Between safety and distance: how Ukrainians experience life in Lithuania

Lithuania’s response to Ukrainians fleeing war has often been described in the language of solidarity, generosity and moral duty. Public debate has focused on swift institutional action, civic support, and the rapid organisation of aid. But hospitality is not only a matter of policy or administration. It is also something people live through every day. Beyond official programmes lies a quieter question: what kind of everyday life does this hospitality create for those who depend on it? Dr Dainius Genys and PhD Dmytro Mamaiev ask.

This article examines Lithuanian-Ukrainian encounters not through policy outcomes or integration targets, but through lived experience. It asks how reliable, disciplined and institutionally organised care is felt by the people receiving it, and how this model of hospitality shapes daily life, social ties and emotional expectations. Rather than judging Ukrainians as either well integrated or insufficiently included, we examine what it means to live within a particular kind of hospitality — one that sits between safety and distance, gratitude and foreignness.

For many who arrive, Lithuanian hospitality is not experienced as a single act of kindness or a moment of emotional recognition. Instead, it appears as a pattern of life: predictable, restrained and morally serious. Every day rules that may seem self-evident to Lithuanians often have to be interpreted by Ukrainians from scratch. Silence, distance, discipline and institutional mediation — features Lithuanians may barely notice — become central to how Ukrainians experience life in Lithuania.

In that sense, Lithuanian hospitality is revealed less in declarations of solidarity than in its texture: the everyday arrangements that shape interaction, limit closeness and define what kinds of intimacy are acceptable. For Ukrainians, this texture is neither openly hostile nor fully welcoming. It is contradictory — protective, yet distancing; reassuring, yet emotionally sparse.

Many Ukrainians describe life in Lithuania as taking place in parallel worlds that rarely meet. One is formal and functional: workplaces, language classes, local authorities and non-governmental organisations. Here, interaction is polite, regulated and emotionally contained. Roles are clear, expectations are explicit, and help is structured. The other world is private and Ukrainian: rented flats, online groups and informal gatherings, where language comes easily, emotions are more direct, and the war remains a constant reality.

From a sociological perspective, this reflects a broader pattern of segmented integration. Inclusion comes first through systems rather than relationships. Belonging is functional before it becomes social. To many Lithuanians, that sequence may seem natural because institutions are seen as the main source of trust. For many Ukrainians, however, the gap between inclusion in systems and feeling socially close creates a sense of suspension — of being inside society but not fully part of it.

That divide is not unique to Lithuania, but it takes on particular force here because of the moral value attached to order, privacy and self-restraint. Social life does not easily flow beyond institutional boundaries. Work stays at work. Help remains help. Emotions are carefully managed. As a result, Ukrainians may feel publicly visible, yet personally on the margins.

One of the most commonly mentioned features of Lithuanian social life is silence. For Lithuanians, silence can be neutral or even positive. It may signal respect for personal boundaries, a refusal to intrude and a sense of emotional self-sufficiency. Silence is not necessarily the absence of a relationship. It can be a way of being present without demanding anything.

For Ukrainians, especially in the first stages of settling in, that silence can be difficult to read. Does it mean indifference, politeness, discomfort or care? Without spoken reassurance, newcomers must learn to interpret it through context. Over time, many come to understand it not as rejection, but as a form of restraint.

Even so, silence has consequences. It protects social space from forced intimacy and helps maintain everyday coexistence. But that stability has a cost. Silence delays emotional recognition. It can slow the building of trust for people whose lives have been shaped by rupture, uncertainty and urgency.

Silence, therefore, becomes both a resource and a burden. It offers calm and predictability, but it also places the work of interpretation on the newcomer. Ukrainians must adjust their expectations and learn that care may be expressed not in words, but through reliability and non-interference.

Friendship, too, is often experienced as slow. For many Ukrainians, forming close ties in Lithuania is not impossible, but it takes time. Trust is not assumed; it is built gradually through consistency, routine and repeated contact. Lithuanians often watch before they open up. Relationships are less likely to begin with emotional disclosure than with steady presence.

