"A common grief we all share'

Former R.A. Long exchange student describes Ukraine's fight to survive

If you want to understand why Ukrainians will not  yield in their bloody struggle with Russia,  listen to the story of a young woman from Kyiv who just completed a 10-day return trip to Longview to visit her high school student exchange family and friends.

Ukrainians are united, whether they’re fighting on the battle lines, supply lines, food lines, utility lines or huddled in air raid bunkers to keep their nation running and able to fight, Iryna S. told me Tuesday.

More than anything, she said, people are united in grief.

 “I grieve for all the people who have died and who lost their mothers or fathers or children. It is a common grief that we all share. Everyone has lost someone.”

Iryna, nearly 25, and her husband, an IT worker named Ivan, 32, are not in the army. But like just about everyone in the nation, they are civilian foot soldiers in Ukraine’s war of survival.  

This is war, and everyone is involved, Iryna said. She has volunteered to help pack meals for the army and arranged with friends who escaped to neighboring Poland to send crucial medicines that were in short supply in Ukraine.

Her friends have purchased and donated military gear for soldiers. Others have organized youth crews to clean up and restore wrecked apartment buildings in Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv where bombing raids and missile fire killed 50 people a day and Russian troops occupied the city for the first three months of the war.

“From my circle of friends everyone was volunteering in some kind of way.”

Iryna was an exchange student at R.A. Long High School in 2014-15, spending her senior year there studying, playing tennis, running in cross country and volunteering in student projects. Once she returned to Kyiv, the capital,  she graduated from college, worked as a flight attendant, married in 2021, and now is employed in human resources for Puma, the German footwear firm. 

Her brief return visit to Longview this month was intended to get a break and reconnect with friends. Her trip  back to Ukraine stared Wednesday morning (Jan. 25), with a stop in New York to visit a Ukrainian friend whose father died fighting in the war.  Her own family has not lost any relatives. Nevertheless, her Longview foreign exchange parent, Penelope Sells, is worried about Iryna’s return to Kyiv. 

Iryna is one of 10 foreign exchange students Sells and her late husband, William “Scotty” Sells, hosted over the years, and she stays in touch with most of them.

“When you take a child into your house and they live with you a year, they become kind of like your own,”  Sells said.  “I just worry about her. I kept telling her and Ivan that I was not going to let her go home.”

Iryna is a slender, classic slavic beauty, with ice blue eyes and a fair, friendly face that belies the struggles her people face.

“Our life will never be the same again. You have the life before and the life after” the invasion began last February.

Evacuating to bomb shelters still is common, even in cities like Kyiv that are hundreds of miles  from the front.  In Iryna’s case, her workplace bomb shelter is in a parking lot three floors below the street level of her office building.

 “We have to take the stairs and take laptops and continue to work in the shelter” — at least while there is power available.

In order to distribute power equitably across the nation, electric service on a four hours-on/four-hours-off basis, as long as there are no recent attacks. 

“The engineers and electricians are working 24/7” to keep the power flowing.  “They are the heroes among the civilians. Everyone is doing their best. Everyone is on edge.”

A curfew is in effect from 11 p.m to 5 a.m. to prevent spies and informants from reporting Ukrainian troop and defense movements.  Generators and diesel and gasoline are in high demand to run generators but are costly and hard to find. The public accepts all this without complaint, she said.

In Kyiv, which the Russians tried to take early in the war and then withdrew after Ukrainian resistance, supermarket shelves are once again stocked normally after food shortages early in the war. But life is anything but normal, Iryna says. The once crowded historic city of more than 3 million still feels deserted.

“So many people have left the country. (Kyiv) is so empty it gives me shivers.”

Ukrainians avidly read  newspapers and news reports for the latest on the war and the possibility of missile strikes. Sometimes air raid sirens don’t work because the power is out. Staying informed “is about life and death for us,” Iryna said. “You have to be on top of the news all the time.” 

When she was a student in Longview eight years ago, Iryna told me that Ukrainians referred to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, as “Putler” — a combination of Putin with Hitler.  Putin took  over the Crimea and Donbas regions of Ukraine in 2014, and he launched the new invasion in February on the pretext that he was fighting “Naziism”  and protecting Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

Imperial, czarist Russia had controlled parts of Ukraine since the mid-17th Century and ruled virtually all of it during the Soviet era. Ukraine regained its independence following the 1992 collapse of the Soviet Union, but Russian leaders and Putin have always coveted it because of its strategic position north of the Black Sea, its fertile farmland and other abundant natural resources.

Still, Iryna said her husband and her friends were skeptical Putin would invade — even when Major General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief of defense intelligence,  warned in the fall of 2021 that an invasion was a strong possibility. Iryna said she took the warnings seriously and had a bag packed so she and her husband could evacuate quickly. (Few people expected the Ukrainians to resist the Russian advance.)

“I told my husband we should move closer to the Polish border just in case. He wouldn’t listen to me. We probably would have been able to leave the country together when we had a chance. Some of my friends did.”

Men between the ages of 18 and 65 are prohibited from leaving Ukraine because they might be needed in army.  Iryna’s mother, a doctor, could be conscripted too.

The invasion early in the morning of Feb. 24 and has taken tens of thousands of lives on both sides and created Europe’s largest refugee crisis in decades.

“I woke up because of the sound of explosions. — huge ones at 5 in the morning.  I asked  (Ivan) what was going on. He was already watching Putin’s speech and he told me. I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘No. (War) can’t be true.’ I was rationalizing.”

They fled immediately, not knowing if they could ever return. 

“You  should not be in the capital city when the war begins. For me it was obvious.  We didn’t think much.We took our backpacks and left home. We returned to our home four months later.”

They spent most of their time away in Ternopol in Western Ukraine, fleeing  a village west of Kyiv they thought was safe — until a bomb or missile destroyed a house on the opposite side of the street.  

They returned to Kyiv after the Russians withdrew from the area north of Kyiv — leaving a genocidal trail of death in their wake in towns like Bucha, a  Kyiv suburb. Stories of torture, executions,  rape and other atrocities arise every time the Ukrainian army liberates a city, she said.

“Everyone was shocked and going through a lot emotionally …  It’s the same pattern all over agin. People who were tortured and their bodies are found ... Raped … Killed …We go through that over and over again …”

As shocking as it was, on another level it was not a surprise. Russians have brutalized  Ukraine many times over the centuries. Iryna said her late great-grandmother lived through the “Holodmor,” a word based on the word “hunger” that refers to the mass starvations of Ukrainian peasants at the hands of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.  

“We  remember all the horrible things they’ve done in the history of our nation.”

It is because of that history that Ukrainians won’t yield  to Putin’s aggression, Iryna says.

“If we surrender there would be no Ukraine. That’s how it is. People would be killed, People would be persecuted for their beliefs. It would be Bucha all over again, everywhere. The genocide would continue.”