The universe provides for a striking Ukrainian trio currently in Cyprus as their positive vibes make them free to go their own way

All the Same are having orange-and-pomegranate juice at Hoi Polloi in north Nicosia when a 200-lira note (about €6) appears on the cobbled street beside them.

Obviously it doesn’t just ‘appear’ – but it’s a breezy afternoon, so either it got blown in by the wind or someone must’ve dropped it just seconds before. Ilya Bugrimov picks up the note and takes it round to the various tables, but no-one seems to know where it came from. “You found it, now it’s yours,” says one patron cheerfully.

The universe provides, it seems. Cyprus has been good to the band; they’ve been here for a few weeks – playing music in the street, as they’ve done for years – and have already found a friend and patron, a local who’s offered them his home in Kyrenia to stay in while he’s away in Europe.

Another local, photographer Emre Gundal, has produced their latest video, for an old Brazilian song called ‘Beija Flore’ (you can find it on YouTube). They’ve performed at the Happy Café in Bellapais – and now 200 lira appear in the street. “I’m lucky,” says Ilya at one point, speaking not of Cyprus but his life in general. “I feel that everything is supporting me.”

He does most of the talking, which is by design. He’s the voice of the group, at least in interview mode – but the actual voice is Maria Halenina, whose crystalline tones elevate their songs into quasi-spiritual psalms. Ilya’s 32, Maria 27; they’ve been married for seven years. The third member of the group, Flora Trehubova, has just turned 21; her induction had to do with the war in Ukraine, on which more later.

It’s easy to see why All the Same draw admirers: even beyond Maria’s voice and Ilya’s guitar riffs (Flora dances, when they play in the street), their appearance – their whole vibe – is so striking.

Ilya, with his cowl and bushy beard, looks like one of those fabled shepherds who came to see the baby Jesus. Maria’s expression also has a touch of the mystical, both amused and a little distant, like she’s privy to a beautiful secret which she may or may not decide to share with you. She and Flora might be sisters, with the same serene green eyes and patient half-smile – not to mention the same exotic garb.

“In Arabic countries it’s hijab,” she says when I ask about her headscarf. “I call it also hijab, but it’s my own feelings,” she adds, presumably meaning not for religious reasons. “I like how it looks.”

Is she part Turkish, or entirely Ukrainian? (All three hail from Kharkiv but have spent time in Turkey, and came to the north from there.) “I’m not sure about my family line,” she replies pointedly – but no, as far as she knows they’re all Ukrainians.

Do they dress like her?

“Only me,” she laughs. “Strange person, in my family. But they support me.”

This is a recurring theme in our conversation: other people – not just people like themselves, but all kinds of people – being ultimately friendly, good, supportive. Call them hippies if you like, but there’s no denying All the Same’s positive vibes. At one point, as we sit at Hoi Polloi, a random child cycles past, and Ilya impulsively waves to him. (The kid waves back.) The universe provides – and they’re happy to “be with the flow,” as Flora puts it.

They’ve been travelling, on and off, for nine years, even before they started playing music. I ask for stories and of course they have stories, says Ilya, he has two really great stories – but they’re actually the same story, a story of being suspicious of strangers only for those strangers to turn out to be wonderful.

The first was in southern Turkey in 2016, when a man needed help pushing his boat out to sea. (“When people need help, I help.”) He took them to an empty, dark marina, then disappeared in the bushes and they heard what sounded like a chainsaw – they were terrified; was he a maniac? – but it turned out to be an electric generator, and the place was flooded with light and they all made music together. The second was in India, on a two-day train trip from Delhi to Bangalore, huddled with a mob of dirt-poor travellers in ‘General Class’. It was like a mosh pit at a punk concert (“I have some experience in punk rock concerts!”), and they spent a sleepless night worried about their stuff being stolen – but then in the morning they began making friends, and “Indian people are so kind”. 

The universe provides. They could never have afforded a trip to India – but they met a woman, a Ukrainian Jew who befriended them (her mental health was poor, explains Ilya; they made her feel better), bought the tickets and travelled with them to Rishikesh, yoga capital of the world. They ended up staying in India for almost a year.

Is there a catch? Maybe that you have to be open, and let go of your ego – and you can’t go looking, either. Oddly enough (or not so oddly), the one time when they were given something officially – not just randomly, like that 200-lira note – was the time when it didn’t work out.

That was recently, after war broke out and Europe extended help to Ukrainians. Ilya was a little bit tired of the transient life; “I decide to live a little bit in the system,” he explains (his English has the Slavic trait of being all in the present tense) – so all three went to England on the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme, signing up with a local host just outside Nottingham.

Maria worked online as a yoga teacher, which was fine (though she missed playing music). Flora continued her dance studies. Ilya, however, only lasted three months, working as a cleaner at a golf club, then a hotel.

