UkraStud, in full: Perceptions of Inclusion, Well-being and Identification with the European Union in Ukrainian University Students, is co-funded by the EU under Erasmus+. Five partners built it: the University of Padova and Igor Vitale International, coordinating from Italy, the University of Zagreb, Ștefan cel Mare University in Suceava, Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa, and the International European University in Kyiv. The goal is to map how Ukrainian students experience inclusion, well-being, and identification with Europe, and turn what’s found into something universities can actually use.
One distinction shapes almost everything else in the research. Not every Ukrainian student abroad is in the same position. Some came through Erasmus and similar mobility programmes: a semester or two, chosen in advance, backed by institutional support on both ends, with a clear date to go home. Others left because of the war. Many left mid-semester with no time to prepare. Some enrolled abroad without ever setting foot on the campus, without local language, without knowing how the host system works, without a return date, because that date depends on when the war ends and what they’d be returning to. Padua tutors described a specific version of this: students who attend “only for exams,” effectively studying online from Ukraine and appearing on campus purely to sit finals. That student can’t be drawn into campus life through better events. Their situation doesn’t allow for it, whatever they want personally.
IEU in Kyiv added a perspective none of the other four sites could offer: what inclusion means when the university itself is operating in a war zone. Staff described lecturing through air-raid sirens, students joining class from basement shelters with laptops, generators bought specifically to keep classes running through power cuts. “We work beyond what is possible,” one participant said, and meant it literally. Students who stayed in Ukraine aren’t a side note to this research. They’re one of its central cases.
Across all four host countries, Ukrainian students’ identification with the European Union came out higher than any other measure in the study, between 5.63 and 6.45 out of 7, with the strongest scores in Romania and Italy.
There’s a specific mechanism behind that number. Drawing on intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006), the research found that students who had more positive everyday contact with local people rated Croatians, Italians, Romanians, and Turks more warmly, and that warmth extended to French, German, and Polish people they’d never actually met. Genuine inclusion doesn’t only improve a student’s own experience. It appears to build something closer to a European identity, through ordinary contact rather than any campaign designed to produce it.
War sits underneath every other theme in this study rather than beside it. A language barrier in peacetime is an inconvenience millions of migrants navigate every year. The same barrier, layered onto fear for family in a combat zone and an unfamiliar bureaucracy, produces a different order of stress. Ukraine’s own shift to online learning, accelerated first by COVID and then made permanent by the war, means some students are effectively enrolled in two academic systems at once, coordinating platforms, schedules, and reporting requirements across borders. The “exam-only” pattern in Padua is a direct consequence of exactly that.
Two further factors shape the picture without being obvious at first glance. Women make up 69.2% of the international student sample, a direct result of exit restrictions on men of conscription age, and staff described the specific weight of anxiety that comes with worrying about people left behind rather than facing shared danger. Length of stay matters just as much: support systems built around a semester or a year run into a mismatch when a meaningful share of students are gone within a few months, before orientation, mentoring, or friendship has had time to do anything.
None of these factors add up to a case for asking displaced students to adapt harder. The research points the other way: the barriers are structural, not personal, and equity means building the structure to match the students who are actually arriving, rather than the ones a system was originally designed for.
