of a new existence, but the country he has left behind continues to exercise an extraordinary hold upon his imagination.

Perhaps this is why the question of returning home is so difficult. Home is not merely a geographical location, and its destruction cannot necessarily be reversed through the rebuilding of houses or the restoration of political sovereignty. It consists also of relationships, memories and expectations, many of which may have been permanently altered by the experience of war.

Nevertheless, there is reason to resist the temptation to regard the refugee’s experience solely through the language of tragedy. A young man who has survived occupation and displacement, learned to navigate a foreign society and found productive employment has demonstrated something fundamental about human resilience. He has not surrendered the possibility of a future merely because the past has been cruel to him.

The Ukrainian struggle against Russian aggression is therefore not solely a military contest over territory. It is also a struggle to preserve the possibility of ordinary lives, in which young men and women can pursue unremarkable ambitions without being obliged to become heroes, refugees or witnesses to historical catastrophe.

The greatest victory for Ukraine will come not merely when its territory is free of occupation, but when its citizens are again permitted the luxury of being ordinary.

For the young Ukrainians scattered across Europe, driving the roads of northern England, studying in German universities or working in Polish factories, that possibility remains both a hope and an unfinished journey.