In Padua, a tutor describes exam stress and delays caused by paperwork. In Suceava, staff describe disrupted sleep and trouble concentrating. In Istanbul, mentors describe something closer to post-traumatic stress. In Kyiv, a lecturer runs a seminar between air-raid sirens while managing her own fear for family members. These aren’t four versions of the same problem. They’re four different psychological realities, and averaging them into one picture of “how Ukrainian students are doing” is exactly the mistake the UkraStud research tried to avoid.
The finding comes from seven focus groups held across five countries between January and April 2026, with 35 university staff: tutors, mentors, curators, international office advisors. Facilitators asked the same twelve questions everywhere, organised around integration, cultural understanding, employment, and psychological well-being. What came back on the mental health question varied more than on any other topic.
Staff in Istanbul used a specific phrase for what they were seeing: an “emotional fragility of a generation.” Young people who spent their teenage or early adult years under active war carry a baseline level of psychological load that standard university support services were never built to handle. In Padua, by contrast, staff described something more familiar: exam anxiety, stress about academic results, uncertainty caused by administrative delays. Concern about family in Ukraine was present but rarely spoken about directly, which staff read less as an absence of the problem and more as a sign that existing channels didn’t feel safe enough for that conversation.
Kyiv gave the research something none of the other sites could. Staff there described teaching through air-raid sirens as part of the regular schedule, and taking calls from students’ parents in front-line areas in the middle of sessions. The lecturers doing the supporting were themselves living under chronic stress. Nobody in Kyiv described this as remarkable. It was simply what the semester looked like.
Staff in Suceava, Istanbul, and Kyiv described symptoms with the hallmarks of PTSD: disrupted sleep, chronic anxiety about family in combat zones, and the specific toll of following news from a city under bombardment.
Nearly every university involved has some form of psychological service on paper. The problem staff described wasn’t absence, it was access. In Padua, a student refused to see the university psychologist because she wanted to talk to someone who spoke her own language. An English-language counsellor existed, but the appointment times clashed with her classes and part-time job. In Zagreb, staff put it in one line: a lack of adequate psychological support in the Ukrainian language. Not no service. The wrong service. In Istanbul, the psychological service only operated during weekday daytime hours, when most students were in class or working.
There’s a cultural layer on top of the language one. Several focus groups noted that seeking psychological help still carries stigma in Ukrainian student communities, especially among younger people. A student going through real difficulty might describe it as simply being tired, or needing to try harder, rather than something worth raising with a counsellor. A lecturer at IEU described a student who missed classes for three months before a personal conversation revealed she was in the middle of an acute depressive episode.
With official services often hard to reach in practice, tutors and mentors end up functioning as the first line of psychological support, whether or not anyone assigned them that role. In Padua, staff described conversations that start with a question about exam registration and end, twenty minutes later, with a student talking about fear for a father still in Kharkiv. Staff in Zagreb described the same pattern and named it directly as a source of burnout among the people doing the supporting.
Here’s where the research gets genuinely counterintuitive. Survey data collected earlier in the project, covering 172 Ukrainian students in the four host countries and 69 in Ukraine, put psychological well-being on the Flourishing Scale between 5.58 and 5.70 out of 7 in every country, comfortably above the midpoint. Read alone, that number would suggest students are doing fine. Read next to the focus group material, it suggests something else: that general well-being scales aren’t built to catch what researchers call ambiguous loss, the specific, open-ended grief of not knowing whether or when a return home will be possible. A student can rate life as reasonably good on a seven-point scale and still be carrying something that scale was never designed to measure.
None of this points to a single fix. It points to training for the staff who are already doing the work without being trained for it, and to psychological services actually built around the students using them, not the students the service was originally designed for.
