It’s been more than a year since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Shortly after the invasion, we spoke with Tatiana Terdal, a board member of the Ukrainian-American Cultural Association of Oregon and Southwest Washington. We’ll check in with her about how the local community has been affected over the last year. We’ll also hear from Erik Heinonen, an Oregonian aid worker who recently returned to his home in Ukraine after fleeing to Romania last year with his family.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. It’s been more than 14 months since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. Shortly after that major escalation of Russia’s unprovoked attacks, we spoke with Tatiana Terdal who’s on the advisory board of the Ukrainian Foundation of Oregon-Southwest Washington along with Erik Heinonen. He is an Oregonian aid worker who had fled with his family from Ukraine to Romania. Heinonen and his family are now back in Ukraine along with an estimated 5.5 million of the 13 million people who originally fled. Tatiana Terdal and Erik Heinonen both join us now with updates as this war slogs on.
Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Tatiana Terdal: Thank you.
Erik Heinonen: Good to be here.
Miller: Erik, first. So the last time we talked, you had recently packed your wife, stepdaughter, mother-in-law, 10 month old baby and two dogs into a car and you all fled Ukraine for Romania. You’d found a temporary place to live, but you didn’t know where you were gonna be staying longer term. What happened since then? Where did you go next?
Heinonen: Yeah, a lot’s happened since then. So going back to that time, we left our home in Irpin, which is just outside of Kyiv, in mid-February about 10 days before the invasion started. We went to Western Ukraine. Looking at the situation, it was quite concerning and decided, ‘let’s be prudent here’. So we relocated with the hope that we would come back home in two weeks and everything would be ok. That wasn’t the case.
We then left from Western Ukraine across the border into Romania on February 25th. A long trip to get across three days, got there on the 28th. And like everybody, I think at that time, very disoriented about what was happening. No one understood at that point what the next few days or next few weeks would hold. But also a realization that we needed to take some action here and try and get ourselves settled in not knowing what will happen.
So we spent about 10 days in a village just south of the Ukrainian-Romanian border and then ended up relocating to the city of Lași, which is near the border with Moldova about four hour drive from the place where we had crossed the border and then spent the next couple of weeks just trying to figure out life there – finding a place to live, which was a challenge with multiple family members plus the two dogs.
Miller: Can I ask you, at that point, what kind of responses did you get from Romanians? I mean, how supportive were they of this influx of Ukrainians?
Heinonen: I mean, the response was very much of solidarity, particularly in those initial days. A lot of volunteer organizations and churches and other well-intentioned people started to collect supplies. A whole variety of organizations and charities cropped up right at the border to try and provide assistance as people were coming across and tried to help people navigate their way to Bucharest, or to other cities across Europe, very warmly received.
The third or the fourth day we were there, we found a place to live. I took my stepdaughter with me to just go buy some groceries and we stopped in a little cafe and the woman there heard us speaking Ukrainian and said, ‘Hey, can I help somehow, at least take a cake, take some muffins, some cupcakes,’ just very touching and a lot of support in those early days, particularly.
Miller: Did that change as the days turned into weeks, turned into months?
Heinonen: I mean, from what I’ve understood through my work and doing humanitarian work in Romania itself, talking to Ukrainians there, and talking with Romanians as well, generally a lot of support and recognition that people are in a tough situation. The government wants to help, generally people want to help. But as time goes on, certain amounts of support wane a little bit. I think everyone wants there to be a solution to the situation and it is of course a burden at some level for any country to take on tens of thousands of citizens of another country who do need support. I think overall the reception has been positive but there is a certain strain and I understand to some degree as well in Poland and Germany and other countries.
Miller: Erik, we want to hear more of your story. But as I noted, Tatiana Terdal is here as well. Can you give us a sense for the much further fleeing part of this diaspora? I mean, do you know, approximately, how many Ukrainians have come to Oregon over the last 14 months?
Terdal: I know that the numbers are in the thousands.
Miller: Oregon alone?
Terdal: In Oregon alone.
Miller: I imagine that that means thousands of different individual stories and a lot of variety. But what are some examples of what you’ve heard about what it’s been like for those people fleeing war to immediately try to make new lives here?
