The BRIDGE (Building Relationships and Intercultural Dynamics through Global Education with Latin America) Project was born a year ago out of a simple but ambitious idea: that Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), even while operating under the strain of a full-scale war, could build genuine academic solidarity with regions it had never systematically engaged before. On June 30, 2026, that idea reached an important milestone. Faculty, students, and administrators from UCU and five partner institutions across Latin America — Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and the Catholic University of Manizales in Colombia — gathered online for the second BRIDGE Online Forum. Supported by the International Renaissance Foundation and moderated throughout by Dr. Halyna Protsyk, UCU’s Deputy Vice Rector for Global Outreach and Internationalization and BRIDGE Project Director, the four-hour forum brought together participants across six countries and as many time zones to take stock of what a single academic year of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) had produced: fifteen joint courses, roughly seven hundred students, and a growing network of trust between universities separated by an ocean but united, as several speakers put it, by a shared commitment to dignity, freedom, and academic solidarity.
Dr. Protsyk opened the forum with warm greetings, welcoming friends from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, before pausing the celebratory tone to acknowledge the context in which the project exists. She invited participants to a moment of silence for the 38 members of the UCU community who have died defending Ukraine, framing the forum’s achievements against a sobering backdrop: the ability to meet, teach, and build academic bridges at all, she said, is possible only “because of the armed forces of Ukraine, because of the many courageous men and women who defend our country right now.”
That same tension between hardship and hope ran through the welcoming remarks of UCU Rector Dr. Taras Dobko, who spoke candidly about what he called the “routinization of the war” — now in its thirteenth year since the annexation of Crimea and fifth year of full-scale invasion. He described a country whose incoming university students will know peacetime only through the stories of others, and where new building codes require bomb shelters and each morning begins with a minute of national silence. Yet Dr. Dobko argued that precisely because “the war becomes like a new norm,” universities carry a distinct responsibility. “Our responsibility today is not simply to transmit knowledge, but to restore meaning where the world produces nonsense,” he said, arguing that hope is not only a spiritual resource but “a strategic security asset” and that faith-based universities like those in the BRIDGE network are “called to be sources of hope” and to “exercise this moral imagination” in envisioning a post-war future.
Olga Kvashuk, Programme Manager for “Europe and the World” at the International Renaissance Foundation, which funded the project, spoke to why a partnership between two geographically distant regions matters in a moment of shifting global alignments. “Modern online tools offer a range of new possibilities for such partnership,” she noted, adding that despite the distance between Ukraine and Latin America, “we have many important topics to discuss and many experiences to share” — chief among them, freedom, dignity, the rule of law, and international solidarity.
Two ambassadors added a diplomatic dimension to the opening session. Rafael de Mello Vidal, Ambassador of Brazil to Ukraine, spoke from Kyiv about the deep historical ties between the two nations, noting that Brazil is home to what may be the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside Europe — by some estimates, close to a million descendants of Ukrainian immigrants who settled mainly in the southern states of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina over a century ago. He described ongoing work on Brazil’s first education cooperation agreement with Ukraine and a planned Portuguese-language certification programme for Ukrainian students, framing educational exchange as an underappreciated pillar of bilateral relations. “It’s time for Ukraine to have an ambassador in Brasília,” he added, “not only because of our diplomatic relationship, but also because of the more than 600,000 Ukrainians that live in Brazil.”
Dr. Yuriy Polukhovych, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador and a scholar of Latin American history, offered a more personal reflection, describing Latin America as his “second motherland.” He pushed back gently against a narrow perception of Ukraine defined only by war, invoking better-known reference points — the Chernobyl disaster, footballer Andriy Shevchenko, or the linguist Yuri Knorozov, who deciphered Maya hieroglyphic writing — while insisting that the war itself is “not only about territory” but “about resisting an imperial idea: that a stronger power can deny another nation its history, language, sovereignty, and right to choose its own future.” He described BRIDGE as a form of “educational diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, and human diplomacy — the diplomacy of people who believe that distance should not be a barrier, and that knowledge can become a bridge.”
Panel I: From Course Design to Cultural Connection
The forum’s first working panel, moderated by Solomiia Rozlutska, Director of UCU’s International Office, showcased four COIL courses designed and delivered jointly by UCU faculty and their Latin American counterparts over the past academic year.
Dr. Sofiya Kernychna presented the course on international private law and contracts, co-designed with Nicolas Cobo and Ignacio García of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Built around two negotiated sales-contract scenarios — Chilean wine sold to Ukraine, and Ukrainian drones sold to Chile — the course combined comparative legal analysis with structured cultural exchange, asking students to research and present on topics ranging from the role of language in national identity to the historical constitution of Pylyp Orlyk. Dr. Kernychna noted with some surprise how quickly professional trust formed across the partnership: “Perhaps the greatest surprise was not indifference in our educational systems, but how quickly we built the contact, established common educational and teaching goals, and how quickly we started to build friendship, partnership, and common plans.”
