A Ukrainian mum has fled her home country with her young son to find refuge in Edinburgh with the help and compassion of her Scottish colleagues.
Dasha Filichkina, 28, was forced to leave her home and husband behind in Dnipro, Ukraine as she took her one-year-old son, her 50-year-old mum and her Yorkshire Terrier to find safety in Edinburgh earlier this year.
The young mum has told her story from the Scottish Capital as she feels Western interest in the Ukrainian struggle is fading.
Dasha said: “There is increasing concern amongst Ukrainians that the public psyche and the news agenda is starting to steer away from the war, but what happens over there will have huge ramifications for us all. We need to continue to stand together in defiance to stop this from becoming a global war, and to stop this from impacting your families.”
According to Dasha, there had been rumours for months that Russia planned to invade Ukraine, but most people didn’t believe it would happen so they just “got on with [their] lives.”
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“I woke up to explosions on the morning of the invasion. War had started, and I was faced with a choice; do I wake my husband, or let him and our one-year-old son sleep an extra hour in bed knowing we were probably going to die here today,” she recalled.
Dasha initially stayed in Ukraine for a few weeks and continued to work from home. She was leading Zoom calls for her colleagues in Edinburgh while Russian troops bombed her home in Dnipro.
“We eventually had to leave Dnipro and our home. You could hear people screaming for help, but what shook me most was seeing white sheets draped over cars with words read in Russian towards the sky, ‘kids on board,’” she said.
Dasha’s husband, Yaroslav, accompanied her, their one-year-old son, Dasha’s mother, and the family dog to the Moldovan border. However, the couple was forced to say goodbye as Yaroslav stayed behind to fulfil his military duties.
“My husband jumped out the car and asked if we could go through first with our baby, the guard quickly ushered us through and Yaroslav closed the car door and said to me ‘you must go now,’” Dasha recalled.
The family drove four days through Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Although Dasha had the necessary visa requirements to enter the UK, her mother did not. That’s when her colleagues at Edinburgh based space firm AstroAgency stepped in to help.
Her colleagues at AstroAgency were able to receive support from local MP Joanna Cherry and they liaised with the UK Home Office to get Dasha and her family to Edinburgh from Greece.
Two months after fleeing their homes, Dasha and her family finally left their car behind in Greece and travelled to Edinburgh.
“The team worked so hard to help my mum get the sponsorship she needed to travel to Edinburgh where I could at least work alongside my colleagues from our company headquarters and focus my mind on growing the business instead of falling into depression,” she said.
Dasha is the chief operating officer at AstroAgency. She has helped to grow AstroAgency’s team of five staff to 25 in a matter of months since joining in recent years, and she previously hosted the Agency’s founder Daniel Smith in Dnipro before the war.
Daniel said: “My wife is Ukrainian and we were in [Ukraine] for months waiting for her new visa, up until the turn of the year. During that period my wife was pregnant and we stayed with Dasha and Yaroslav a lot while we faced the possibility of having our child in Ukraine due to visa delays.
“The concern I had about this was the build-up of troops on the border. My wife and I were lucky to get out in time and my daughter was born in Edinburgh around the time the maternity hospital was attacked.
“The immediate priority for us at that point was to try and bring my wife’s family and Dasha to the UK, as well as keeping our staff positive and focused, and of course dealing with the usual challenges new parents face.”
AstroAgency employs a number of people in Ukraine, and the company has helped them and their families whenever they have decided to leave the country. The AstroAgency team has protested, gathered medical supplies for the Ukraine border, and raised more than £3,000 for the Dnipro Kids charity in Edinburgh.
Daniel said: “Dasha kept us all strong. She’d completely amaze us by holding team meetings and delegating tasks over Zoom while fighting was going on around her, or while travelling through Europe with her little boy, mum and their dog. I wasn’t surprised by her resilience and strength of character, but the team certainly were.”
Dasha said she is doing her best to stay positive and keep working towards an image she has of herself in her mind:
“I was able to meet my husband for two weeks this month, but I don’t know when I will see him again. The war is not over and I miss my home every single day. But whenever I feel like I can’t continue like this, I ask myself ‘are you going to give in?’ I have an image in my head of the woman, the professional, the mother I want to be and that keeps me motivated to stay strong for my family and my team.”
Dasha has recently been shortlisted for Diversity Hero of the Year in The Herald’s Diversity Awards which celebrate the outstanding achievements organisations have made with diversity and inclusion. The awards will be presented at a formal dinner in October. She has also been nominated at the Women's Enterprise Scotland Awards 2022 for Start-Up Business of the Year.
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