Ukrainian students face down the challenges of conflict to earn their Loyola PROLAW degrees

During Nataliia Okhotnikova’s first term in Loyola University Chicago’s Rule of Law for Development (PROLAW) program in fall 2022, she did much of her coursework in a Kyiv supermarket.

It was one of the few places with reliable, generator-created electricity—and thus a Wi-Fi connection—as shelling from the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022 pounded the city infrastructure.

“When you’re under stress, you show your real face. And I found out that the face of Ukrainians is amazing,” says Okhotnikova, who’d come to Kyiv after her home city of Kharkiv was devastated by Russian attacks. “If you had light or hot water, you shared it. We exchanged information about where you could charge your phone. If you lived near a hospital or a railway station, it meant your house was connected, so you invited people over.”

Overcoming obstacles

Okhotnikova is among several extraordinarily resilient Ukrainian students who are surmounting the overwhelming challenges of wartime to earn advanced degrees in rule of law for development. While Okhotnikova was at the supermarket, classmate Yuliya Voitenko was elsewhere in Kyiv, connecting to her assignments from wherever she could find electricity.

“I would be at the hospital, gas stations, or McDonald’s with my baby, downloading class resources as fast as I could,” she recalls. “I always tried to get the subtitles to a video saved in the few minutes I’d have internet.”

Another member of the PROLAW cohort, Nataliia Hrytsenko, says “it was impossible to plan anything” during last fall’s shelling.

“I sometimes sat in my office from morning until night because it is equipped with its own power station and internet access, so it was possible to study there when the electricity went out,” Hrytsenko says. “But missile attacks then, and again now while we’re getting ready for our final deadlines for the program, mean sleepless nights and extra effort to study.”

Still another classmate, Iana Verteba, was preparing to move to Malta in early 2022. “Then, on the 24th of February 2022, everything changed,” she says. Already in the process of applying to the PROLAW program, “I didn’t know what I’d be doing the next week or the next month, but I knew I had to finish applying and see what happens,” she says. Writing the required letter explaining her reasons for applying, she was consumed by “strong feelings, a real passion, about how PROLAW might help me change my country and help vulnerable Ukrainians after the war is over.”