Dr. Bohdan Chuma and Francisco González Chiaramonte of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina presented “One Family, Multiple Stories,” a course exploring the shared migration heritage linking Ukraine, Argentina, and Paraguay. Drawing on the family history of a colleague descended from early twentieth-century Ukrainian migrants, students conducted interviews with descendants of that diaspora and produced collaborative narratives about identity, memory, and belonging. González Chiaramonte read out one student reflection that captured the course’s emotional core: a Ukrainian participant wrote, “We heard stories from Ukrainian diaspora who share our problems. We couldn’t even imagine that someone leaving an ocean away could turn out to be so close.”
Dr. Natalia Subbotina and Cláudio Finkelstein of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo described their course on international arbitration, built around a seven-week module culminating in a simulated moot court with volunteer arbitrators drawn from both countries. Finkelstein reflected on what surprised him most about co-teaching across a legal and cultural divide: “What really impressed me the most is the level of planning that Natalia had… I’m not sure this is a cultural difference — it’s more a technical and planning structure — but that impressed me very, very positively.” Dr. Subbotina, in turn, offered a piece of advice for future COIL instructors that several colleagues would echo later in the day: build in spare time, because “planning is good, but flexibility is even better,” as Dr. Kernychna put it during the same discussion.
The final course of the panel, “Safeguarding Across Cultures,” tackled one of the more difficult subjects addressed anywhere in the BRIDGE programme: sexual abuse, clericalism, and power dynamics within Church settings, taught jointly by Ivanka Rudakevych of UCU and Ana Caro and Veronique Lecaros of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. The course paired psychology and theology students in mixed teams to study case material from both Ukraine and Peru and to co-produce short videos proposing culturally informed approaches to child protection. Dr. Lecaros described the experience as demanding but valuable: “It helped us recognize that our own cultural assumptions are not naturally universal… it gives us the desire to understand more in Peru about Ukraine, and in Ukraine about Peru and Latin America.” Dr. Rudakevych added a detail that illustrated the sensitivity required in cross-cultural teaching on trauma-adjacent subjects, describing how she and Dr. Caro had anticipated that Peruvian students might be uncertain how to broach the subject of the war with their Ukrainian peers, and had prepared guidance for the conversation together in advance.
Panel II: Student Voices
Mariia Myshlovska, International Partnerships Manager and BRIDGE Program Manager at UCU’s International Office, opened the second panel with survey results drawn from the eleven joint courses run during the spring semester. The data painted a picture of real, if imperfect, success. Students entered their COIL courses with only moderate prior familiarity with their partner region — typically rating themselves two or three out of five — and left with markedly higher self-assessed understanding, most clustering at four or five by the end of the module. Nearly all respondents reported feeling included and able to contribute despite linguistic and cultural differences, and on a ten-point scale measuring willingness to recommend COIL to other students, the largest single cluster of responses was a perfect ten.
The same survey surfaced recurring friction points: a six-to-eight-hour time zone gap that one student summarized bluntly as meaning “we rarely worked at the same time, because most of the time one group was sleeping”; technical mismatches between students joining individually from home and those joining collectively from a university classroom; and uneven engagement within some mixed teams, with one respondent writing that “my team was completely uninterested… and I did the entire writing part myself.” Mariia Myshlovska noted that despite these frustrations, instructor support consistently received the survey’s highest ratings, and that the most striking outcomes were qualitative rather than quantitative — Latin American students expressing admiration for Ukrainian peers who “continue to fulfill their duties as law students despite the situation in their country,” and Ukrainian students describing conversations with peers in Chile, Peru, and Colombia as “the best part of their studies during that period.”
The panel then turned to a live conversation with students who had taken part in the courses. Camila Roldán Acosta of PUCP, an architecture student who took the COIL module as part of a general Christian Social Teaching requirement, described her main hope going in as simply wanting “everyone to be able to have this sort of patience and understanding” across the language and time-zone gaps — an expectation she felt was met. Yaryna Zaletska, a UCU law student who joined a course on international trade in times of war, admitted she had been nervous that her English “wasn’t that good,” but found her Chilean partners far more forgiving of imperfect language than she had feared, and instead struggled more with the mechanics of coordinating a moot-court presentation across a shifting daylight-saving-time gap. Samantha Osaki of PUC-SP, who took the arbitration course as an elective specifically because it did not exist in her regular curriculum, said plainly that “all my expectations were met,” while noting that Brazilian students’ work schedules made live coordination difficult outside class hours. Sofiia Kremer, a first-year IT student at UCU for whom BRIDGE was her first international academic project, offered one of the panel’s more reflective lines: “This experience showed me that international communication is not something to be afraid of… it is an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to discover different cultures and even yourself.” Salomé Martínez of the Catholic University of Manizales in Colombia, describing herself as initially self-conscious about her English level, credited patient Ukrainian teammates — “they were very kind… and made me feel more comfortable” — and said she would take part in the project again without hesitation.
