It has been 70 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. The invasion has displaced a quarter of Ukrainian residents and triggered the largest refugee crisis in Europe since WWII. For people with family, social and ancestral ties to the region, the impact is personal.
In Lviv, the pastel-colored city lined by maple trees and stone buildings, the 94-year-old grandmother of Caroline Durr ’24 refuses to leave the city. 40 miles away from Poland, Lviv has been receiving 10,000 refugees per day. Several airstrikes targeted infrastructure there, killing more than 30 people. Durr explained while there are “safe villages,” — rural villages without running water or electricity that are unlikely targets of Russian bombing — her grandmother doesn’t want to leave her cats. “It’s like, the city is your whole identity in your life in this country,” Durr said. Many of her relatives have since decided to stay in Ukraine.
For Durr’s extended family who have decided to leave Ukraine due to the war, communication has been difficult. Durr’s relatives refuse to tell her their location in the US due to fear of their phones being bugged.
A former classmate of Thais Lawson ’24 texted her from Moscow. He is a Russian citizen who had enlisted in the military before the war was on the horizon. She was initially hesitant to reach out. “I didn’t know how to react if I found out that he was in Ukraine,” Lawson said. For eight years, she attended a secondary public school affiliated with the Russian embassy in New York City. Lawson described herself as having “legally and socially grown up in Russia.” To her, the war doesn’t feel very far away.
“If the body count is as high as it is estimated, he might have known people who’ve died already,” said Lawson. “He didn’t mention the war. So I didn’t either.”
Simone Tricca ’25 lived in Moldova, a country located between Romania and Ukraine, for a year during high school. When the war broke out, she got on the phone with her Moldovan friend. Tricca’s friend warned her not to believe everything that Western media is telling her. “‘They were really siding with Ukraine’ he told me,” Tricca said. “I want to be delicate about this. But at the same time, what information is getting through to them?”
Lawson’s family’s first reaction to the war was complete horror. “Everyone (in my family) has been to Ukraine. Many people still go to Ukraine today.” Lawson said, “That isn’t to say that it wasn’t seen as a separate entity. It was respected that Ukrainians had a different cultural identity.” Lawson pointed out that Russian propaganda isn’t primarily targeting Ukrainian people, because it would be “ridiculous” trying to make Russians hate Ukrainians. Lawson said, “So [Putin] has been framing it as a proxy war — a war against NATO in the West and the U.S. Maybe as a war liberating Ukrainians from supposed Nazis.”
Durr’s Ukrainian grandmother, who escaped the German invasion of Ukraine, said that a lot of Ukrainian culture overlaps with Russian culture, such as language and traditional clothing styles. However, from Durr’s impression, Ukrainian people had more political freedom than Russian people.
Clare Haas ’25, whose father worked for a Ukrainian news company, said that she has been expecting the invasion for about six years. After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, her father’s colleagues started talking about the increasing Russian infiltration into Ukraine. In 2015, the situation became hostile to the point where his colleague asked if he could send bulletproof jackets to Ukraine. In Kiev, Haas’ father mentioned a taxi driver asked him what he was doing in Ukraine and if he was pro-Russia. “There’s been a lot of tension building there for a long time,” said Haas.
Lawson felt that her education in Russian public schools prepared her for the arrival of the war. The school exhibition of children — known as “young heroes” in Russia — who had died fighting in the guerrilla forces in World War II came to her mind. “The whole weekend that I first learned about the war, that Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I couldn’t think about anything except those dead teenagers that they had on our walls. Because if that was the clearest example of an event of war, that’s where we’re supposed to be.” All of the young heroes were awarded medals posthumously for fighting against the Nazi Germany forces. All of them died defending Russian territory. “But that’s not who we’re going to be,” Lawson said. “All these boys who grew up, almost dreaming of being those people on the wall. That’s not how they’re gonna die. They’re gonna die confused, misinformed and scared. It’s Ukrainians that are living that nightmare that I was taught about.”
