In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the colors of the Ukrainian flag appeared everywhere — on social media posts, photos, yard signs and murals. Two years later, the familiar yellow-and-blue symbol’s vibrant colors have faded on bumper stickers and window signs throughout the country.
In Massachusetts, Olga Yulikova and other Ukrainians are trying to keep hope alive at the local and federal levels on this second anniversary. Russia’s invasion commenced two years ago Saturday.
Yulikova runs Olga's List, a nonprofit volunteer organization that assists Ukrainian families with resettling in the commonwealth. Demand for its services is a lot lower now.
“It’s a slow trickle compared to what it used to be,” Yulikova said, referring to the number of families arriving from Ukraine. About five calls come in a week from people looking for assistance, she estimates, compared to 30 a year ago.
Many of the volunteers with Olga’s List are themselves Ukrainians who fled the war, Yulikova said, helping others find housing, jobs and to wade through the bureaucracy of social security and other requirements for residency. About 10 Ukrainian families a month continue to be resettled in all parts of the state through Olga’s List and other agencies, mainly finding homes outside of Boston due to high rents.
They’re coming under different circumstances now, too. Olga’s List continues to support about 400 people altogether, and recent arrivals are often men, many of whom stayed behind to fight or defend the nation in other ways at the start of the war.
Yulikova says that she anticipates that her organization will hear from many more Ukrainians in the coming weeks and months.
“What we're afraid of is that the war is not getting any better,” she said. “So my staff and I, we're rapidly building our capacity to be able to accept more refugees coming in.”
More than 10,000 Ukrainians have been killed since February 2022, and another 20,000 injured, according to UN reports. The war in Eastern Europe remains at a stalemate, but there is rising fear that the conflict is turning in Russia’s favor after Ukraine withdrew from the city of Avdiivka last week.
U.S. Retired Brigadier General Leonid Kondratiuk, a military historian of Ukrainian descent who lives in the Boston area, acknowledged the setback, but told GBH News that the Russian battle for Avdiivka also came at great cost to the Russians.
He’s calling on the Massachusetts Congressional delegation to help usher through weapons assistance to help Ukraine defend itself. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who visited Kyiv last summer and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has called on the Republican-led House to approve the aid package that the Senate passed last week. But House leadership has resisted demands to bring the legislation — which includes over $60 billion in military assistance for Ukraine — up for a quick up-or-down vote.
This has left Vsevolod Petriv, president of the Boston chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, furious.
“We're waking up more and more to how important advocacy is from our side [in the United States]. Because obviously it’s needed,” Petriv said.
Petriv, a second-generation Ukrainian American, said his community is alarmed that former President Donald Trump is egging on his Republican allies in Congress to block aid to Ukraine.
He said he would hope that the media would start to pay more attention to Ukraine and less to Trump. His organization is helping to register members of his community to vote in the 2024 national election.
“I think we are giving way too much air time to candidate Trump over other candidates and other issues, which is not helpful,” Petriv said. “I have family in Ukraine. And friends. So far, thankfully, they're doing OK. No one has been killed.”
As far as the waning attention of the world, the country and the state to the deteriorating conditions in Ukraine, he is philosophical.
“Yeah, I think that there is a dwindling of support,” Petriv reflected. “But America, it gets tired of things, and they go from one thing to the next thing. You know, like, from the war to Taylor Swift.”
The Boston chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America is hoping that a rally planned for Saturday on the Boston Common, and in cities throughout the United States, will help redirect attention to the ongoing war.
Yulikova is resolute in her commitment to her countrymen and women. She said, no matter what happens, she will be here for the Ukrainians at home and those arriving to Massachusetts.
“As far as people I am friends with and work with, it’s made us stronger because we feel very personally involved and responsible for helping those people,” she said. “It feels kind of like — if nobody is going to do it, that’s OK. We can do it. We are really strong, and we have a solid team.”
For more than a year, Ukrainians arriving in the United States received federal benefits under the designated status of “humanitarian parole,” but beginning Oct. 1 of last year, new arrivals were no longer eligible. That resulted in an extra burden for aid agencies, said Yulikova.
“It became very difficult for other agencies to resettle Ukrainians that are coming recently. And we are amongst the very few who continue to support individuals coming in because we have other funds. We rely on private donations. So the private donations allow us to help people in need.”
Yulikova said she and her staff will continue to work to assure that the colors of the Ukrainian flag “remain vibrant” in the minds of Bostonians and others, whose attention may have been diverted elsewhere.