Asked what they valued most, several students converged on the same answer: not the legal or theological content itself, but the human connections formed around it. As Kremer put it, describing her Peruvian teammates, “before this course, I think that I will never manage to make friends with someone from abroad… it was nice, and I really, really valued it.”
Panel III: From Enthusiasm to Institutional Program
The forum’s closing working session, moderated again by Dr. Protsyk, shifted from classroom experience to institutional infrastructure — the unglamorous but decisive work of coordinators, quality-assurance frameworks, and communication systems that made fifteen simultaneous COIL courses possible across such varied time zones and academic calendars.
Allison Betancourt Chilcón of PUCP argued that the single most important structural decision UCU and its partners made was designating a dedicated institutional coordinator on each side rather than treating COIL as a matter for individual faculty to sort out informally. “A well-designed process creates the necessary conditions to establish a meaningful international collaboration,” she said, listing clear points of contact, sustained inter-institutional communication, and realistic expectation-setting with faculty as practices worth preserving, and warning against assuming that professors already understand COIL methodology simply because they have been invited to teach it.
Patricia Harumi Shiroma of PUC-SP described starting from what she called “the lowest level of COIL” among the five Latin American partners, with no prior institutional programme at all, and detailed the internal work required to secure buy-in from university leadership and to recruit enough students once a course was approved. She recounted a near-miss when one course under-enrolled and had to be rescued through an explanatory outreach campaign that filled all remaining seats within an hour, and — like Betancourt Chilcón — identified a dedicated coordinator role as the first lesson her office had learned. Looking ahead, Shiroma proposed exploring three-way “triangle COILs” involving UCU and two Latin American partners simultaneously, and said PUC-SP intends to fold COIL training into its regular semester orientation workshops for faculty.
Juan Carlos Vinasco of the Catholic University of Manizales offered the most structurally developed model presented at the forum: a multi-year “pathway” that introduces students to internationalization gradually, from basic English-language reading exercises and guest lectures in the first year through full COIL partnerships and English-medium instruction by the final year, with students accumulating digital badges toward what he described as a kind of internationalization passport. He noted, half in jest, that graduates continue emailing him years later asking for copies of their badges for job applications — evidence, he argued, that the credential carries real value in the labor market. Dr. Protsyk agreed, observing that a résumé showing participation in a Ukrainian-Colombian academic project would stand out to any employer weighing global competence.
The panel’s most reflective contribution came from Maria Verónica Muñoz of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, who reframed the entire year’s work in terms borrowed from Catholic social teaching. Quoting Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti — that fraternity “allows us to transcend the barriers of geography and distance” — and Pope Leo XIV’s recent call for Catholic educators to draw “new maps of hope,” Muñoz argued that BRIDGE’s real achievement was not the fifteen courses themselves but the institutional trust built in producing them. “Most international projects begin with institutional structures, money, and then create relationships,” she said. “BRIDGE began with Halyna reaching out, with building relationship, with sharing our classroom first… that inversion may become BRIDGE’s greatest contribution.” She proposed a different set of success indicators for the project’s next phase: not how many students or courses, but whether faculty who taught together this year choose to teach together again, whether students stay in touch, and whether new research questions grow organically out of what has already been built.
Closing Notes and What Comes Next
In her closing remarks, Dr. Protsyk announced several concrete next steps. A delegation of eight coordinators from four partner universities is due to visit UCU’s Lviv campus within the week, and the BRIDGE model will be presented in July at “Ukraine in the World,” a conference co-organized with Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and the Ukrainian Institute. She also revealed that the University of Notre Dame in the United States has adopted the BRIDGE institutional model as the basis for a new partnership programme with UCU — external validation, she suggested, of an approach built largely through trial, error, and what Muñoz had called academic solidarity rather than top-down design. The fifteen courses delivered this year are being compiled into a project book intended for distribution to embassies, COIL centers internationally, and potential future donors, and UCU plans to launch an annual COIL Week and a COIL faculty award beginning next academic year.
Fifteen courses that began a year ago as an experiment are now being written down as an institutional model, with a dedicated coordinator role, a faculty award, a shared project book, and a university on another continent, Notre Dame, already building its own cooperation with UCU on the template tested this year. Whether BRIDGE ends up remembered mainly for its courses or for the habits of trust it left behind in international offices from Lviv to Lima and São Paulo is a question no one on the call tried to answer definitively. What the forum did make clear, across four hours of testimony from rectors, ambassadors, professors, and students alike, is that none of them are treating the project as finished.