Terdal: I know a number of refugee families because my friend herself is hosting her niece with two children and they left, not at the start of the war, but in November when Russia started destroying infrastructure. So she is a young woman with two children, a one year old and a three year old, living in the capital Kyiv in an apartment building on the 13th floor. Suddenly the energy system are destroyed, there is no power, no elevators. So even to get groceries, you need to walk down 13 floors carrying a one year old and a three year old. Even to get groceries, you need to carry with you some food and diapers and everything because at any time, air raids can start, and you may need to go into the bomb shelter for who knows how many hours. So that was incredibly difficult for a family with young children to be in a big city with no electricity, no power.
My friend applied through United for Ukraine Program [ https://www.uscis.gov/ukraine ], ‘U for U,’ for her to come through the program and she was able to get permission within four days. So, this family arrived just in early November and has been staying here ever since. But it was very difficult because the three year old, for example, would not want to even get his hair cut, because the last time he went into the head type place in Kyiv, air raid alarms sounded and…
Miller: He associated that.
Terdal: Yes he associated that. So there is a lot of that trauma and of course kids had very hard times to even go to preschool, to separate from mom. Stories like that are everywhere. So there is another family who came early in the war and the child has now celebrated her ninth birthday and she has not seen her father now for more than a year because her father is in Ukraine in the military but the family found shelter with friends here in Portland.
Miller: As a reminder, Ukrainian men, for a pretty big swath of ages, unlike women and children, were not allowed to leave because they were expected to defend the country. The other day, I heard about some teachers in East Portland who’ve been trying to learn at least some Ukrainian to talk with some of their new students. How has school been going for the youngest refugees who have ended up in Oregon? What have you heard?
Terdal: I met one refugee family during one of the fairs and it was a mother with a kid, maybe fourth or third grade. So I asked her how school is going. She said, ‘Oh, the school has been so helpful. They give us everything. They even give us school supplies. The only thing they don’t give us homework. I’m really surprised they don’t give homework.’
Miller: So this was a sense that school has been helpful in terms of providing some aspects of living but not as rigorous in education as his family was used to?
Terdal: Possibly. But the kid did not complain. But I know parents who are sending their kids to public schools here, but then also sending the kids to Ukrainian school on Saturdays, a Saturday school. So these kids, I’m so impressed with them because they have to learn a new language very quickly, a new system, and then also try to keep up the Ukrainian and not forget their own language.
Miller: I mentioned that stat at the beginning, that came from the United Nations, of something like, and I think these numbers are probably hard to pin down exactly, but 5.5 million Ukrainians who had fled around or sometime after February of last year, coming back, out of about 13 million people who initially fled. Do you get the sense, Tatiana, that the Ukrainians who have made it all the way to the US, and in this case, all the way to the west coast of the US, that they, too, actually plan to go back or have, they’ve gone 10,000 miles away and they’re making new lives?
Terdal: It very much depends. So I do know families that actually went back.
Miller: Already?
Terdal: Yeah. Already. They were here and they wanted to go back so they already left. Then there are some families who may stay here permanently, especially families whose kids may want to continue education here. It very much depends on the family and also where they’re from because, for some of them, their houses are still standing. For others, their homes were completely destroyed.
Miller: Erik, let’s go back to you. When we left off with your story, you’d found a place to live in Romania. How long did you end up staying there before you and your family went back to Ukraine?
Heinonen: So we arrived just there at the very end of February and we ended up staying until January 15th. So about 11 months in total and a lot of discussions from the very beginning of wanting to go back. Once we learned that our city, Irpin, had been liberated and we were very fortunate that our house was only partially damaged by the fighting that took place. As we saw people starting to come back to our city, for us, we started to have real discussions about going back – again, well received in Romania but your heart’s at home. You want to be home. You wanna be home for your family. In a lot of hard discussions over the coming months, I think we went back and forth – Is it the right time to go back or not?... many times.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what you were talking about in those conversations? I imagine with your wife and perhaps with your mother in law as well, or even with your stepdaughter, she’s 12 now?
Heinonen: Yeah, she’s 12.
Miller: So what was the calculus?
Heinonen: I mean, the calculus really came down to our perception of the risk of going back. We didn’t have any intentions to stay in Romania for the long term. We want to be back in Ukraine. It was just a question of, when would it be… did we feel like it was safe enough to go back, given the dynamics of the fighting. Again, those things changed a lot over the course of the year. The first missile strikes on major civilian infrastructure after the initial couple of weeks, those took place in the summer. Shopping malls getting hit, other infrastructure in the middle of cities being hit, and then in the fall, the large scale rocket and drone attacks started that Tatiana mentioned, targeting infrastructure for the most part, but not entirely.
