Shevchuk is safe thanks to Amel Menacere, a 36-year-old Liverpudlian she’d never met, who volunteered to house a refugee in her spare room. “It’s strange – it feels like it’s in Ukraine,” Shevchuk said.

Liverpudlians, who typically bleed either red or blue, depending on their allegiance to the city’s two footballing giants, have instead draped their home in Ukraine’s national colors, and welcomed scores of displaced people after the British government earmarked 3,000 tickets for Ukrainian refugees. The dockside hub where the competition is being held feels like a little Ukraine. The UK, the second-placed nation, stepped in, and Liverpool triumphed over bids from other British cities to stage the contest.

Had circumstances been different, the Eurovision Song Contest might be taking place this weekend Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, or Shevchuk’s home city, Donetsk, which she left for Kyiv after fighting broke out with pro-Russian separatists in 2014.īut Ukraine – which won the 2022 contest on a wave of European solidarity – is in the grips of war. Shevchuk, 33, is one of 122,000 displaced people housed in the UK under a government program to help some of the millions who fled the Russian invasion of her home country.Īnd this week, five months after Shevchuk arrived, her adopted city of Liverpool is playing host to Ukraine’s biggest celebration since the Russian invasion. “I just cried and said: ‘I’m from Ukraine,’” she recalled. Her first memory on British soil was the sight of paramedics, buzzing below an airport ceiling. Then, exhausted and overwhelmed, she collapsed. Nine months after she fled Russian rockets in her pajamas, carrying only her passport, Iryna Shevchuk finally arrived somewhere vaguely resembling home.

Shattered sea book 2