Ukrainian widow Olga Garbuz, who lost her husband to the war in Ukraine, came to Dubai with her daughter in 2022 to rebuild her life.
But the recent escalation in the Gulf has revived the fears she thought she had left behind.
“The war in Ukraine took many things from me and my daughter. My husband got killed. We got displaced multiple times. I cannot imagine going through any of these again,” Ms Garbuz tells The Independent.
Her husband, Yuriy Volchkov, was killed in Kharkiv, a frontline city in eastern Ukraine, in March 2022, when the vehicle he was travelling in to distribute humanitarian aid was shot at by the Russians. He was 45 years old.
After fleeing Kharkiv, which fell under the Russian occupation in the early months of the war, Ms Garbuz and her daughter moved repeatedly across Ukraine before eventually leaving the country.
“We had to move 13 times from city to city,” she says. “Each time packing our things and setting up a new home was incredibly exhausting.
“I arrived in the UAE with my daughter Maya and just two suitcases four years ago. Since then, I have been working hard for the wellbeing of my daughter.”
A few days before the escalation began with Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the Gulf, she said she had finally begun to feel, after three years, that life was returning to normal.
Her biggest fear now is having to uproot her daughter again.
“Now we have been living in the same apartment for almost two years. My daughter goes to school regularly.
“It would be an absolutely heartbreaking situation for her if we had to move again,” she adds.
But the sound of missile interceptions over the Dubai skies has brought back old instincts.
“I found myself again packing an emergency bag. I knew which documents to include, that we must have water at home and cash on hand.”
The explosions also bring back the physical memory of war: “Sometimes my body tenses up because I remember what it was like and what usually followed.