So there were times when we were feeling like, ‘Ok, it’s calm enough, the fighting is mostly in the east, it doesn’t seem to be a threat, from the Belarusian side or from the Russian side of the border, coming from the north. This feels ok, we can go back,’ and then, the dynamic changes in a week and we’re back to thinking again and wondering how many more months might it be before it feels like it’s safe enough to go back. So a lot of just factoring in and lot of pluses of going back. But of course, the major minus is the question first though, of safety. Then, as Tatiana mentioned as well, once we got into the winter season and there were these substantial strikes on the infrastructure system. Exactly what Tatiana has said: the question of heating your home, having access to electricity, access to water, being able to care for our children, given what they need to go and have a more or less normal life in terms of just taking a warm bath in the evening, heating up food.
Miller: You mentioned that you found that your home was minimally damaged by the fighting. What about in your broader neighborhood? I mean, how much damage was there?
Heinonen: A lot, and our city was occupied and fought over for only about three weeks. Which is quite different than areas in the south and in the east where there was active fighting along the front line for months and months and months. But in that amount of time, very substantial damage on the other side of town and then also in our particular neighborhood, almost random, it seems like. Our house was… we had a shell land in our front yard that blew out the windows on one side of the house and damaged the fence and part of the roof. Our next door neighbor had a shell land right under her back bedroom and damaged severely the wall of her bedroom and the roof and the fence. Then our neighbors just across the alley, they were hit directly by a shell. Their house burned down entirely. Then going up the block, very substantial damage to people’s roofs, more houses burned down. It’s hard to see any logic in any of it but that’s just the reality of fighting.
Miller: It’s interesting that just like we hear after a natural disaster, a purely human disaster like a war, it, too, can have such randomness in terms of one house to the next. How much of your neighborhood, how many of the people in those places have come back? How much does it feel, people-wise, like your old neighborhood?
Heinonen: People-wise, it feels pretty much normal. I mean, obviously if you look and you can see there’s still signs of damage. Some people have repaired things -- entirely rebuilt houses that were destroyed a year ago. Others haven’t started or haven’t come back. But in terms of actual people, it feels just about normal.
One of the bizarre elements in all of this is a lot of people moved from the Donbas area to our city just outside of Kyiv because the prices were a little bit more affordable in terms of housing. So they were displaced at the beginning of the war in 2014 or 2015, moved here and then displaced again, fled again. While a lot of people have left the city, other ‘IDPs’ or other displaced people from other parts of the country have actually moved and started apartments and houses here. So there’s actually been a turnover in terms of it’s a second round of people being displaced to this particular city from different parts of Ukraine.
Miller: And if I’m not mistaken, this is what you talked about the last time you were on a year ago. This is a story of your wife and her family as well – your mother in law and your stepdaughter, along with your wife, they had already fled their home once in 2016 after living in Donetsk. Your stepdaughter, who’s 12 now as you mentioned, in particular, how is she faring?
Heinonen: Yeah, you can imagine, pretty difficult. She left her home when she was six, left behind her bedroom and her toys and her friends and her playground and her school and had to restart life once. Then having those discussions.
I remember very vividly before we left Irpin in February, about ‘Look, we’re gonna need to relocate for a while.’ And then her understanding of, ‘Maybe I won’t be able to go home again, when we cross the border into Romania,’ a couple of weeks later, really hard. She’s very resilient. She’s a tough kid for sure. She’s tried to sort of manage it and not be clearly upset, but we know it’s been really hard for her.
As Tatiana mentioned, separated from her biological father for almost a year, she’s still in Ukraine. We were in Romania and she’s also unfortunately lost her uncle as well, who was enlisted or enrolled in the military at the beginning of this year and unfortunately lost his life in Bakmut recently. So she’s gone through a lot. Also the double burden of school of trying to go to school in Romania while continuing her Ukrainian lessons online, a whole lot… but again, very resilient kid and tries to find positive happy things and normalcy in her life as much as she can.
Miller: Tatiana, you and Erik both talked a little bit about what the winter was like, including a family in Kyiv who came to the US in November because of what it was already like, even before the coldest, darkest time of the year arrived. What else have you heard about the reality of life in Ukraine over this past winter?
Terdal: Yeah, it was a very hard winter. It was actually easier for people in the villages who had their own homes and could have wood for fire and could cook like that, than for people in tall apartment buildings. So it was advised even for people with young children to leave and if they had relatives somewhere in the villages to go to them, to help them survive the winter. So it was a hard winter and remember it’s much colder in the winter in Ukraine than here in Oregon.
