Unsettled times: War, temporality, and Ukrainian transnational lives

War is among the most disruptive forces in people’s lives, reverberating across borders and reshaping how time is experienced transnationally. This article examines the Russo–Ukrainian war through the lived temporality of long-term Ukrainian migrants in Poland, drawing on thirty-seven interviews and participant observation conducted between 2023 and 2025. While not dismissing the political and experiential relevance of a unilinear model of time, it advances a more heterogenous perspective by adopting a multiscalar approach to transnational social space and wartime experience. Conceptually, the article distinguishes between two timescales: the timescale of intimate life and the timescale of war, underpinned by patterns of military violence and political decision-making. It traces how these scales intersect, synchronize, and diverge in migrants’ transnational lives, showing that temporal experiences are not uniform across participants. In conclusion, the article highlights the analytical value of a multiscalar temporal approach for analysing transnational migration in other protracted conflicts and for understanding the relationship between transnationalism and time.