Ukraine resident: 'Everyone is very depressed these days'

Oksana Fuk fears she is speaking from a crisis the world has forgotten. The war in Ukraine is now almost two years old. Russian planes fly over her apartment building, often setting off air raid sirens. For the sake of her two little children, she decorates a Christmas tree.

The planes and the alarms remind Oksana that a number of friends have died at the front — and that her own husband could be conscripted without much notice.

“Everyone is very depressed these days,” she says.

Oksana’s message to the world includes the caveat that she lives in Ternopil, in one of the safest regions of Ukraine. She spends her days taking care of her family and working as the head of the foreign languages department at Ternopil Professional College.

And yet, even in Ternopil, she is terrified. Her family could be killed by a Russian-instigated explosion from a too-close nuclear plant. She was heartened by initial Western support after the Russian invasion but realizes that another war, the one between Israel and Hamas, now takes center stage. It scares her that military aid to her country might evaporate, stymied by politics.

Were it not for the war, Oksana would be sending her 2-year-old toddler, Yarynka, to a day care center. But when those sirens go off, a teacher has to corral as many as 20 small children and move them to safety below ground.

“She is a happy child,” Oksana says of Yarynka. “But we are not sending her to the children’s center. We are keeping her at home. I am aware of how hard it is for teachers to get such small kids into bomb shelters. They have to help them to get ready fast.”

Oksana once worked as a counselor for disabled children and adults at an upstate New York sleepaway camp. She returned home to raise a family in her native Ukraine. After Vladimir Putin's forces invaded in February 2022, she took Yarynka and her son Adrian, now six-and-a-half, to Poland. She missed Ukraine with a passion and her son cried, demanding to return home to see his father. So they did.

Oksana says her little girl seems oblivious to the war. She hopes this is so. But Adrian, a first grader, “is well aware. He constantly asks: ‘If Russians want to hurt us, does this mean they don’t have kids of their own?'’’ A lot of Adrian’s classmates have fathers serving in the war. The little boy says he is sad that his friends cannot go with their fathers to the park or the local puppet theater. As he can. For now. In his bedtime prayers, Adrian always says: “Let there be peace.”

Oksana is heartened that some “regular” Americans have not forgotten Ukraine. For the last two Thanksgivings, a group of children from Rockaway Beach in Queens sent a video greeting to Oksana's children, a message of solidarity, kid to kid. Oksana is also heartened that this year for the first time, Ukraine will celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25, not on Jan. 7 as Russian Orthodoxy does. Her parents are happy because now they can “celebrate with the whole world and separately from Russia.”

The war ebbs and flows, sometimes near, never too far. Much of Oksana’s life follows a pre-war schedule of meals, shopping, helping with homework. She tries to keep life as normal as possible, but each time the air raid sirens blare, she remembers they are living on the edge of war.

This guest essay reflects the views of Barbara Fischkin, a writer and former Newsday reporter.