Lost in Lack of Translation: Svetlana, Bulgaria and the Conflict in Ukraine

Novinite is introducing Svetlana Belenets, a Ukrainian national seeking asylum in Bulgaria, and Carl Spate, a Briton who has been helping her along the way and who contacted us to tell their story.

"I sent an email to the Ministry of Interior that Sveta is an illegal immigrant; then sent another one to the State Refugee Agency. She will be illegal after the 1st of March," Carl tells me angrily on the phone on a Tuesday morning. "If they want to do deportation they should do it. I told her: 'If you want to go home, go home. She will not get into Donbass."

It is the 2nd of March now, and "Sveta" is not an illegal immigrant as of today - her residence permit is valid at least until mid-March when it will be up to the state to decide. Just a week earlier, however, listening to the man talking about her on the phone, I can clearly hear in voice a crack of despair: 

"At seventy-two, I have nobody I can turn to? while it's costing the government nothing."

Two minutes later, as I hang up sitting in my office, I wonder what is more infuriating to Carl Spate, a retired Englishman who moved to the northern Bulgarian city of Ruse eight years ago and to whom Svetlana Belenets, an ethnic Russian from Ukraine, is the only person he could call "family": is it the uncertainty about whether Bulgaria will allow them to stay together in the end or the impossibility to understand why it should be so difficult?

Svetlana Belenets is one of the people from Ukraine seeking asylum in Bulgaria,

even though it wasn't war that took her out of the country initially.

It was a click.

For her, like for some of the dozens of people from Ukraine who have applied for asylum since the conflict erupted...