Where were you when…? One generation will remember where we were the day the American president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963. Another will remember the moment they heard or saw the Twin Towers slide hideously to the ground of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. But for roughly 345,000 Ukrainian-Albertans across generations, February 24, 2022, will be the day we mark as the morning we learned Russian forces had invaded Ukraine.
Almost everyone among my Ukrainian-Albertan friends and colleagues stopped dead in their tracks and reordered their lives. In my case, meetings were cancelled and new ones urgently organized while my inbox spilled over with links to webinars and roundtables of international experts as well as phone-ins with Alberta-based professors. I learned of Edmontonians of all origins who scrambled to gather humanitarian aid and organize impromptu fundraisers. People at my old housing co-op hung enormous blue and yellow flags on their balconies and planted sunflowers. So many of us with relatives in Ukraine were desperate to learn whether we could still e-transfer funds to Ukraine—in my case, to second-cousins in western Ukraine near the Romanian border. Still others anticipated hosting evacuees. And nobody could say how long the war would go on.
VINCE REES
February 23, 2022: Vince Rees, founder and owner of Edmonton-based Cobblestone Freeway Tours, had just returned from a tour of Ukraine, where he had been rallying his staffers in Kyiv and Lviv—plus an extended crew of drivers, artisans and musicians—after a two-year pandemic shutdown. “We had a repertoire of tours that could run for 10 more years: Christmas in Ukraine, Easter in Ukraine, Highlights of Ukraine,” he says. That buildup of 150,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders? “I thought it was just sabre-rattling.”
February 24, 2022: Vince was in shell shock, “doom-scrolling” through media. Meanwhile in Lviv, Cobblestone staffers were making and storing Molotov cocktails, while others were suddenly working as translators and fixers for the international media arriving in droves. As Lviv ran out of accommodation, Cobblestone gave over its office space to refugee families fleeing west from the war zones in the east, on their way to the Polish border.
Having put Cobblestone Tours “on idle,” Vince no longer has a job. “But my business doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m lucky in Canada. I can do other things, teach dance, live with my mother—my condo is up for sale. I’m educated, I have connections and a reputation. I’m still in shock. So I’ve sunk my teeth into the Cobblestone Foundation.” The Foundation was first established to support cultural projects in Ukraine but, with the war, donations are now sent directly in cash to support humanitarian aid—to purchase food, shelter, water, medicine, blankets, baby formula, a night’s stay in a safe place and a tank of gas to drive from Lviv to safety, among many, many other needs.
It’s Day 126 of the war as I read the Foundation’s Facebook page. Back on April 25, “The village of Tulova, supported by our Foundation, banded together to provide Easter bread known as paska for soldiers and refugees this weekend. Thank you to the villagers and to our donors for making this possible.” Ah, yes, Tulova. I had wondered how the villagers were faring: both Vince and I have ancestral roots in Tulova.
That buildup of 150,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders? “I thought it was just sabre-rattling.”
Each time Vince had organized dance tours around Ukraine, he visited Tulova and brought friends along “who could see how powerful an experience it was for them, to eat, drink, sing along with the villagers, an ancient vibration.” In 2011 Cobblestone Tours was incorporated, and thereafter Tulova was on the itinerary as an example of “eco-rural tourism” and the best way to get to know people. “These were not tours where the only local people you meet are hotel staff,” he says. I joined a tour in 2013, was swarmed by distant relatives and presided at a long table almost bending under the weight of home-made pyrohy. And now? Vince has emailed his people in Tulova for an update. “Thanks for not forgetting us,” they write. “We are well. How are you?” Perhaps, I muse, villagers’ sense of security is one form of resistance to terror.
After hearing from Tulova again, Vince tells me, “It’s fascinating. They are continuing to support the troops and following the same system they use to herd the village cows. One street at a time takes responsibility for the village collective efforts. Once a week, one street takes responsibility for preparing food packages for soldiers on the front lines. They also have quite a few refugees. An empty house with five rooms has several families living in it. They still struggle with the regular air-raid sirens, which are driving them crazy. But it’s war… what are you going to do?”
