They Woke Up in Prague. The War Woke Up With Them
When the first rockets began falling on their homeland, three young Ukrainian scientists were already awake in Prague. It wasn’t sirens that woke them, but their phones, which would not stop ringing. One saw missed calls from his parents in Zakarpattia, another watched explosions unfold live on Telegram, and a third called his mother before sunrise, urging her to turn on the television.
All three had left Ukraine years earlier to study physics at Charles University. Neither Associate Professor Michael Vorochta nor PhD students Mykhailo Shestopalov and Bohdan Morzhuk from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics could have imagined that their homeland would become the centre of a conflict that would shadow them abroad.
Their families remain in Ukraine either because western Ukraine still feels safe enough to live in, or because, fathers of drafting age are unable to cross the border, leaving only the mothers free to occasionally visit Prague. Their grandparents feel too old to travel. All three researchers recall the first weeks of the war as a time when they lost their sense of time entirely, spending hours constantly checking the news, searching for information, and talking to each other. They were all haunted by a sense of guilt that, unlike their compatriots in Ukraine, they were safe.
In Prague, they continued their work researching graphene, plasma, or catalysts. They send money home, maintain collaborations with scientific institutions in Ukraine, and help researchers arriving in Prague from Ukraine. They speak with gratitude about Czech support, yet they sense that global attention is fading and understand that a war does not end when it begins to disappear from the headlines.
“War is not fought only on the battlefield in the trenches. It is also a global war in the information space, in the media, everywhere. It is happening here in Europe too, even if Europeans may not realise it, or they know and try to ignore it,” says Bohdan Morzhuk. At the Institute of Physics, he studies epitaxial graphene grown on silicon carbide, exploring its possible electronic structures, applications, detectors, and the optical properties of the systems designed on it.
His colleague from the institute Mykhailo Shestopalov is finishing his PhD. In the laboratory, he works on epitaxial graphene growth, as well as its characterization and optimization. He has taken up cycling intensively, he sees it as a way to distract himself from the everyday burden of what is happening in his life and in his country, as this hobby was the only effective way for him to deal with the chaos in his mind when the war began. Now, it is no longer just a way to clear his head, but a serious activity that brings him joy, allows him to explore Czechia, and to which he is deeply committed. He also dedicates part of his free time to learning Czech in order to better integrate into life in the Czech Republic.
Associate Professor Michael Vorochta works in the Nanomaterials Group at the Department of Surface and Plasma Science. His laboratory is part of a large research infrastructure that hosts international users investigating a broad range of materials for catalytic and gas-sensing applications. He is currently preparing a European project together with the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Kyiv. In the past, he also collaborated closely with Uzhhorod University, where he facilitated the transfer of an older Auger spectrometer to the Ukrainian side for a symbolic price of one crown. In addition to providing material support to family members and different charity organizations in Ukraine, he considers this kind of activity the least that every researcher with Ukrainian roots should do at this moment to support the country where they were born and spent the first part of their lives.
