Hearing from the LI Ukrainian-Russian community
Insider views of Ukraine War
Masha has lived in the United States for the better part of 30 years. Her 75-year-old mother, sister and niece, however, still live in a small Russian village, and she worries how Vladimir Putin’s stringent crackdowns on protests and social media — especially since the start of his invasion of Ukraine last month — will affect them.
“I can Skype with my mom as of now,” said Masha, who used a generic Russian name name instead of her real name, out of fear of retribution against her family overseas. “Who knows what happens tomorrow? You never know. That's why when I talk to my mom, we talk about puppies and kittens, and not about the situation at all. Because if something happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Masha’s friend on Long Island, Ania Kulchytska is also concerned because her grandmother still lives in the mid-sized city near Ukraine’s border with Romania where Kulchytska grew up. Just a few weeks ago, she told a reporter how proud she was of the bravery Ukrainians were showing against the Russian invaders. But now, a month in, Kulchystka has faced a grim reality.
“I’m worried if my family is going to wake up alive tomorrow,” said Kulchytska, a Bellmore real estate agent who grew up in what was then a newly independent Ukraine.
“My grandmother is going to be 80 years old. She can’t walk. We’re trying to come up with a plan how we can get her out of Ukraine. The lines on the border are just terribly huge. You have to wait for days to cross the border.”
Kulchytska also has relatives in the heavily bombarded city of Mariupol.
“About a week ago, we were able to contact them.” she said. “But there’s no longer any connection with them, so we don’t even know what’s happened to them.”
The family of Father Wasyl Hrynkiw lives in a small mountain village of western Ukraine. Of his 14 cousins, several are men fighting on the front, many miles to the east. His mother, sister and other female relatives help to pack food to send to the soldiers.
The mountain villages have not been bombed by Putin because, the pastor of St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Catholic Church said, “For one bomb, he wants to kill a lot of people,” so cities have been targeted.
One exception, though, is a community not far from Hrynkiw’s, where a monument stands to Stepan Bandera, a major figure in Ukraine’s battle for independence during and after World War II. According to reports there, the Russians aimed a bomb at Bandera’s monument, but it failed to explode. Hrynkiw called it a miracle.
“When the Ukraine military staff came to deactivate the bomb,” Hrynkiw said, “they said if bomb could explode, whole village would be washed off the earth and half of my village would be destroyed.”
The war’s effect on citizenry
Masha feels pain, horror and betrayal that Putin would actually attack another country, but especially one with fellow Slavs. “He forgot that Ukrainians are like Russians. We are Slavic people. We will fight to the last drop of blood.”
At the same time, “I feel for normal people, I really feel bad for them. For example, my mom. She doesn’t make a lot of money. She’s going to be 75. She’s still working and just because her pension is so little, she has to continue working. Before the war, I can help, I will send her money. I can’t do this anymore. So, if my family is going to starve, there is nothing I can do about it.”
For Kulchytska, war is coming all to close to her native city. The Ukrainian government created an app that alerts citizens when air raid sirens are sounding.
“But what’s scary is, at first everybody was going to bomb shelter when they heard sirens,” she said, “but then it just happened so many times throughout the night that … their mind started normalizing it and now they sleep right through it.”
Hrynkiw is finding it increasingly difficult to send money to his family.
“It’s tough,” he said, “because MoneyGram, if I try to send a couple of hundred dollars, they charge almost 30 percent.”
He is trying a workaround through a Ukrainian credit union, but for his niece to receive what he sends in the form of dollars — rather than the less-stable Ukrainian currency, hryvnia — she has to open a special bank account.
How can the war be won?
Masha and Hrynkiw both said Putin would not stop, but had to be stopped.
“NATO, if they create a no-fly zone,” Masha said, “the moment they announce this, it’s going to be official World War III. Putin would consider this a declaration of war. I really don’t know how this is going to end.”
Hrynkiw does not believe Putin would start a nuclear war, “because he doesn’t want to be killed.” But nor will he cease the war until his every resource is exhausted.
“He wants to be king of the world,” Hrynkiw said. “He wants to control the universe, or at least planet Earth.”
But Kulchytska stands firm in her certainty that Ukraine will ultimately win. Ukrainian morale is high, and so are Russian casualties.
Her friends on the front tell her, “They have the Russian dead bodies laying on the ground everywhere. The Russians have a cremating facility on wheels to burn the amount of Russian bodies that they have, because they can’t pick them up. They can’t physically take them back to their families.”
Her friends at the front have even reported that Russian morale is so low, some Russian soldiers have dropped their weapons.
“I think in people’s hearts,” Kulchytska said. “There’s no doubt that we're going to win.”