In Mid-May Vince’s kuma (mother of Vince’s godchild) arrived in Edmonton with her two children and her mother-in-law after making their way from Kyiv to a refugee camp in Romania and on to a friend’s cottage in Spain where they waited for a three-year visa to Canada. “They’re here because I’m here,” Rees says, “but also because, through my connections, I knew they would be in good hands in our community.” His kuma’s husband, Roman, is fighting in the Donbas; the two kids are enrolled in the bilingual Ukrainian-English program at St. Martin Elementary Catholic School in south Edmonton’s Lendrum Place neighbourhood.
I ask: How long will they be here in Edmonton? Vince: “You tell me… for as long as the war lasts.”
LIANNA MAKUCH
February 23, 2022: playwright and theatre activist Lianna Makuch was working at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre as assistant director of Jane Eyre. At supper she was feeling “queasy.” A text came in from an uncle in Vancouver: “Explosions in Kyiv.” She turned on CNN—“best source of news coverage”—and went into shock.
Lianna and I spoke on June 15, 113 days into the war. I had seen the workshop and then the full production of her newest play, Alina, “an exhilarating, breathless journey toward and away from war” (per its Facebook page). The script had a long development, beginning with a trip with her collaborators in Pyretic Productions to Ukraine in 2017. Travelling a “grassroots” itinerary—“It was an exploration of my Ukrainian-Canadianness with an emphasis on the Canadianness”—Lianna had help from Vince Rees in planning the visit to eastern Ukraine.
“Why not go to Slovyansk? He got us a fixer, we met with displaced people, people living in their ruined homes, an orphanage, a sanatorium. All the places we visited in 2017 are now in the war zone within 5 km of the Russian border. In the course of meeting veterans [of the war ongoing in the Donbas since 2014 against Russian-sponsored separatists], I asked to meet a woman. The story of the play is of Alina Viatkina in 2015.”
In 2015 Alina was a 19-year-old who showed up unbidden at the front line of the Donbas war zone and schemed to join a combat battalion as a medic. Her harrowing experience under heavy shelling led to prolonged PTSD. The play, Alina, is a first-person telling of her courage and resilience in the mayhem of war.
“We are collecting funds for bulletproof vests, tourniquets, thermal vision lenses, vehicles. Alina has been purchasing supplies in Poland.”
February 24, 2022: Lianna fired off text messages to friends in Ukraine. Alina had just left Kyiv, driving with her mother to Poland. Lianna wired money. Dmitryi, a war veteran of the Donbas she had met earlier, posted a selfie, “being silly,” striding down a street yelling, “Let’s go, Ka-put-in!”
In May 2022 in Edmonton the play is also a fundraiser for Alina Viatkina’s gathering and distribution of medical supplies to a war zone now immeasurably more violent and destructive. “We are collecting funds for bulletproof vests, tourniquets, thermal vision lenses, vehicles and more. Alina has been purchasing supplies in Poland, then bringing them back across the border to Lviv, where they are being delivered directly to volunteers and then on to the front lines.”
In June Lianna explained to me that, since the war, she had felt a resurgence of Ukrainian identity, “which is not a theatrical identity. My work in Ukraine has changed the course of my creative life as an artist. What I want to do now is with a deepened resolve, fighting in whatever way we can—for example fundraising for Alina. This has been a way of humanizing the need.”
I asked her about two phrases from the playscript, both spoken by the character Alina: “There is no future.” And: “We have a future.” For Makuch there is no contradiction but a paradox. “Alina’s trauma as we have witnessed it in the theatre lies in not being able to conceptualize a future in the midst of war… and yet going on to fight for it.”
RUBY REMENDA SWANSON
Ruby Swanson grew up in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, speaking Ukrainian at home until, at school, she switched to English although her parents and aunties, all Canadian-born, kept on speaking Ukrainian. “I’m okay as a Ukrainian speaker,” she says now.
