They were refugees then.
And they are likely refugees again today.
When the European Training Foundation interviewed Lubov and Olena in the summer of 2016 in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro for a feature in its quarterly print journal, Live & Learn, the vocational education and training (VET) specialists were 18 months into rebuilding careers and skills training systems shattered by war.
Today they are almost certainly refugees again, as their hometowns and adoptive cities are under ferocious attack.
And the job they were doing then – trying to rebuild broken training systems – is today an even greater task, one requiring the urgent recognition of qualifications for the estimated 10 million Ukrainians that have fled the war.
Most of those refugees have headed west, or north-west into nearby EU countries, such as Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic States.
Some have gone further afield – to Germany, France and beyond. The EU is allowing all Ukrainian refugees in, visa-free, with the right to live and work in the EU for up to three years.
In 2016, the ETF met the women at a regional workshop on Ukraine’s progress in the Torino Process – the ETF’s flagship tool for analysing and improving the delivery of professional VET services.
Lubov Chihladze, a vocational school teacher from the eastern Luhansk region, had fled fighting in 2014 between Russian-backed rebels and forces loyal to the Ukrainian government in Kyiv.
The mother of a teenage daughter with a quarter of century professional experience behind her, Lubov, from Sievierodonetsk, north-east of Donetsk, had fled with her family and 90-year-old mother - who had survived Nazi occupation, deportation and incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp between 1941 and 1945.
Olena Makarenko, from Donetsk, and Deputy Director of the Department of Education and Science, Donetsk Regional State Administration, had also fled.
Both women were attempting to rebuild networks of skills training in parallel with recreating their lives in exile from their communities, with skills provision (schools and colleges) split between rebel and Kyiv-controlled territories.
As the war enters its second month, and Russian forces attempt to connect Crimea with Luhansk and Donetsk, Ukraine’s tragedy is counted in thousands of dead civilians and Ukrainian soldiers – and millions of refugees.
It will be a massive task to assimilate a wave of refugees that far exceeds the crisis of 2015, when as many as 1.3 million people fled wars in Syria and Afghanistan. Fortunately, the EU is ready.
In Germany – which took in more than a million refugees, a law known as the Western Balkan Regulation of 2015 offers asylum seekers without sufficient qualifications the chance to gain work permits; a more recent Skilled Immigration Act (2020) is designed to attract qualified workers, such as doctors and nurses, that Germany needs to help care for its ageing population.
The ETF has prepared a resource hub on qualifications and recognition for both Ukrainians fleeing the war and EU countries hosting them. A new EU wide scheme designed to provide formal documentation and recognition of prior learning or existing qualifications, is also beginning to be introduced.
The European Qualifications Passport for Refugees (EQPR) is designed to help those fleeing war find new hope in the EU.
Introduced to the ETF’s global audience during an online webinar in December, 2021, the EQPR aims to achieve a “fairer recognition of migrants’ qualifications and skills.”
It offers a two-way street that benefits both migrants and their host countries – and could be valuable if and when migrants return to their home countries, bringing new skills back with them.
There is also a new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, that “enhances legal pathways to the EU.”
Within the Migration and Asylum Pact another scheme - the Talent Partnerships - aims create better matching of labour market needs and skills between the EU and partner countries. The scheme is open to students, graduates and skilled workers.
While many of the legal niceties of these programmes will have been partially superseded by the EU’s commendable scrapping of visa requirements for Ukrainian refugees, it is essential to ensure that qualifications are recognised to allow for maximum positive labour market impact.
There should be no need for a Ukrainian doctor – for example – to end up driving a taxi – when he or she could be offering their skills to people in EU hospitals and medical facilities.
Such schemes will now need to be urgently expanded and advertised to ensure that employers in EU member states can trust the skills that Ukrainians bring with them.
Many are likely to be well qualified.
After years of close cooperation with EU institutions, such as the ETF, Ukraine’s path to harmonising its laws and educational practices with Europe’s is well-advanced.
Until 24 February, Ukraine was well on the way to becoming as civilised and mature a democracy and economy as many of the EU’s newer eastern European member states; its path to eventual EU accession moving forward at a steady pace.
As the people of the EU are likely to soon discover, the millions of Ukrainian refugees will largely prove to be intelligent, educated, hard-working and decent people ready to contribute to their temporary host countries.
In the meantime most of those refugees will dream of – and work towards – returning to rebuild their beleaguered homeland following a war that will only have served to increase the regard of the world for the Ukrainian people.