Miller: What has that intermittent power and other attacks on infrastructure – what has that meant for your ability to communicate with people in Ukraine?
Terdal: Yeah. Sometimes you would just…they would not be online the way they were before. So you just wait until you hear from them. It was hard when I knew that there was a raid going on and sometimes when they don’t come back, you don’t know whether something happened to them or they just don’t have power to connect with you. So it was difficult.
Miller: Both sides now have been talking about Ukraine’s anticipated spring counter offensive, which seems imminent. What are people that you talk to anticipating or bracing for?
Terdal: They’re already surviving air raids almost every day. So I have this air raid app on my phone. So I get notification for one of the regions, when Ukraine… when it is happening. I know Kyiv has been having air raids every day for almost a week. So they are already living through… but they are very, very hopeful that all of Ukraine would be liberated because look, people were able to go home even to destroyed homes when their areas were liberated. And more people are hoping that they would be able to go home.
Miller: So you might be shopping in Fred Meyer, say, and you’ll get a notice on your phone that there’s an air raid in Ukraine?
Terdal: Yes, and if I have even the sound a little bit on it actually would tell me. The voice, I have it set for English because you can set it for either English or Ukrainian, the voice is Luke Skywalker – Mark Hamill. He actually recorded it and he says, ‘Alert, go to bombshelter, take it seriously.’ Then I also get notification when it’s over. So he says, ‘Air alert is over, may the Force be with you.’
Miller: You’re not seeking shelter at that moment, you’re thousands of miles away. Why do you have that alert on your phone?
Terdal: Because, that’s what my classmate from my school in Ukraine is living through right now. She is there. She never evacuated. And I want to understand what she’s going through. I also want to know when I can get in touch with her and when she is likely to be in the bomb shelter.
Miller: Erik, the West has made Ukraine’s survival - I don’t think that’s too strong a word - possible with billions of dollars of military aid for tanks and armored vehicles and radar and helicopters and missiles and drones and probably lots of things that the public doesn’t know about. What have you heard from Ukrainians about the West’s response so far?
Heinonen: I think everyone recognizes the volume of support and certainly people are very thankful for what the West has done, what the US has done, what European partners have done to support. One of the things that people have heard, multiple times, is there’s a fear of being alone and feeling alone in all of this.
That being said, I think there’s also certainly a feeling that more support is needed and a very clear recognition that every day that this continues more Ukrainians will lose their lives on the front lines and more civilians will lose their lives in certain parts of the country. More schools will be destroyed, more hospitals will be destroyed, and more infrastructure will be destroyed. That, for none of us, can we really move forward entirely with our lives in the short term or in the long term, with real plans for the future.
So a lot of thankfulness in all of this but at the same time, recognition that we can’t do this without the support and every day it drags on the country will sacrifice more and more.
Miller: Tatiana, there’s also the question to me, the open question, about the West’s continuing interest in, or appetite for, supporting Ukraine, the longer this war goes on. How much do you fear that Ukraine’s allies will just lose interest?
Terdal: I hope they don’t. I guess I don’t feel it that much if people realize how important it is. It’s also important to remember that the United States provided crucial support to the United Kingdom and to the Soviet Union during World War II to help defeat the Nazis. So just looking at the LendLease Program that United States sent to the USSR, it included over 11,000 planes. So far, the US has not provided a single plane to Ukraine. It was 400,000 jeeps and trucks. So the support that helped the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom defeat Fascism was enormous, but it paid off.
Just last weekend, we looked at the coronation of King Charles III, and I was thinking, what if the US did not help Britain to win the Battle of Britain? Would we have seen now, a third Reich during that ceremony? And Nazi flags instead of British flags? Imagine what would have happened if Nazis overcame the UK resistance? We would not have had the Beatles, we would not have had ‘Doctor Who,’ or even ‘Lord of the Rings.’ All it would have been just the music and Nazi salutes and parade.
So there is a very important need for Ukraine, right now, in terms of military equipment and the United States is helping. I think the United States and the UK understand the importance of helping Ukraine defeat modern day fascism.
Miller: Tatiana Terdal and Erik Heinonen, thank you very much.
Terdal/ Heinonen: Thank you.
Miller: Tatiana Terdal is on the advisory board of the Ukrainian Foundation of Oregon and Southwest Washington. Erik Heinonen is the Ukraine-Romania partnership coordinator for the Catholic Relief Service.
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