In the wake of her family’s experience when elder son, Carl, came out as a gay teenager, Ruby published a memoir, A Family Outing, in 2016. Just ahead of its publication, interested in family history, she and her younger son, Paul, set out to Ukraine on a “roots expedition.” She was also curious to know more about the LGBTQ community in Ukraine and had already corresponded with Olena Globa of TERGO, Ukraine’s equivalent of PFLAG—Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
An appointment at the Canadian embassy in Kyiv brought together people from the Pride Centre, Olena, another mother, a psychologist and some of the embassy people to talk about her forthcoming book. Olena then arranged for her to meet the parents of TERGO.
A “roots expedition” with local driver Yarema to the ancestral village was a Ukrainian-Canadian rite of passage, but this invitation in Kyiv was to prove an entry to a milieu and community for which Ruby was utterly unprepared. “The visit to the Pride Centre was clandestine; no visible number on any building, though we had the address. We made our way across an empty lot to the back door of a horribly rusting building that was falling apart and into a nicely renovated suite of rooms. Mostly young people were in the audience of some 25.
They are all familiar with the country, “the actual roads, the actual villages. I can’t cry, because once I start I don’t know if I can stop.”
“The reality of the parents’ experience compared to mine in Canada is that as parents they were demoralized and defeated because of their children’s imprisonments and beatings [for not being straight], and because many of these young people had escaped Ukraine as refugees. They gave me a look as if to say: ‘It’s nice that she’s saying and writing these things, but she doesn’t understand.’ In fact, it is the mothers who are accepting of their children’s sexual orientation; there were no fathers at the TERGO meeting. I read a couple of translated passages from my book and the young people begged me to get the whole book translated so they could give it to their parents.”
Done. Connections (at the University of Alberta) and funds (the Heinrich Böll Foundation) and the Ukrainian publisher, Krytyka, produced, in Ukrainian, Family Values: Memoir of the Mother of a Gay Son.
“In the summer of 2019 they printed 1,300 copies,” Ruby tells me, “but then came COVID and now war. I have no idea how the book is doing.”
Ruby walked in the last Equality March in Kyiv in 2019 and is now acting as a conduit for activists to tell their stories abroad. She has kept up contact with members of Ukraine’s gay community throughout the war. Some have fled Ukraine or moved to safer locations or have been directed to organized shelters. Or stayed at home. As one trans woman emailed her: “I feel like my place is here [in Kyiv]. Some LGBTQ people [joined] the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and I know some who are on the frontline now and taking action in the battles against Russian occupiers.” Ruby knows of a soldier, out and open as gay, who reports that his sexuality is “irrelevant” to the struggle on the frontlines.
Ruby shares an email with me sent in early July from Mila, a young woman she met in 2014, a translator for the election monitoring team: “I’ve started working with the Handicap International organization; we are helping with rehabilitation of wounded people who are sent to the western Ukraine for medical assistance. It looks like it will be a long-lasting war, and we try to adapt to the new reality we could never even think of. Probably we have taken our freedom and human values for granted and now we have to fight for them.”
As for Ruby and her family in Edmonton, she says, it’s very personal. They are all familiar with the country, “the actual roads, the actual villages. I can’t cry, because once I start I don’t know if I can stop.”
ANDREA KOPYLECH
The daughter of a Ukrainian “mixed marriage” (father born in Germany, mother in Saskatoon), Andrea Kopylech first travelled to Ukraine in 2013 and “at the first sight of the Cyrillic alphabet I felt ‘I’m home.’” The product of Ukrainian-English bilingual schooling in Edmonton and a dancer in a Ukrainian youth group, “even as a child I felt a passion for liberating [then-Communist] Ukraine.”
No longer Communist but its sovereignty threatened by Russia’s formidable war machine, Ukraine has once again evoked that passion in Andrea in her current work with the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies [CIUS]. Already a professional fundraiser and then a “perfect fit” for CIUS as communications and public relations lead, she was on only the second day of her job when Russia invaded Ukraine.
That frantic first period of the war “felt solemn, heavy, scary. I can breathe a little better now, but there is so much to be done.”
“A trial by fire that first week,” is how she describes it to me, “going 24/7 handling media enquiries”—138 interviews with CIUS scholars between February 24 and May 13—“keeping the YouTube page current, assembling a Zoom roundtable right away, responding to Putin’s lies by posting an online Q&A, ‘Did you know?’” with 10-minute clips:
“Are Ukrainians and Russians the same people?” with Dr. Frank Sysyn.