“[Putin] doesn’t care about Russians. He doesn’t care about their lives. He endangered Russian lives more times than throughout his presidency that anyone really knows,” Lawson said. “You see people marching and making barriers, anti-tank barriers, digging trenches, collecting bottles to make Molotov cocktails, and we’ve seen this all before. How many parallels does he want to make with the war that he taught us about?”
For Ukranians like Durr’s grandmother, the nightmare is a recurrence. Durr said, “My grandma immigrated from Ukraine when she was 10 years old. She had to leave behind her doll to climb through a window to get on the train.” All of the stories she has been told by family members felt distant because it was “so long ago,” she said, but this war brought back events that she thought the world had moved on from. During the German invasion of Ukraine, Durr’s grandmother and other refugees slept on a train every night. They would alternate between sleeping on the train or in the woods, because the Germans would either bomb the woods or the train. One night, Durr’s grandmother and her immediate family slept in the woods while her best friend and cousins slept on the train. “They bombed the train that night,” Durr said. Only a few people were in the woods; everyone on the train died. “I think that she probably feels a lot of anger and frustration,” said Durr. “She is safe and secure, but now everyone has to go through the trauma that she went through.”
Russia is accused of indiscriminately bombing Ukranian cities, which, according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, is a clear pattern of war crimes. Russia’s military targeting hospitals, schools and train stations — common places reutilized into refugee shelters — has killed most of the 2,072 total civilian casualties.
“Moldova and Ukraine were the part of Europe where the German Nazi forces and the Russian forces, clashed so the city that I lived in, a large part of it had just been completely destroyed by bombing,” Tricca said. They learned from their host family that back in the ’60s, Moldovan firefighters were sent to Chernobyl to clean up after the nuclear accident. Many of them died from radiation poisoning. The recent Russian occupation of Chernobyl reminded Tricca of the incident. “There’s a lot of reminders of the things that have happened in the past,” Tricca said. They are concerned about what a Ukraine defeat would mean for Moldova, since there has always been talk about whether Moldova will return to Romania, which it gained independence from in 1940. “My panicked brain is like, ‘Is this the point where we see Moldova cease to exist?’” Tricca said.
Durr’s family is pessimistic about the war. “It’s hard to be optimistic when everyday you are waking up to not great news,” Durr said. “A couple days ago, there was good news coming out. But then, the next day, it just got shut down.” Still, she thinks that Ukraine has strong morale right now due to international support and their organized resistance. Yet Durr struggles with how one should support a country at war without contributing to the expansion of the war. She is trying to directly give funds to families, but she recognizes not everyone has access to Ukrainian families directly. As someone who values non-violence, she said, “How can I support Ukraine and continue to align with my morals that I’ve been preaching forever?”
Lawson said that she is aware a lot of people are donating to the Ukrainian National Defense Fund — a decision she personally has a hard time reconciling with. “I know that those bullets are being bought to shoot Russian boys,” Lawson said, “but as to how effective it is, in any sense of the word, I couldn’t say.” Lawson wondered if the funding might serve to prolong the war rather than ending it.
For Tricca, the war has helped them to further see the importance of their work in museum studies at Smith. When they were in Moldova, people rarely gave them unbiased information, so they needed to piece history together. They want their museum work to give people information about things that people didn’t want to or can’t talk about.
“I think there is a lot of sympathy [at Smith] and guilt towards being American,” Durr said. She hasn’t met anyone who told her that they don’t support Ukraine in the war. Lawson said that she hasn’t spoken to anyone who thinks that Russians are bad people. And at Smith, she said that she has received “nothing but sympathy” from people.
Lawson and her mother both remember a Soviet song based on the melody of the 40s waltz, The 22 June Song. Slowly but steadily, it begins with a guitar plays in the background and a man hums:
On the twenty-second of June,
at exactly four o’clock
Kiev was bombed, we were told
that the war had begun.
The war began at dawn
To kill more people.
Parents slept, their children slept
When they began to bomb Kiev.