He had no problem with English people (who are “so good, so gentle”) – but his boss, who was Polish, had a certain mentality: “Oh, £1,000, it’s everything for me. I’m ready to sell my soul for £1,000 a month,” as Ilya describes it. He shakes his head: “I feel that it’s not my way”. They withdrew from the scheme, and “after that I told myself ‘Now you are a free man, and you shouldn’t do what you don’t want. Do only what you want’… After England, I understand that I’m not a slave”.

The war goes on, of course, lurking in the background as we talk. Maria’s mum, a factory worker, is refusing to leave Kharkiv, and her daughter’s worried. (Maria never knew her dad, who left when she was a baby, hence her comment about not being sure of her family line.) Ilya has an even more wrenching story: his father – to whom he was close – enlisted to fight and was killed, in January 2023 near Luhansk.  

His father was 55. He’d remarried after leaving Ilya’s mother, and had two more children – yet he felt a responsibility: “He said, ‘Because this is our war’,” meaning his generation. “‘Because we lost all this’.”

Ilya recalls his dad – something of a “hippy-style guy”, like himself – envying the life his son was living, feeling slightly lost in his own life. When he went to fight, however, and they’d speak on the phone, “he looked so happy”, maybe because he’d finally made his own choice in life.

“Before he died, his face looked like when he was young,” muses Ilya. In those last days, he became once again the dad he remembered from childhood. “It feels that I lost my father – but no. I think I lost him many years before, when he left my mother. But now, when he died, I think my father is back to me.”

The war also brought something else: the addition of a third member. Flora had met Maria at a dance class, gone to an All the Same concert and become something of a groupie, following them everywhere. “After the war started, I went with my grandmother to them, because they invited me to a safe place [in Turkey],” she explains. Had she been planning to join the band anyway, though? “Yes of course!” she replies with a giggle.

It’s a new dynamic with three people. Maria and Ilya, of course, have their own dynamic. What did she like about him, when she first met him? “That he is so simple,” she says, laughing affectionately. “It was very simple to speak, to walk with him, to spend time… I don’t like to speak, he likes speaking a lot. You know, two puzzles,” says Maria, joining her hands to indicate two pieces of a puzzle fitting together.

And he? “I liked her because I didn’t feel the same as with other girls before. I liked her because she didn’t want to use me like a man. She spent time with me like with friend, like with soul”.

They met at the Hare Krishna temple in Kharkiv, where both were seeking to find themselves – though especially Ilya whose energy is boisterous and a little bit bumptious, what he calls “man energy”. He’d ‘lost his mind’ over girls in the past, “and that’s why I decide to not be with girls if I don’t find myself – or maybe never to be with girls, because I decide maybe it’s better to be a monk!… And Maria helped me to be more free”. They never really dated, he recalls, just went for a walk “and we had some feelings… The next day again, another day more – and on the third or fourth day, I proposed to her.”

It’s a bit different now, though not wildly different. Flora feels a bit like their sister – or sometimes their child, “because she’s so young”. The three were more separate before, muses Flora, but they now increasingly behave “like one organism”. She herself, being Gen Z, knows about tech and Instagram (@all_the_same_ilya_maria) and so on; Maria inspires “through her silence and calmness,” in Ilya’s words – while Ilya himself brings his blustery ‘man energy’, doing things and dealing with people.  

It’s a simplification, but I can’t resist: ‘Mind, soul and body,’ I suggest, pointing at each one in turn. Happily, the band agree – though they actually prefer to cite Trimurti, the Hindu version of the Trinity made up of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva: creator, preserver and (creative) destroyer, respectively.

Either way, All the Same are indeed all the same (though of course the name refers to humanity more generally): the same spirit, same wide-open vibes. They’re a happy hippy trio, playing music, encountering people. Any alcohol, drugs? What do they do to unwind? “We eat sweets and watch films,” says Maria disarmingly.

And what of the war? Shouldn’t they be fighting for their country? It preys on his mind, admits Ilya – but his dad explicitly urged him not to fight, to keep living life, and besides don’t they also make Ukraine proud by connecting with strangers, singing songs, spreading positive vibes? Why submit to this, when they go their own way on everything else?    

“Can I say something about all of us?” he adds, glancing at his friends for permission. “We are tired of depending on this system – because the system doesn’t care about us. This system cares about war, about banks, about money, about business. Why should we try to live for this, if we can decide to live for us?”

Music and travel, and a certain ‘lucky’ mindset. We’ve been talking for a while, and it turns out they’ve missed the last bus back to Kyrenia – but it’s fine, shrugs Ilya, something will turn up. And what of that 200-lira note? What do they plan to do with this money? “Eat ice cream!” says Flora hungrily, and the others nod. The universe provides.