Ukrainian Saba Yamani was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Kyiv, baptized, came out, and narrowly escaped deportation and death. Hereʼs her story

Saba Yamani does not yet have a Ukrainian passport, only an expired Saudi Arabian passport. When we ask her if she considers herself Ukrainian, she answers: “Of course!”

She has darkish skin, coarse curly hair, and a tattoo on her right forearm of her favorite Arabic word. Saba Yamani speaks Ukrainian without an accent, like any other girl her age, who grew up where Saba lived most of her life, in the Lisovyi district of Kyiv.

Saba was born in Saudi Arabia. Her father is Saudi, her biological mother is Syrian. Her father, an employee of Saudi Airlines, met a Ukrainian woman and, when Saba was three years old, brought her to Ukraine for the first time.

When she turned sixteen, her father decided that she should marry her twenty-year-old cousin. Saba was then studying at school in Kyiv and decided that she would not return to her homeland — and she did not. Her father did not have the opportunity to force her, so Saba graduated from school and entered university.

She was baptized in the Orthodox Church. In addition, she came out — she told friends, acquaintances and relatives that she was LGBT.

When the great war began, Saba wanted to leave for Europe, but she was afraid that she would be detained at the European border for having an expired document and deported to Saudi Arabia. She turned to the State Migration Service of Ukraine.

There she was ordered to hand over for disposal the Ukrainian documents she had managed to obtain and leave within two weeks. If Saba were deported to Saudi Arabia, she would be guaranteed to be arrested and executed there — for tattoos, Christianity, and LGBT.

1.

As a child, Saba spoke exclusively Arabic, the language of her first family in Saudi Arabia. For a while, the family lived in two countries, and her father had financial difficulties, and in the end, Saba lived mostly in Kyiv, in the Lisovyi District, with her new family: her mother, whom she considered her own, her parents, and later her brothers.

When her Ukrainian adoptive mother entered medical school in Kyiv, Saba stayed home with her Ukrainian grandmother, and it was difficult to communicate. In kindergarten, she began to speak Russian, and at school, Ukrainian.

True, she missed two grades (second and sixth) of the Ukrainian school, as the family was living in Saudi Arabia with her father, in Al-Khubar. Saba did not go to the second grade at all, and in the sixth grade, she first tried an Arabic school, and then, when it turned out that she had forgotten Arabic in Ukraine, she went to an English-language school.

English was spoken at home: Sabaʼs mother doesnʼt speak Arabic, and her father doesnʼt speak any foreign languages other than English. (Saba still speaks English with her younger brothers, although they speak Ukrainian.)

The English-language school in Al-Khubar, however, was not very different from the Arabic one — Saba did not really manage to make friends with local girls, there was no girlish friendship as we know it in Ukraine.

Unlike the Lisovyi Masyv, where you could go for walks, in Saudi Arabia leisure time was limited to home and trips to relatives, to the shopping mall, or to Riyadh, the capital, of course, with the whole family. If Sabaʼs mother wanted to get to know another family there (for example, other Ukrainians), then only her husband could initiate the acquaintance.

Although the womenʼs world there is separate from the menʼs, Saba does not remember any special friendship between women — neither her age nor her motherʼs. Sabaʼs mother was friends with local Ukrainian women who, like her, married Arabs. Saba rather remembers their children, whom she was tasked with playing with.

In general, the general rules applied to children when visiting — girls separately, and boys wherever they wanted. Boys could also walk on the streets, although the local climate is not very conducive to this.

There is also little public transport in the country, most everyone gets around by car. Women only recently gained the right to drive — until 2018, this was prohibited.

In Saudi Arabia, Saba wore a headscarf from the age of nine, and on the street she had to be accompanied by one of her brothers. Even if it was a younger brother, it had to be a man.

She promised her father that she would walk around Ukraine with her head covered, this was the condition under which he allowed her to return to Kyiv after the sixth grade. Up until the age of 14, the girl did not break it.

Firstly, a promise is a promise. Secondly, her father had a habit of coming to Kyiv unexpectedly, without warning anyone, and could come to school to check whether her head was covered. He could also check whether Saba was sitting at a desk with a girl, or whether the teacher was a woman (if not, then Saba should not have sat at the front desk), or whether there were boys sitting behind her.

Thus her father kept both Saba and her family in constant fear and a sense of threat. Added to this were beatings. As a result, her mother suffered two miscarriages, and Saba was left with a scar.

The Ukrainian environment exerted pressure in its own way:

“When a girl covers her head, it is very rare to walk down the street and not get some kind of stare, condemnation, finger-pointing, laughter, and so on. I transferred to a new school, a gymnasium. And there they said a lot — that I had cancer, that I had a bomb under my hijab. I didnʼt pay attention to it, but it was still noticeable.”

Sabaʼs father, when he came to Kyiv, no longer even stayed with his Ukrainian family, but lived in the “Bratislava” Hotel. However, it was her, Saba, unlike her brothers, who were born to a Ukrainian woman in Ukraine, that he considered “his blood” and wanted to return to Saudi Arabia. He was going to marry her to his sisterʼs son as a thanks for the fact that she had once taken care of little Saba. Saba said “no” and broke up their relations with her father.

Saba once perceived physical violence and control over both her and her mother as a cultural norm. Now she suggests that there were also personal characteristics. Her father studied in the United States, so even during their first conversation he calmly accepted Saba’s confession about her orientation:

“Yes, I knew since childhood, I saw some difference.”

