The Ukrainian teenagers who returned to a war zone for their school prom

Sofiia (second left), Aliesia (third left) and Yuliia (front) with their friends at Lyceum No 2 school in Mykolaiv before the war

Sofiia, Yuliia and Aliesia, three school friends from Mykolaiv in Ukraine, were 16 years old when war broke out. They were regular teenagers looking forward to sleepovers and trips to the beach near their home city.

But after 24 February 2022, the girls and their families scattered across Europe.

For two years, they have connected almost entirely online, using Telegram and Snapchat.

"Many of us feel overwhelmed by the loss of friends and the inability to meet them," Yuliia says.

Incredibly, though, they did see each other again in person last summer, in their bombed-out hometown for a school prom.

Now, their stories, and those of other Ukrainian women, are being told in a photography exhibition in London.

Yuliia, Sofia and Aliesia talking over Zoom from Warsaw, Mykolaiv and Gipf-Oberfrick, Switzerland

When they fled Ukraine, the teenagers hoped it would be temporary, as Yuliia tells me they thought "it would take just a few months and we would all go back to Ukraine and back to our lives".

She originally moved with her mother and grandparents to Bulgaria, where a friend lent them a holiday flat. They later moved to Poland.

Aliesia's journey was more intense. She spent weeks travelling by bus and train, staying in tents and hostels, moving from Romania to Switzerland, then France and Spain, before arriving in Krakow, Poland, in May 2022.

The whole experience "was not as physically stressful as it was emotionally", Aliesia says.

With her mother, 13-year-old brother, 17-year-old cousin and aunt, they moved into a one-room dormitory.

Aliesia (second left) with her mum, brother, cousin and aunt, sharing a room in Krakow

The children did online schooling on their bunks, with teachers who had remained in Mykolaiv.

Sofiia left Ukraine for Katowice in Poland first. The journey took several days. "There wasn't a place to stay for the night, my mum wasn't sleeping for three days, there was no food at the gas stations."

Seven of them, including her mother and her cousin, lived in one bedroom.

"It was really difficult."

Left-right: Sofiia with her new friends in Katowice in April 2022

Sofiia loves dancing and music. She would practise on the outdoor public piano on a street in Katowice. "I didn't have one at home. I'm really very extroverted, so it was great."

The family have since moved to Switzerland, where she is studying 10 subjects at a prestigious school.

Her father died of Covid during the pandemic. Aliesia and Yuliia had to leave their dads behind in Ukraine because men over the age of 18 are banned from emigrating.

Aliesia and her father were reunited when the family moved back to Ukraine at the end of 2022.

Six months into the war, her mother and aunt found that the hotel cleaning jobs they had in Poland didn't pay enough to cover rent and other bills.

Teenage dreams

Photographer Polly Braden has tracked the families' experiences over two years and is about to tell their stories in an exhibition, Leaving Ukraine, at the Foundling Museum in London.

After watching reports from inside Ukraine about the men going to war and what they faced, "it felt really important to see what the women were doing and what was happening outside Ukraine", she says.

So she followed the young people as they have built new lives to find out, "what would that be like for them?"

They have had to grow up fast.

Sofiia putting on make-up after school in Katowice in April 2022

Sofiia says "very quickly we stopped being teenagers and had to start our life as adults".

Aliesia tells me the "teenage dream", the one you see "in American movies", has been taken from them.

"I have sometimes had pretty bad mental breakdowns… It was not fair that I can't enjoy life the same way as people my age from other countries do."

Yuliia says it has "felt very isolating, especially as everyone else in the world is still living their lives like nothing happened".

Yuliia at Poland's Independence Day in Warsaw in November 2023

But none of the girls come across as self-pitying. As Sofiia puts it: "It's not only difficult for us."

Aliesia adds: "We have to sometimes just accept some things we cannot change."

With school friends spread far and wide, last year they began to talk about wanting to have a school prom when their Ukrainian schooling ended.

"For such a long while, our friend group was separated, our whole class was separated," Yuliia says. "So seeing everyone, almost everyone, was really important to all of us."

'We all felt beautiful'

Sofiia began planning her outfit. "If you want to get a prom dress in Switzerland or Italy, it's very expensive." She and her mum decided "it would be cheaper to go to Ukraine". So after school one Friday, Sofiia took a 20-hour bus trip to Lviv, in western Ukraine.

She found a gold dress that "was really perfect", bought it, and took the long journey back to Switzerland.

The prom couldn't be held at their school, which had been bombed.

Instead, they hired a local hall. Bombs fell on Mykolaiv a couple of days before the reunion, which made the decision to return difficult because they were "a bit scared", Sofiia says.

The aftermath of a Russian missile strike in Mykolaiv in July 2023

But about 20 teenagers went back for the prom, from new homes as far away as the UK, Austria, Poland, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland.

They came to dance, party and try to be normal teenagers for just one night.

"It was actually much more special than just being a normal teenager, because a prom is quite a special day in anyone's life," Yuliia says. "We all felt beautiful and it was kind of magical."

She spent two days getting to Mykolaiv from Poland. "I was very excited."

She also got to see her father for the first time since she had left Ukraine.

Sofiia's mother drove for three days to get them back home, sleeping by the roadside when she felt tired.

Everyone understood why it meant so much.

Left-right: Sofiia, Aliesia, their teacher Svetlana, Iryna and Yuliia at their prom in Mykolaiv in July 2023

"The war wasn't planned and so our lives stopped in one moment," Sofiia says. "I think it was really very important to have the ending of our school lives, of our teenage lives."

It was an emotional evening, according to Aliesia. "Especially by the end, when we had to say goodbye to each other and realise that we won't see each other for a long time again."

But for one night, they drank punch ("mildly alcoholic" and "so tasty", according to Yuliia), danced and sang to Maneskin (Alesia's "favourite band"), listened to speeches, and as the sun rose in the early hours, went out for a walk.

"In the morning, we all felt sad," Sofiia says, "because it was totally the end of school life."

Polly Braden's exhibition Leaving Ukraine is at the Foundling Museum in London from 15 March.