For Ukrainians in the diaspora, the past year has meant broken friendships, survivors’ guilt, and a new way of thinking about identity.
although it’s difficult to confirm exact numbers, some government sources believe that the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces have each suffered as many as 100,000 to 200,000 casualties. The war has also brought a jarring sense of dislocation to those in the diaspora — including in New York, the city that’s home to the most Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans in the country.
As soon as Ferguson heard the news last February, she started trying to reach her family and friends in Ukraine. “I waited for their answers, but my body would, like, shut off,” she says. “For quite a few weeks, a lot of people wouldn’t sleep until their families woke up.” Like many Ukrainians, Ferguson says that this war started in 2014 when Russia invaded, then annexed Crimea, and Russian-backed separatists took over swaths of the Donbas region.
When she says “us,” she means New Yorkers like herself — people she describes as post-Soviet-era Jews whose families came to the U.S. from Russia or Belarus or, like her parents, Ukraine and Moldova. Sofia, who asked to use a pseudonym, grew up jokingly calling herself “Jewkrainian,” though even that could be fraught. “Especially when it comes to Jews from Ukraine, we’ve never really called ourselves Ukrainian. Historically, we’ve always been separate,” she says.
When the war began, Sofia was working for a prominent Jewish social-service agency in South Brooklyn. Her supervisor was a Jewish woman from Kharkiv whose younger brother was unable to leave Ukraine: “I remember my boss looking at me with tears in her eyes Sofia identifies as a leftist and says that over the past year has gotten into her share of debates with other leftists about Russia’s history as an imperialist power, and with those who sneer that she’s a “liberal” when she criticizes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “People don’t really seem to think that there is colonization because Ukrainians are ethnically similar-looking to Russians,” she explains.
Roytburd, the co-founder of Spilka, has been similarly frustrated with progressives she’s encountered here.
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