‘Nothing more precious’: Portland area Ukrainians grapple with grief over their homeland

Within a few days of the invasion, Yulia Brockdorf rearranged her Hillsboro office to make her Ukrainian heritage a focal point.

A medium-sized blue-and-yellow flag had been hanging on a side wall. But the 44-year-old therapist and dietician moved it to a more prominent spot, hanging it vertically on the wall directly behind her desk, to make sure people see her as Ukrainian when they talk with her.

“Ukraine is my loved one. Ukraine is my sister, is my daughter, is my mother,” said Brockdorf, who married an American and immigrated to the United States in the 1990s before settling locally in 2000. “There is nothing more precious than Ukraine.”

Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans in Oregon are trying to cope with a war that is entering its third week, the Russian military bombing towns and killing civilians, displacing millions of people and creating a future that is entirely uncertain.

Oregon is home to some 9,000 people who were born in Ukraine, according to a Portland State University analysis of federal data, and it ranks third nationwide for the highest percentage of its population speaking Ukrainian at home. More than 20,000 people in Oregon claim some Ukrainian ancestry.

As of Friday, Russian forces had renewed an offensive into the capital, Kyiv, a city with more than four times as many residents as Portland. At least 564 civilians have died in the fighting, the United Nations said Friday, while acknowledging the true number is likely far higher.

As they watch the war unfold, Ukrainian immigrants in Oregon do what they can to help those back home while caring for themselves and others struggling to cope with the worry of what’s happening to loved ones abroad.

Brockdorf’s taken a reassuring tenor at her Hillsboro practice — trying to help clients feel like they are in control of their lives — while finding much of her own free time is spent coordinating help for people who live in Ukraine.

Brockdorf used to see patients back-to-back, but now she typically leaves a gap of at least five minutes between each appointment to send emails and make calls to coordinate donations and shipments of medical supplies, organize fundraisers and help promote rallies.

And she’s getting even less sleep than usual.

Tuesday, for example, she was woken by a call from a contact in Poland around 4 a.m. about a shipment of communications equipment into Ukraine. That call triggered another she had to make to move the shipment logistics forward. She then watched the Ukrainian president’s speech on her phone, a stirring dispatch proclaiming that his country would not give up the fight. After falling asleep for 45 minutes or so, she got up to start her day.

Brockdorf wishes the U.S. government would do more to stop the war. Even with the widespread support of the Ukrainian cause, she is afraid the government’s actions aren’t enough, given the risk to her country and the rest of Europe.

“And we just sit here,” she said.

***

Sitting at the white dining room table in the Northeast Portland home she shares with her American husband, Tetyana Horner looked down as she tried, and struggled, to explain exactly what she wishes she had done differently.

“At least you warned them,” Horner, 42, said a friend told her recently. “But still, I don’t know …”

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Horner had tried to convince family in Nova Kakhovka, a strategically vital town just north of Crimea, to leave. Train tickets were still available at the time, and it seemed certain to her Russia would invade the city of 45,000 residents, roughly the size of Lake Oswego.

“They dismissed me,” Horner said. “‘It’s impossible,’ they were saying. ‘Nothing will happen.’”

The town her parents and sister live in is now occupied by the Russian military, one of the first to be captured in the earliest days of the invasion. Finding food at grocery stores has turned into a five-hour ordeal, Horner’s sister told her, and the Russian military has ordered locals to stop protesting.

Things could get worse. Horner’s voice dropped to a whisper as she said the word “killed” when recounting that a former classmate told her a family, including a 6-year-old, was shot to death trying to leave town. She glanced quickly at her 7-year-old son bouncing a ball in the living room.

But perhaps the most frustrating thing in these days of the occupation is the silence.

Her family’s phone carriers aren’t working properly anymore, so she can’t talk to them. Even when they were still able to talk, her parents tried to say as little as possible, afraid they were being listened to.

Still, she tries. She reached her sister by Facebook messenger Thursday, and she learned that the road to the family’s country house was blocked, leaving her father worried about his collection of beehives. But the family has food, water and electricity, the sister told her.

Horner said she is deeply concerned that her parents’ town might run out of food, given nobody appears to be accepting the supplies offered by the Russian military. Still, she believes her parents are probably in one of the safest places in the country right now, because there is no fighting. But if fighting were to reach the town, she’s afraid her parents would not survive any shelling because of their age and the distance from their apartment to a bomb shelter.

And Horner is dealing with other kinds of fallout from the war.

Several days after the invasion, Horner’s friend in Russia-occupied Crimea published a post on Facebook about a weight loss program. Shocked, Horner messaged her and asked her to instead write something against the war and in support of Ukraine. But her friend, who watched Russian state news sources, refused to accept the full scope of what was happening.

That friendship, Horner believes, is over.

***

The 9:45 p.m. phone call brought some good news for Nataliia Zybachynska, a relatively recent Ukrainian transplant with countless ties at home.

“Thank God,” she said, as her friend Katya, on the other line, said her family had managed to get out of Kyiv and was now in west Ukraine. Zybachynska offered to help them go farther west, listing people Katya’s family could stay with, including cousins in Germany and friends in Poland.

The friend, whom Zybachynska used to sing with in a church choir, was one of many Zybachynska has gotten used to not hearing from as often as she would like. She stays in touch mostly by text message, with one friend sending photo updates from her seventh night in a basement, and another sharing videos of Russian tanks driving through the streets of Kyiv.

Most importantly, for Zybachynska, 42, her parents managed to get out of the country. Right as the war started, her sister, who lives in London, bought them plane tickets to fly there. They grabbed what they could from their home in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, which has a population equivalent to all of Hillsboro, Beaverton and Tigard. They drove to the border with Romania, left their car, and walked across the border, before flying to London the next day.

Zybachynska and her husband, Ihor Zybachynskyi, came to the U.S. in 2016 after winning a green card lottery, and both now work for the North Clackamas School District. She is an instructional assistant for students learning English as a second language, and he is a Russian and Ukrainian interpreter.

Zybachynskyi’s mother is still in Ukraine. She volunteers at an orphanage that has also become a home for refugees, Zybachynskyi said. He asked her several times whether she wanted to try to go to the U.S. or to stay with friends or family in Germany or Poland, but she refused all offers.

“I don’t have the moral right to leave,” his mother told him, Zybachynskyi said. While he said he is, of course, worried about her, he understands, and would likely do the same if he were still in Ukraine.

“She’s a fighter,” said Zybachynskyi, 42.

Besides, worrying can get the Clackamas family of six only so far. Zybachynska said that after several days of panic, dread and sorrow, she has started to try to take care of herself. Wednesday, the family took the day to go to Mount Hood for a hike.

But it wasn’t easy to come to that point. Her colleagues were well aware of what she was going through, she said. Americans have a tendency to try to make people feel better, she said. She’s been moved by the many gifts people at work gave her, and their repeated efforts to check in.

“When you see that people really support you,” she said, “not just to check a box, it pulls you up.”

— Fedor Zarkhin

503-294-7674; fzarkhin@oregonian.com