Every Thursday in Riesbach, a Psychotherapist from Mariupol Shows Up
She survived the siege of her hometown. Now she spends her free time helping fellow Ukrainians in Zürich cope with what they've been through.
It started in August 2022, a few months after the first wave of Ukrainian refugees arrived in Switzerland. The Quartierverein Riesbach identified a gap — not in housing or bureaucratic support, but in something quieter and harder to organise: mental health care for people processing the kind of trauma that doesn't resolve on its own.
The solution they found was Olena Zakharova. A trained psychotherapist, Zakharova had fled Ukraine herself after surviving the siege and eventual fall of Mariupol — one of the most brutal episodes of the war. She ended up in Riesbach. And rather than step back from the community around her, she stepped into it.
Since then, every Thursday at the Kirchgemeindehaus Neumünster in Kreis 8, she has led a group therapy session for Ukrainian adults in the neighbourhood. Entirely voluntary. Nearly four years running.
What the group offers
The sessions provide a space for people to process experiences that are difficult to put into words in a foreign country, in a foreign language, surrounded by people who have not lived through what they have. War, displacement, separation from family, uncertainty about the future — and often guilt at being safe while others are not.
Group therapy in this context does something that individual appointments or bureaucratic support cannot: it creates a community of people who understand each other without explanation. For many participants, the Thursday group has become one of the few places in Zürich where they don't have to translate their experience before being heard.
The Quartierverein Riesbach has hosted and supported the group since its founding. SRF's Schweiz aktuell covered the initiative in February 2026, bringing it to a broader Swiss audience for the first time.
A neighbourhood stepping up
Riesbach — the lakeside district of Zürich, home to the Seefeld and Kreuzplatz areas — is not the obvious setting for this kind of story. It's one of the city's more affluent quarters. But civic life here has a genuine texture to it, and the Quartierverein has long been active beyond the typical remit of neighbourhood associations.
What Zakharova is doing is remarkable not just because of her own biography — though surviving Mariupol and then choosing to spend your free time supporting trauma survivors is not a small thing — but because it has continued quietly and consistently for years, with no fanfare and no funding requirement attached.
The war in Ukraine is no longer front-page news in Switzerland. The refugees who came in 2022 are still here, still navigating an open-ended situation, still carrying what they brought with them. On Thursdays in Riesbach, at least, there's somewhere to go.
