‘If you’re still talking to someone after 15 minutes, you may have saved their life,’ says Irish founder of Ukrainian helpline

Kyiv can be good at masking Ukraine’s war with a bright veneer of normality: with bars and cafes bustling with life, musicians and artists who have never stopped working, and squares and parks that are now getting busier as the days grow longer and milder.

But then an air-raid siren howls or a blackout cuts the lights, or a conversation turns to a friend or relative now serving in the military, or who has been killed or wounded or forced to flee their home by Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24th last year.

For all the resilience of the Ukrainian people, a war that has taken tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions will inevitably leave deep marks, some of which can be overshadowed by the ruination of Mariupol, mass murder in Bucha or other Russian atrocities.

“Before February 24th last year we had a stable average of about 1,000 calls and chats per month,” says Paul Niland, the Irish founder of Lifeline Ukraine, which is the country’s first and only national suicide prevention hotline.

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“Now we are taking around 3,000 calls and chats per month. That’s the very real and measurable psychological effect on this country of this phase of [Vladimir] Putin’s war,” he adds.

“When we launched Lifeline Ukraine in 2019, our first mission was to be there for veterans of the conflict in the Donbas, because people with military experience are at a higher risk of potentially taking their own lives ... But we are available to anyone and the vast majority of our callers – about 84 per cent – are civilians,” says Niland.

The idea is to stop someone acting on emotion for long enough for that emotion to subside, and for their natural self-preservation instinct to kick in again and become dominant

—  Paul Niland

Working with international funding – including €10,000 from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs – the service’s 22 staff aim to make the most of what Niland calls a “golden window” of 15 minutes when dealing with callers in crisis.

“If you’re still talking to someone in that situation after 15 minutes, then you may well have saved their life,” he says. “The idea is to stop someone acting on emotion for long enough for that emotion to subside, and for their natural self-preservation instinct to kick in again and become dominant.”

Niland (50) is heartened by statistics that suggest the suicide rate has been falling for several years in a country that has endured repeated upheaval in recent decades.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 pitched Ukraine, like most of the newly sovereign republics, into a period of economic chaos and rising crime and corruption, which fed public anger that found release in the Orange Revolution of winter 2004-2005.

[ Bucha remembers: 'I walked into the garden and found him lying there ... They had shot him ]

Huge crowds came out on to the Maidan square in central Kyiv to reject claims by establishment candidate Viktor Yanukovich to have won a deeply flawed presidential election against reformist rival Viktor Yushchenko.

Niland says he had arrived in Kyiv in 2003 to work as a property and investment adviser, planning to stay for six months and “not knowing for a second what I was getting into”.

He joined the crowds on Maidan during the Orange Revolution – which ended with Yushchenko winning a repeat election run-off – and again in winter 2013-2014, when a Kremlin-backed regime led by Yanukovich following his political comeback was ousted in the so-called Revolution of Dignity, but not before riot police killed more than 100 protesters.

Niland sees Ukrainians’ ability to join forces and self-organise as crucial to the victory of both revolutions he has witnessed, and to the defence of the nation during the fighting in Donbas and now the extraordinary resistance shown to Russia’s full invasion.

“I knew [last year’s all-out attack] was coming but I didn’t think the Russians would dare to try to take Kyiv. The idea of them encircling, capturing and holding this city of 3.3 million people is insanity,” Niland says.

[ Ukraine says army preparing for offensive despite ‘insane’ Russian attacks in east ]

He describes twice being turned away from volunteer territorial defence units in Kyiv – first for being a foreigner and then due to a lack of available weapons – and instead joining neighbours to patrol their district and plan for a possible Russian siege, by preparing everything from Molotov cocktails to enough vegetables to feed their whole apartment complex.

“It’s the common Ukrainian response ... Everybody contributes,” says Niland.

“It was the same during the revolutions. People know their strengths and know what they can add of value. And the outcome in this case will be victory over the brutal regime in Moscow that is intent on committing genocide here.”

Help and information

For mental help support, Samaritans offers a 24-hour listening service: Phone 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie