Poole man returning to UK shares experience of being in Ukraine

Passengers arrived at Gatwick Airport on a direct flight from Kyiv shortly after noon on Saturday, just hours after the Foreign Office warned UK nationals in the country, thought to number in the low thousands, to “leave now while commercial means are still available”.

Paul Meakin, 51 and from Poole, said Ukrainians did not seem worried about the situation despite reports that the threat of a Russian invasion looms.

Speaking after landing at Gatwick, Mr Meakin, his Ukrainian-British wife Svetlana, 36, and their daughter, who had spent a week in Ukraine to attend a funeral, said most passengers on their flight had been Ukrainian, not British.

Asked about people’s attitudes there, the IT company chief said: “You wouldn’t even know.

"They don’t care, that’s what came across.”

This sentiment was not shared by others on the flight.

Haider Ali, 21 and from Birmingham, said: “I’d been in two minds about coming back because of the advice coming out by the British Embassy, about the amber alert, red alert.

Haider Ali

“A lot of people, a lot of students were waiting for the red alert, and it happened yesterday.

“Once that happened, everybody booked their tickets and left as soon as possible.”

Mr Ali said his university, the Dnipro Medical Institute in Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine, had advised students to “get out as soon as you can”.

He said around half the students at the university are British.

The UK and other Nato countries have urged their citizens to leave as fears grow that Russian President Vladimir Putin could order an invasion in the coming days.

Mr Ali said: “I think the main thing that people were getting worried about as well is, because it’s along the Dnieper River, a lot of the people were saying, if Putin wants to suffocate Kyiv, push his warships along that path as well.”

He said he was hoping to return to Ukraine by June to continue his studies.

Mr Ali said Ukrainians’ opinions were split on the likelihood of a Russian incursion, but that the perception that Western media were blowing the crisis out of proportion was changing.

He said: “The Ukrainians are generally very laissez-faire as in terms of people, but the last couple of days they’ve started to get worried.

“And when that happens, alarm bells should be ringing.”

Ukrainian Pasha Honcharuk, 24, from Kyiv, said he was “not too worried” and that he would have stayed home if it were not for work in the UK.

He said: “All news channels tell that there will be war but I don’t think so.”

But a Ukrainian business analyst, who did not want to be named, said that “of course everybody’s worried” about the threat of war.

But she said this had not influenced her pre-existing decision to move to London from Kyiv for work.