This slowness reflects a moral economy of trust shaped by historical vulnerability. In a society where disruption has often been part of collective memory, emotional investment can be approached with caution. Depth matters more than immediacy. Endurance matters more than intensity.

For Ukrainians, that pace can feel disorienting. In social settings where solidarity is often shown through quick emotional engagement, the Lithuanian rhythm may seem withholding. The need for connection — sharpened by displacement and loss — meets a host culture that values patience.

Yet this, too, can be reinterpreted over time. When friendships do form, they are often seen as lasting. Ukrainians frequently note that once trust is established, it is not easily withdrawn. Friendship in Lithuania may not be broad or immediate, but it can be stable.

Emotional discipline also plays a central part in everyday life. Control, restraint and measured expression are widely recognised features of Lithuanian social interaction. In the hospitality context, these qualities can have a double effect. They may create an impression of coldness, but they also help ensure that care remains sustainable, organised and less likely to collapse under emotional strain.

For Ukrainians, this emotional discipline can be experienced in two ways. On the one hand, it removes pressure. People are not required to perform gratitude, retell trauma or engage emotionally on demand. That can be a relief. On the other hand, emotional restraint limits opportunities for spontaneous closeness. Feelings remain largely private.

In sociological terms, restraint helps stabilise social life. It reduces emotional overload and protects those working in institutions from burnout. But it also shifts some emotional labour onto those who arrive. Ukrainians must manage their own need for reassurance and belonging in a moral environment where emotions are tightly rationed.

This creates a particular kind of ambivalence. There is gratitude for safety, but also a quiet loneliness. Care exists, but it rarely becomes intimacy.

Another important part of the Ukrainian experience in Lithuania is the question of selective empathy. Ukrainians are received within a specific moral and political framework. They are seen as neighbours, Europeans and victims of a clearly identified aggressor. That framing gives them a form of moral privilege — access to protection, legitimacy and public sympathy.

For many Ukrainians, that privilege is both helpful and uncomfortable. It provides safety, but it also draws attention to the conditional nature of compassion. Some are keenly aware that their reception is very different from that of other migrant groups. That awareness can create ethical unease: they are welcomed with generosity, while others remain excluded.

This exposes the limits of Lithuanian hospitality. Compassion is not universal. It is shaped by geopolitical narratives, cultural proximity and symbolic similarity. Ukrainians do not simply receive care; they also reveal the conditions under which care is offered.

Hospitality, then, becomes a mirror. It reflects not only generosity, but also the moral hierarchies built into humanitarian practice. Ukrainians become witnesses to the boundaries of solidarity, even as they benefit from it.

Taken together, these experiences suggest that Lithuanian hospitality is not best understood through the language of integration alone. It works more as moral companionship. Hosts and guests share a social order that values reliability over intimacy, and endurance over emotional openness.

Hospitality here is not a finished achievement. It is an ongoing practice that requires constant adjustment of expectations, emotional rhythms and ways of understanding one another. Lithuanians offer stability without promising closeness. Ukrainians respond with patience, without any guarantee of belonging.

This model is neither a failure nor an ideal. It is historically shaped and still unfinished. It allows care to continue in uncertain conditions, but leaves some emotional needs unmet. It protects, but does not fully absorb.

More broadly, it points to a wider feature of contemporary solidarity: a shift away from emotional immediacy towards managed care. Solidarity is expressed less through shared feeling and more through sustained, rule-based support. The stranger is not embraced completely, but accommodated.

That is the central paradox of this hospitality. What makes it durable also makes it distant. What secures coexistence also postpones intimacy. Ukrainians living in Lithuania experience this paradox every day — between gratitude and distance, safety and foreignness.

What emerges between hosts and guests may not be integration in the fullest sense, but something quieter and more fragile: a shared moral space in which living together becomes possible without erasing difference. Hospitality, in this sense, is not an endpoint. It is the slow, disciplined work of remaining present to one another among strangers.

Adapted for media publication from the authors’ original academic text. Dr Dainius Genys, a member of The Migration and Intercultural Diasporic Life Laboratory, a research platform within the VMU Lithuanian Emigration Institute, and Dr Dainius Genys, a PhD Candidate in the sociology of migration at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (Institute of Sociology).