Does escaping a war zone feel worse than being there? War and coping by Ukrainian civilians in Ukraine and Poland.

OBJECTIVE

While the factors facilitating and compromising stress coping by civilians in an active war zone and those who have fled it are critical to the experiences of trauma, they are underexplored, which the current article aims to address.

METHOD: Between March 23 and May 15, 2023, 122 Ukraine-based and 132 Poland-based Ukrainian participants completed a survey measuring different aspects of trauma, social beliefs, and coping.

RESULTS

Compared to the war zone civilians, the Poland-based refugees scored significantly higher in terms of general war repercussions, peritraumatic experiences, posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, loneliness, anxiety about the loved ones, and chemical/biological/missile/drone attack anxiety. While no differences between them were found in terms of other factors, regression and structural equation model analyses suggest that the general well-being was compromised in both samples by lower sensation seeking, higher loneliness, higher fantasy proneness, lower expected support from the West, and higher expected Chinese and Iranian support for Russia. Religiosity did not play a role.

CONCLUSIONS

While the role of perceived social support (at the levels of friends and family) turned out to be limited, the (broader) expected support (from the West) played a more significant role. Additionally, our exploratory Civilian War Trauma Structural Equation Model suggests that anxiety interacts with the individual's overall vulnerability, thus exacerbating the psychological impact of war. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).