Within a month of fleeing the war in Ukraine to Ireland where she continued to work remotely as an export and marketing manager at a major pharmaceuticals manufacturer, Anna Repetska was told she needed to return to the company’s Kyiv offices or leave her job.
The ultimatum seemed harsh but “in the circumstances we are now, fair is not a word Ukrainians use,” she says. “It was the fact.”
Since then, however, she has been lucky on almost every count. After arriving here in May 2022 she met a family in Newbridge who took her in and treated her like a daughter, got a job at United Drug Consumer, where she works as a brand manager and, more recently, has been able to study again.
That opportunity has been provided by a bursary in executive education programme aimed at Ukrainians and run by the business school at Trinity College Dublin. She heard about the programme from friends online.
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“I like to learn new things and it was nice just to be doing that again but it’s been beneficial too.
“We are not locals,” she says. “We have a different culture and mindset, different ways of speaking and doing things, so I wanted to dive deeper into the different styles of communication and leadership. I wanted to understand that better, to see how things work and get new tools to progress. It has helped a lot.”
Repetska is one of about 65 Ukrainians to benefit from the programme over the course of the academic year and by the end of 2025 the school hopes to have brought 100 Ukrainians through courses intended to be short, practical and targeted to particular needs.
Anastasiia Levdikova had 17 years’ experience in business before leaving Odessa and now lives in Dundalk with her partner and their three children. She has continued to work since arriving soon after the war started while gaining her second master’s degree at DCU, which also provided supports.
In August, she started a new business, L&D Works, helping companies here and abroad with talent analytics, recruitment and retention. She says her course, like Repetska’s, in leadership, has helped her better understand the people here.
“It has been important for me, it has helped me to have a different view on what we are developing and gave me a good idea of what people in Ireland are expecting,” she says.
Viktoria Horbonos and her partner Mykola Kuleshov have started a catering business, Lucy, and plan to open at a new location in the coming weeks close to Leonard’s Corner in Dublin 8. The course they did in finance for non-finance professionals has helped hugely, they say, in presenting business plans to banks.
“It was great to learn the terms and it has helped us when we speak to our accountant,” says Horbonos. “We wouldn’t have coped without it, it’s been an amazing experience.”
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Like a lot of Ukrainians in Ireland, Horbonos had initially struggled to find employment in Ireland despite being hugely well qualified at home. She has a PhD and worked in forensics in Kyiv before lecturing at a university in her native Vinnytsia, 250km southwest of the capital.
“I thought I could work in a kindergarten here but was told I would need to do a level-five qualification. Then I went for a job as a barista and the person interviewing me said I would be better to throw my two-page resume away and just keep a few lines about being good with my hands and people and being eager to work.”
After a succession of hospitality jobs she and Mykola started to think about opening up a business of their own, serving food from back home, but they were a little daunted by the practicalities.
They heard about the Trinity course from a woman who worked in the college as she bought Ukrainian dumplings from them and they have big ambitions for the business.
Kuleshov, however, says that even getting to study at a university such as Trinity initially seemed unbelievable. He had never previously got to study having gone to work from a young age after being brought up by his grandmother then helping her and his disabled uncle. “I cried when I heard we had been accepted,” he says.
Nina Mischenko, meanwhile, has also struggled to get work here despite experience as a journalist and communications director for a large real-estate company back home.
“I was always told I was overqualified for the lower-ranking jobs but did not have the Irish or EU qualifications wanted for the executive roles. I did a course before this in Pearse College and am also studying at TU Dublin but the course here in AI has been so interesting, how we can use it in marketing, and I am hoping when people see I have studied at the best university in Dublin on LinkedIn it will help me.”
All of the Ukrainians who spoke to The Irish Times about the course expressed gratitude, not just to Trinity for the opportunity it has given them but to Ireland and its people for the support they have received.
Their back stories are varied but all remarkable, full of trauma, decisions of great consequence and resilience.
“A woman I know who lived through the war in the Balkans told me there were people who left there to grow their families and career abroad and those who stayed and had to wait years for the war to end, then the country to rebuild. And she said to me: ‘If there is a war, think about what you really want in your life?’”
Two weeks later she knew the war had started when she heard an explosion in the middle of the night and immediately started making plans.
All have shown a determination to move their lives forward while the war rumbles on. Michael Flynn, director of executive education at the university, says the Ukrainians accepted on to the courses, from the hundreds who applied, “are very aligned with the other people who look for these programmes. They want skills uplift or leadership development aligned with the jobs or aspirations they have.”
Each bursary, he says, is worth about €2,000 and by integrating the students with Irish and other nationalities based here, the Ukrainians also benefit from “plugging into the ecosystem” and the networking opportunities that brings.
Having initiated the programme after the war started, the department is starting to extend it to other groups including international protection applicants and those working in the areas of homelessness and mental health or with vulnerable women – all areas, the department hopes, where a positive impact can be made.
The Ukrainians have felt it already, they say, and want to put the skills they have been equipped with to good use.
Some seem likely to settle in Ireland while others, such as Anastasiia Snytkova, a newly qualified lawyer from Mykolaiv, hopes the course in business and human rights might help her make Ukraine a better place some day.
She is, she says, incredibly grateful to the families who have hosted her here, to the first legal firm that employed her, Byrne Wallace, when “my English was not good and I’m sure they didn’t know what to do with me” as well as A&L Goodbody, where she now works as a legal review analyst. “But my parents are in Ukraine and a piece of my heart too,” she says.
Asked what she will do, Repetska says there is no way of really knowing for now. “I had lots of plans before the war but war teaches you not to plan so much.”
