“I’m learning from Olena what it’s like to be a historian in wartime”
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine forced many researchers to flee. An invisible network of mentors, established at the UvA, is helping these researchers in building new lives. “There is despair, but we’ve grown accustomed to it.”
Halfway through the conversation, UvA historian Jouke Turpijn is showered with compliments. “I’m so grateful that I can talk about history at the same level again,” says Olena Prykhodon, a historian who fled Ukraine. “Jouke has a high level of professionalism as an academic and is a truly good person.”
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“That makes me humble,” Turpijn responds, visibly uncomfortable with so much gratitude. It is the second time that mentor Turpijn and mentee Prykhodon have met at Turpijn’s office in the Bushuis. After their first meeting in October 2025, they communicated mainly by email.
Turpijn and Prykhodon connected through the University of New Europe (UNE) mentoring network. A solidarity network, founded by former UvA professor of Slavic literature and culture Ellen Rutten, that aims to give students, researchers, artists, and free thinkers from high-risk areas a helping hand. Five years after the network’s founding, collaborations are still active. UvA mentors and mentees look back.
Doomsday
The first few months following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 were chaotic, recalls UvA lecturer in Hebrew language and culture Yaniv Hagbi. “It was right after the pandemic; there was a sense of doomsday. Faculty, students – everyone wanted to help. Not by donating a tenner, but by collecting clothes and offering people a place to sleep. Looking back, I see how wonderfully people helped one another back then.”
UNE brought structure to that chaos through its mentoring network and by offering mentors professional support in the form of workshops, online consultation hours and a database of information. Researchers and artists who had fled – mainly from Ukraine, but also Russians, Belarusians, and researchers from other countries – were matched with a mentor in a similar field at another university. In total, there are around five hundred mentor-mentee pairs, 51 of whom are affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. Founder Ellen Rutten drew also on her own network for this, which is why many of UNE’s mentors are humanities scholars, social scientists, and Slavicists.
A large number of the mentor-mentee pairs were particularly active during the first, chaotic months after the outbreak of the war. A Ukrainian schoar who had fled Kyiv stayed with Hagbi for six weeks. She helped him with his course on Jewish philosophy.
The connection between some mentor pairs never got off the ground. For example, Turpijn was initially paired with a Russian history student to whom he sent about six emails but received no response.
Still other mentoring relationships resulted in joint academic publications, a visiting professorship, or a temporary position. Take, for example, Oksana Kononchuk, who fled from Kyiv to Amsterdam and, after establishing contacts via the mentoring network, secured a post as UvA lecturer in Ukrainian studies.
Starting from scratch
The Ukrainian Olena Prykhodon fled to the Netherlands with her children after the war broke out. At her university in northern Ukraine, near the Russian border, she could only continue working if she stayed there. “But that would mean my children could only attend classes online or in a bomb shelter.”
Once in the Netherlands, she found work as an art teacher at a school in The Hague. The first few years flew by. “You had to start from scratch,” she says. “You take your kids to school and go to work, day in and day out. You can’t make long-term plans – it’s a temporary situation.”
She has now been in the Netherlands for 4.5 years, and that temporary situation continues. Prykhodon: “My children have now been here longer than they were in Ukraine. For them, the Netherlands is home. For me, it’s harder – I don’t have the social network here that I have in Ukraine.”
Through the mentor network, she got in touch with Turpijn last October. Since then, they’ve been in regular contact about potential jobs and the obstacles you face when trying to build a life in a new country. “It’s not just about career; it’s also about human support.”
Finding a Way
“Saying you want to help is easy; actually being able to help is more complicated,” says Turpijn. Through a contact at the Royal Military Academy in Breda, the idea arose to teach officer candidates about the language and history of Russia. “The perfect job for the perfect person at the perfect time.” Ultimately, that didn’t work out because the Ministry of Defense doesn’t hire people from outside the EU whose background they are unable to check, or find it difficult to check.
According to UvA philosopher Yolande Jansen, it was also “a matter of figuring things out” at first as to how to help. She Russian philosopher and activist Petr Safronov from Moscow. He was arrested by the police on the first day of the war because of his activism against the Russian regime.
“With a lot of juggling and a great deal of effort, we eventually managed to secure just enough work for him to bring him here,” says Jansen. This involved 25,000 euros in funding from the Scholar Rescue Fund and 25,000 euros for a research projectw hich fell within the UvA’s Research Priority Area, Global Digital Cultures, which Safronov was able to begin in July 2022 as a visiting researcher at the UvA.
And then there was the matter of arranging a visa and finding a place to stay. For the first few weeks, Safronov was registered at Jansen’s address. “That was only for a few weeks; through a Safe Haven Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, he quickly found housing. But that did cause a lot of hassle with the tax authorities. I spent endless hours on the phone trying to sort it all out.”
Fluent Dutch
“Yolande was crucial for me,” says Safronov, who regularly went over to Jansen’s for dinner. They’d talk about everything under the sun: from political activism to Dutch literature. “Within a year, he was speaking Dutch fluently,” says Jansen. “He told me I had to read Eva, by the Dutch author Carry van Bruggen. He’s incredibly interested in literature.”
Jansen calls it “refreshing” to have the perspective of researchers from Eastern Europe at the university. “Petr has also given a presentation in my department. He knew an incredible amount about the history of Ukraine and Russia, but also about constitutional democracy. Now, whenever I see a documentary about the war, I ask Petr what he thinks of it.”
Turpijn learns from Prykhodon what it’s like to be a historian in wartime. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to leave your country with your children and build a new life and career in a new country.”
Still Relevant
According to founder Rutten, the network remains relevant five years after its founding and is still open to new mentors and mentees. “Precisely because so many things are happening in the world that demand our attention – such as the situations in Gaza and Iran – war fatigue can set in. Many people have understandably shifted their focus. Networks like this one are still important for giving people a little nudge.”
According to Hagbi, the acute stress of the war has turned into constant stress caused by wars throughout the world. He still regularly receives emails from researchers in distress, but fewer urgent requests. “There is despair, but we’ve grown accustomed to it.”
Safronov returned to Russia a year ago. There, he is working on a new constitution, a legal foundation for the future of Russia. “I call myself a field philosopher; for my work, I need to be among the Russian people.”
Is he safe there? “Yolande asks me that, too,” he replies with a laugh. “I try to temper the concerns about that a bit. So far, I’m managing. But it’s possible that at some point I’ll have to leave again. You have to be able to cope with a certain degree of uncertainty.”
Safronov and Jansen do, however, stay in touch. Jansen: “I’m trying to get him a column in a Dutch magazine, so the connection is still there. And if the repression of political intellectual work in Russia intensifies again, we can fall back on a network.”
