War in Ukraine tests limits of Swiss welcome model

Cheerful to open up to the refugees, less to pay the bill, the Confederation sees 1,000 Ukrainian a day, by train or road.

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Funny place for an exile. Out of season, the ski resort of Morgins (Canton du Valais), border of Val d’Abondance (Haute-Savoie), has the strange appearance of deserted places by those for which they developed. Closing shutters of second home residences, businesses and closed restaurants, spurious snow puddles at the foot of static lifts. Skiers folded baggage early April.

To be soon replaced, in the languor of a spring not even lukewarm, by unplanned visitors. On the heights, in a luxurious wooden chalet, three women are busy in the kitchen. Nothing predisposed Evguenia Chevchenko, Anastasia Cheiko and Anastasia Voikhevich to prepare here the Bortsch – after struggling to find the ingredients needed at the local supermarket. Nothing apart from the invasion of their country by Vladimir Putin.

“We will never thank enough for the extraordinary welcome we receive here, they repeat in chorus. We did not expect that. Anyway, when one must let his life behind all business stops, we does not expect, we run off. “

After their husbands engaged in the territorial defense of the capital, the three thirties fled kyiv early March with a child under his arm, plus a mother and a father-in-law, a wounded veteran during the first conflict Donbass in 2014. Some luggage thrown hastily in the trunk of two cars; Then a crossing of Europe by the Carpathians, the plain of Hungary and Austria, before, finally, Switzerland.

between tearing and relief

Chance wanted to contact the three Kiévienna friends end up moving into the chalet of the director of an international sports federation that made it available. “We pass hours to follow on social networks Info from Ukraine, says Evguenia Chevchenko. The slaughter massacre took place right next to my home in the neighborhood of Obolon, it was fifteen minutes. Live These horrible events since the surrealism of our refuge here is both a tearing, because we think of those who stayed, and a relief, because we had to save our children. “

As they, about sixty Ukrainian refugees are now in the Val d’Illiez, who had never known the same influx. Social classes are different, kyiv’s bobs to Kharkiv workers, the experiences, too – some saw the war, others. But all share the same goal: to go back to Ukraine as soon as possible.

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/Media reports.