Your Ukrainian neighbors: These 3 Utahns share their stories, struggles as war rages in their homeland

The family sits together in their living room — two squirming toddler boys, a young girl who periodically bursts in to play with them, the oldest sitting right next to his father.

The toddlers come to their mother for various things: help opening a snack, adjusting their green-stuffed-animal slippers, or just to sit by her. She doesn’t even need to look away to know what they want.

Their grandmother wrangles them as well, speaking in Russian to the girl as she plays with her bright purple dress. The oldest boy, wearing a yellow and blue soccer jersey, listens intently as his father talks about his life in Ukraine.

“When I come to my kids and I hug them, I feel guilt of some sort, because I know there’s some parents that lost their children, and there are some children that lost their parents, and entire families killed,” said Yevgen Kovalov, the children’s father. “It just cannot get out of my head. And you can never fix it.”

This is the reality for many Ukranians in Utah — and has been for two months now. Families like the Kovalovs wake to news of tragedy almost every day, but still get up, take care of each other and head to work as news of the war fades from U.S. headlines.

Yevgen

The father, Yevgen Kovalov, was 11 years old when Ukraine became independent in 1991, near the end of the Soviet Union.

“It was a very exciting time,” Kovalov said. “Our neighbors were really looking forward to being an independent country, and freedom, you know, [to] be proud of Ukraine — don’t be subjugated by Russia or USSR as a part of something.”

He attended law school in Kyiv, and became a part of the Orange Revolution in 2004, when Ukrainians took to the streets in protest following election fraud that favored a Russian-backed presidential candidate.

He moved to Utah in 2007 to study law and English at Brigham Young University, where he met his wife Tatayna.

Tatayna is from Transnistria — a breakaway state from the Eastern European country of Moldova, which borders Ukraine to the southwest. She said what Ukraine is going through right now reminds her all too well of what happened when she was a child.

Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, Transnistria wanted to be independent. Tatayna said what happened then was like what’s happening now in Donetsk — a Russian-backed area in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.

“Ever since then, it’s been not officially independent, but monopolized ... where there is no opportunities for people mostly, and a lot of people left,” Tatayna said.

“It’s very traumatizing,” she continued tearfully. “Because I kind of buried it in my memory from way back; I was small at that time. But I remember the fear ... Never ever would anybody want anybody to go through this again.”

The Kovalovs still have family in Ukraine, including Yevgen’s father and sister. But they also have family in Russia.

One relative doesn’t believe anything about what’s happening in the country, and just repeats Russian propaganda when faced with the truth, Kovalov said.

When one of the Kovalov’s 3-year-old twins got hold of their grandmother’s cellphone, he accidentally sent an article on Ukraine to that relative — along with his grandmother’s entire contact list.

“They can choose to believe it or not,” Tatayna said, “but that means that they’re closing their eyes to not see what is happening.”

Anya

Anya Baryshok moved to Utah in 2003, when she was in her early 20s. She grew up in Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine along the Dnieper River.

She was born around the collapse of the Soviet Union, and while her childhood was nice, she said she found out later how challenging it was for her parents.

“The country was really new, and there was like, no food or clothes — everything just kind of was a deficit,” Baryshok said. “I just remember standing in line to buy bread for two hours every day, but then, in the same time, I feel like it’s made me who I am.”

She moved to Utah after attending architecture school in Ukraine, and continued her studies at Salt Lake Community College, on the advice of a friend who invited her to the U.S. She had also always wanted to see Utah because she is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City.

“It was different and definitely took some time to adjust — I came with two bags of clothes, and that’s all I had with me,” Baryshok said.

She was one of the founding members of the Utah Ukrainian Association back in 2014, and when the association’s first president moved out of state, Baryshok was nominated and now leads the organization.

The group was formed in the wake of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which forced their Russian-backed president at the time out of power, and Ukrainians in Utah wanted to do what they could to aid families in need during that time. After Maidan, they focused on donating clothes and toys to Ukrainian orphanages.

Then Russia invaded in February.

“My life turned 180 degrees, really,” Baryshok said. “It was just so unreal and shocking ... You just want to go now and do something now. But you’re restricted; almost feel like you have your hands tied. And everybody felt the same.”

So many people were reaching out to the organization to see how they could help that board members were returning messages around the clock. She said it was a blessing to see the outpouring of support, but it was hard to keep up when they were trying to reach family still in the country.

“With news, I just kind of have to isolate myself a little bit from reading stuff,” Barushok said. “My friends and family, they would send me things that people record with their phones, and then it’s just horror. And I just had to tell them, don’t do that — I cannot process this anymore. And it’s just so physically sick.”

“Those first weeks especially, you don’t feel like eating,” Baryshok said. “You forget that your child is hungry, and your family needs care, so the small acts of kindness I really appreciated.”

Yulia

Yulia Holko is greeted in her living room by two furry roommates, one orange and one gray, who each say hello with their small meows. Her right wall is dominated by a bookcase, packed with the Ukrainian books she read as a child and a painting that was recently gifted to her.

It features a cracked house in front of a blue sky and a yellow field, and on the back reads a poem: “This little home looks like it is it is about to break, but I choose to see it as the pieces grasping tightly to one another, coping, loving, forgiving, cherishing, fighting for peace.”

“I love it. I was crying when they gave it to me,” Holko said, smiling.

Holko moved to the U.S. from Ukraine in 2001 when she was 18, so she could attend an international exchange program at the University of Nebraska. Her family later moved to Utah, and she joined them after graduating.

She said her family had always talked about the states, since her great grandfather emigrated in the early 1900s wave of Polish Ukrainian immigrants. But he later came back to Ukraine to buy some land and — “surprise, surprise, Russians came and took it away,” Holko said.

Holko was born when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, and although she was young, she remembers her family talking politics a lot near the regime’s collapse.

“In the late ‘80s, things really started changing, and there was a lot of turmoil,” Holko said. “I just remember a lot of excitement and a lot of change in everyday life — like going to school in the Soviet Union… Everybody had to be the same, like you had to wear the same stuff, you had to act the same way. It was very restrictive.”

“And then all of a sudden, in ‘91, when the independence happened, things just changed so drastically — it was like this big, cultural, Ukrainian revival,” Holko continued. “The whole world opened up to us all of a sudden.”

Holko joined the Utah Ukrainian association when it first started in 2014, initially as a volunteer to help Ukrainian causes. She became a board member in 2019, and said having others who understand what’s going on at home has been a big help as she tries to cope.

When they get together, they try to share the good news they find — since amid the turmoil of the past few months, Ukranians have also developed a new culture in the form of songs and poems.

“A lot of people are saying the same thing — they’re at home, just reading the news and crying by themselves. They feel so helpless,” Holko said. “And then when we get together as a community, it really feels like … We kind of bring our strengths together and try to do something about it. And we feel a little less helpless about everything.”

Holko remembers holding her father’s hand while he was on the way to the voting booth for the first time in an independent Ukraine, and the excitement that buzzed around the polls.

People had been craving that moment for so long, Holko said, and that’s what Ukranians are defending now.

She, Kovalov and Baryshok agree that Vladimir Putin won’t stop, even if Russia succeeds in Ukraine.

“I feel like if we all come together as an international community and support Ukraine right now,” Holko said, “it’ll go such a long way to make sure future generations do not have to go through this again.”

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