“Is the Ukrainian language the same as the Russian language?” with Dr. Marko Stech.
“Is the war in Ukraine a result of ethnic conflict?” with Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen.
Looking back on that frantic first period of the war, and as part of a staff of only three, Kopylech nevertheless knows that she was “in the right place, at the right time. But it felt solemn, heavy, scary. I can breathe a little better now, but there is so much to be done.”
CIUS’s network includes scholars, students and researchers in Ukraine, and Andrea is helping coordinate the Ukraine-Archives Rescue Team: “We need to secure private digital space to preserve work threatened by massive targeted attacks.” She is also organizing support for Disrupted Ukrainian Scholars and Students (DUSS), because students had begun arriving in Edmonton as evacuees. Reaching out across campus—faculties, departments, institutes—DUSS has raised funds internally, reallocating $529,000 to bring the scholars over, house them, find grants and scholarly positions (these are scholars of all kinds, not just of Ukrainian subjects). “The outpouring of support for and interest in our community has been overwhelming,” she says. “It’s interesting what it takes to put a country on the map: a war.”
Andrea has close relatives in Ukraine, and every second day now FaceTimes with a cousin who has relocated to Germany with her two children while her husband runs humanitarian aid to “hot spots.” The personal impact of the war on Kopylech has been profound.
“I have cried for all that is going to be lost. But it has also brought out how proud I am and always have been to be Ukrainian. This has given me such richness. We speak of the Ukrainian soul, our ‘dusha,’ and we will survive.”
MARK MINENKO
For Mark Minenko, legal scholar and retired barrister and solicitor, there was no dramatic pivot from life on February 23 to life after February 24, because “from the time I could speak, I ‘stood with Ukraine.’” The son of refugees from Soviet Ukraine who as teens fled ahead of the Red Army as it pushed west to Berlin in 1943, Mark grew up in Ukrainian-speaking homes in Toronto, Grimsby and Winnipeg. “My parents ensured we siblings knew who we were and where we were from,” he says. “We could read, write and speak Ukrainian so that, in spite of the Russification of Ukrainian culture since Tsardom, we’d always be able to read the source material” of that culture.
In retrospect he was primed for February 24: he had been part of the Ukrainian-Canadian youth wave in the 1970s who participated in demonstrations in front of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and elsewhere, including Edmonton, protesting the imprisonment of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals in the Gulag. (His ongoing research interest as a legal historian is the treatment, including internment, of Ukrainians in Canada during the First World War.) When the People’s Movement of Ukraine a.k.a. Rukh (which means “motion or movement”) was organizing the eventually triumphant referendum for Ukrainian independence in 1991, Minenko, “standing for Ukraine,” was a member of Rukh-Winnipeg.
But February 24, 2022, mobilized him all over again: “My initial reaction was to go into the basement and open two large tubs of Canadian military gear from 36 years of service in the CAF Medical Reserves to see what I could use to go [to the front]. My second reaction was to realize I was 64 years old and I’d probably be a greater burden than help overseas.” Instead, he joined hundreds who attended a rally at the Legislature that evening. He has since assisted Ukrainian Canadian Social Services and St. Anthony Ukrainian Orthodox parish’s Humanitarian Aid Committee on an ongoing basis, while waiting for a family to arrive from Kharkiv: “The father is my late mother’s godfather’s son.” They had been communicating back and forth for some years, but at the start of war began talking about Canada as a safe haven. “We’ve received donations of furniture—including from a salesperson at The Bay—and not just from Ukrainian-Canadians.”
Both Edmonton Public and Edmonton Catholic school boards are accepting Ukrainian students without documentation. Both of the parents Mark is helping have Ph.D.s in internet technology. I ask Mark bluntly: Is Canada abetting the brain-drain of a vulnerable society? He says no—these evacuees know the future desperate need of Ukraine to rebuild, and they are determined to be part of it.
Myrna Kostash writes literary and creative nonfiction, including All of Baba’s Children, which has never gone out of print.
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