Russian teaches refugee Ukrainian children in Munich – district of Munich

Little Darja hardly takes a step from her side, the nine-year-old keeps looking for contact with Ksenia Kuligina. And the 34-year-old Russian is intensely engaged with the Ukrainian child, even during the conversation with the reporter, she keeps turning to the elementary school student with a smile and full of care. Little Nestor also comes to her several times, asks questions or just wants to be close to her – he obviously needs a lot of attention too. For almost two weeks, around 200 children have been coming to the “Ukraine School” in Fürstenried every day, as the improvised signs in the entrance area say.

There is a bit of chaos in the premises of the Freie Waldorfschule Südwest, which is actually located there. And yet what happens there is more structured than it appears: the six to seventeen-year-olds are divided into four age groups and mostly stay in the rooms intended for them. Teachers or – this is the normal case – mothers from the Ukraine give lessons again and again, the adolescents are taught the German language, sometimes there are also group discussions with a psychological touch. “Officially, of course, this isn’t a school, it’s just a care facility,” explains Ksenia Kuligina, who helps with the organization and teaches German. “But the most important thing for the children here is to have a routine again and to know where to go every day.” They even get homework, learn how and according to which rules life is lived in Germany. “And there is a strict ban on mobile phones, even in the schoolyard.”

You can tell Kuligina how important it is to her to help the students who have fled their war-torn country, to make it easier for them to get started in this completely foreign culture. “Since the day of the attack on Ukraine, I’ve only been concerned with this topic,” she says. When the war began, she was in quarantine with her family in Ottobrunn, where she lived. But even after her recovery, she couldn’t get out of bed: “For the first time in my life, I had a depressive phase and couldn’t get up.” But then she brought her friend and colleague Anastasiia Amosova, a Munich-based Ukrainian who, like Kuligina, works in the real estate industry, out of the darkness: “She said she needed me for work at school. I’m as fast as went there as much as possible and it was like starting a second life.”

A Munich lawyer is actively helping, not only in procuring the rooms, but also in organizing the catering

Amosova contacted the Munich lawyer Christian Steinpichler immediately after the attack on her home country. Together they both developed the idea of ​​opening a school and meeting place for children who had fled from the Ukraine. Initially, the lessons took place in the Hotel Super 8 Munich City North in Schwabing, where only around 40 kindergarten and preschool children are now cared for. The space there was very cramped, which is why Amosova and Steinpichler convinced the supporting association of the Waldorf school that school-age children and young people could move here. Actually, the Waldorf School would have liked to use the area that has now been temporarily ceded to the Ukraine Aid, but this restructuring is now being postponed for the time being. Amosova and Steinpichler also organized important partnerships, for example with the Käfer company, which supplies the facility with food, or with trauma experts from the association for emergency pedagogy, who talk to the children about their experiences.

Ksenia Kuligina cannot do that, as she repeatedly emphasizes. “I don’t ask any questions, especially not about the fathers of the children who had to stay in Ukraine. But the little ones can always come to cuddle or cry.” She too is highly emotional about this whole issue. Her aunt, her mother’s sister, lived near Kyiv with her cousin, who has two children, including a five-month-old baby. You are now trying to make a fresh start in Switzerland. As did her cousin, who lived near Odessa. He has three children, so an exception applies to him: he was allowed to leave the country with his family and did not have to join the army.

“I’m torn inside because the two peoples I feel I belong to are at war with each other,” says Kuligina. Her mother lives in Russia and has diabetes: “So far we have bought the medication in Germany and then sent it to her, that will hardly be possible anymore.” She fears that things will only get worse, the economic effects are already being felt: in Kamchatka, where she was born, in Siberia, where she grew up and also in Moscow, where she lived with her husband Leonid before the family, who also owns the two children Matvej and Mila, came to Germany five years ago. Leonid keeps in daily contact with friends in Russia who know next to nothing about Putin’s war of aggression because of the filtered information: “There is only fake news there, the people there believe that this war is the only way.” The development in Russia is very difficult to bear, especially for Leonid: “My husband says that Moscow is his favorite city, which gives him a lot of energy.” He also dreams of living there again one day, says Kuligina.

She is almost overwhelmed by the reaction of the Germans to the war, on the one hand by the willingness to help, but also by the understanding with which Russian exiles are treated in this country: “We don’t experience any bullying.” On the contrary: When her son wrote in a chat in his seventh grade at the Neubiberg high school that his mother worked in a meeting place for Ukrainian children, she was very willing to help.

In Ukraine, women mainly take care of the upbringing of the children. Now they have to stand on their own two feet

In the meantime, you no longer need toys, at most there is a lack of money to finance snacks for the kids in between or to do something else good. Ksenia Kuligina is currently struggling to set up a club account, but the German bureaucracy is giving her problems. Bureaucracy and integration – topics that also bring Anastasiia Amosova to the scene: The 26-year-old Ukrainian demands that Germany takes care of her home country for good reason: “There must be a bridge between our countries, for the children who are here , for their integration, because not only has Ukraine benefited from Germany in recent years, but vice versa.” She alludes to cheap labor in her home country, which many German companies would have used.

Now, however, the first thing to do is to let the women and children who have fled get to Germany. “It’s very difficult for many mothers because they’re not used to being able to stand on their own two feet from home,” says Kuligina. In Ukraine and Russia it is common for men to organize everything and for women to take care of raising the children. But here they have to go to the authorities, take care of financial support, and go looking for a job and an apartment. So it’s good to know that the children are in good hands, like at the school in Fürstenried, which actually isn’t one.

Ksenia Kuligina doesn’t have much hope that the nightmare will be over so quickly: “I reckon that they won’t be able to go home this year or next. There’s no infrastructure in their home country anymore, you can’t live there.”