However, within a few days he said that it was terrible. Contrary to the stereotype of fabulously and universally wealthy Saudis, her father also constantly had financial problems, took out one loan after another, and supported his family in Ukraine only from time to time, when they specifically asked him to. Despite the fact that Saba rejected his plans, he paid for her first year of university.

At the age of nine, Saba learned that her mother was not biological. Her grandmother carelessly touched on the subject, and little Saba guessed to check her motherʼs passport and understood everything. But she didnʼt tell anyone about it for many years. Sabaʼs biological mother lives in Syria, she has three daughters. She doesnʼt seek communication.

“Every time I thought it was worth at least getting to know her, I stopped myself. I am the embodiment of everything that contradicts her religion. It is better not to traumatize a person. And, in fact, we are strangers. We don’t even speak the same language.”

The baptism was Saba’s idea, but they did it together with her mother. Saba’s mother converted to Islam when she got married, and after her divorce in 2022, she thought about returning to Christianity:

“I decided that it would be important for me to somehow join my mother, so that we would have something to unite us. We went together, I was baptized, and she came back.”

In addition, Saba always liked Christian holidays and traditions.

“For me, it’s just like home. And when I was growing up here, and no one saw, my grandmother would secretly say [on Easter] “Let’s fight eggs!” She knew it wasn’t allowed, but she allowed it. My grandmother planted the first seeds of Christianity, took me to church at six in the morning to bless the Easter cakes. I was about seven years old. For me, it was like an adventure, something new.

Saba loves Christmas the most. She organizes a Christmas party for her younger brothers. They communicate with their father, but they have long accepted Sabaʼs choice: "When I have a girlfriend earlier than them, of course they were upset! But they took it calmly."

2.

When, after a full-scale invasion, it became clear that Saba was left without valid documents and had to leave Ukraine, she was in despair. Her Saudi passport had been expired since 2017, and to get a new one she would have had to go to Saudi Arabia. While she lived in Kyiv, she was not in danger of marriage, but in Saudi Arabia, her father legally had full authority over her until she turned 21.

The problem is that her permanent residence permit in Ukraine was created illegally. Sabaʼs biological mother is Syrian, she returned to Syria immediately after her birth. She could not take her daughter with her because of the ban on a girl living under the same roof with another man (if the mother remarries).

In Saudi Arabia (and in Islam in general), there is no procedure for abandoning a child, so Sabaʼs Ukrainian mother could not legally adopt her, because she had no grounds. The matter was settled for a kilo of tomatoes — the fatherʼs Ukrainian wife was simply recorded as the biological mother, and the birth certificate was "forgotten" to be filed with the archive.

This solved the problem for a while, but created new ones when Saba turned 16. With a permanent residence permit, she managed to pass the state internal examinations, enter and graduate from university, and work, but she was only able to open a bank account recently.

After the full-scale invasion, when the girl turned to lawyers, and they opened the archive, the State Migration Service gave her two weeks to submit the documents for disposal and leave Ukraine.

The solution came by chance, literally — she spoke to a taxi driver, a refugee from Belarus, who advised Saba to seek asylum. The State Migration Service studied her history for a year, but most importantly, Saba received a document — a person who applied for protection.

“After I contacted the State Migration Service, I was contacted by charitable foundations that deal with refugees in Ukraine. It surprised me — a full-scale invasion is going on, but here are charitable foundations, and they work with refugees. They contacted me themselves, invited me to a meeting, just explained everything to me, told me what to do. I was in despair, thinking that I had been alone in this story all this time, since I was 16. And here random people helped me go through this path.”

3.

At the age of 15, Saba began assisting her mother in the dental office: she would come after classes. At the end of her first year of medical school, she began working in other clinics, all unofficially.

She can only speak of discrimination in one case, in 2023, when she had already received a residence permit (and completed her internship) — everyone in the clinic grew from assistants to doctors, but not Saba. When she was fired, she simply asked if this was due to the fact that she did not have citizenship, and was told “yes”. Now Saba is a dentist in a private clinic in Novopecherski Lypky.

I ask Saba about the untranslatable Ukrainian “свої”. What people she considers as hers?

“I was a kid who was always on the Internet. I found my friends there. When I was a teenager, my friends were just fans of ʼOne Directionʼ. At university, my friends were the same people from Muslim families who lived here, who grew up here, somehow assimilated into Ukrainian culture. Now, of course, itʼs medicine, the queer community, and friends, a really cool new environment.”

At the medical school, where Saba interacted with many international students, she was accepted primarily by students of African descent. Sabaʼs grandfather was black, and they immediately recognized her by her curly hair:

“When I was there, the Arabs would say, ʼYou’re Ukrainianʼ or ʼHell knows who you areʼ. But the Africans always say, ʼSheʼs ours!ʼ.”

When thousands of young people leave Ukraine or consider such an opportunity, one cannot help but ask what Ukraine is for young people who grew up in mixed (Muslim) families or came to study and integrated into Ukrainian life, connecting themselves with Ukraine.

“Well, first of all, these are people like me, especially women, for whom it is important to make something of themselves, besides being a mother, wife, housewife. To achieve their goals, to have their dreams. How do they see Ukraine? Development. In fact, most of the students at the medical university, from Iran, Iraq are men who come. Even men develop here more than at home.”

To obtain Ukrainian citizenship, Saba will take exams in May — Ukrainian language, history of Ukraine, and a test on knowledge of the Constitution. She sees real difficulties only in the history exam. As far as she remembers from school, everything there is confusing.