The Russian invasion of Ukraine has displaced millions of Ukrainians.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Shahrzad Rasekh to discuss her article, “This Ukrainian family fled war in Odesa and found a foothold in CT,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Shahrzad’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Shahrzad. How did you come across the Natsevych family, and why did you think their story would make such a compelling photo essay?
SR: Yeah, so I realized that Ukraine had just fallen out of the news cycle, and I was looking for local ways to be able to cover this issue, given that it still exists; we're just not hearing about it as much. And so I wanted to find a personal angle that could tell the story that we know through numbers, but this time through a personal perspective, and kind of follow one family's journey from Ukraine to Connecticut, and kind of see how the war is affecting people in Ukraine, but also what services they were able to benefit from, and what their experience was like as a Ukrainian family in Connecticut.
And so I connected with them through this one woman that my colleague Laura Tillman had met at a different event, who happened just to be Ukrainian, she works at Yale, and just by nature of being Ukrainian and being connected with the community, she happened to know this family and gave me their number, and I called her out of the blue, and she was gracious enough to be open about the idea, and we just clicked. And from there, it made it much easier to kind of follow them through this process of resettlement.
WSHU: Was the fact that she had these Instagram posts of what was happening in Odesa when the war came helpful to you?
SR: I actually didn't know her Instagram or hadn't seen her Instagram before reaching out to her. It did help that she had already been open about her experience. Some people don't want to think about it or don't want to process what they've experienced yet, but because she had a disposition to share this information, it made it easier to dig deeper and ask questions that might have been intrusive to some. She just wanted to be able to share this experience, and she just had fewer barriers than most people.
WSHU: Wow. Let's discuss their experience a bit. What was the experience like?
SR: Sure. So Evgenia and her husband Vitalii were living in Odesa. They were from Ukraine. They've lived there their whole lives, and their whole families are there. That's their home. And Odesa happens to be right on the Black Sea, relatively close to Crimea. It's the largest city that's that close to Crimea.
WSHU: It also has the largest port for Ukraine right now, correct?
SR: Correct. And so, I mean, since 2014, when Crimea was annexed, it was kind of in this fragile position geographically. And Evgenia and her husband's home happened to be near a military outpost that they worried would be a target. On February 24, when they first saw these missiles flying overhead, they decided, in that instant, to try to go somewhere safer. It was kind of a shot in the dark where they went. They went to Vitalii's parents' home, which unfortunately happened to be even closer to the front lines. The battle for Kyiv was happening as they were sheltering underground. Eventually, they were able to make it out to Germany, and after a while, they found their way to the U.S. They actually connected while they were in Germany with a man in Arkansas who wanted to sponsor people coming in on U4U.
WSHU: So U4U is a special visa that was created by the Biden administration for Ukrainian refugees.
SR: Correct. So, U4U was a program that existed that was created for these Ukrainians who were caught in the heart of this war, and that was recently paused in January 2025 along with a set of other statuses, like TPS, temporary protective status, which is relevant to this story, because people who have come on you for you, on the earlier side, who were no longer eligible to renew U4U, are now trying to resort to TPS to be able to stay here. Those individuals are also in a fragile position, as most of the programs available to them in the past have been paused, leaving them in a state of uncertainty.
WSHU: And you use this family to illustrate the type of assistance that refugee families were getting that they no longer had access to.
SR: Yeah, so organizations like CIRI and IRIS here in Connecticut have seen major cuts to funding and programs and services that they're able to offer. This family was lucky enough to be part of the last group of people who were able to receive these services, but Ukrainians who have similar life experiences to this family, who are only now trying to leave, will not be able to reach the same places that this family was able to reach, because all of the services that were available to them along the way have now been impacted by either cuts or just not existing anymore.
WSHU: Now, how is the family itself? How have they adjusted to being in America, and are they still in Connecticut?
SR: The first year or two were particularly difficult for the family. It was a shock in many ways, both in terms of culture, but also in terms of the professions that were available to them. This is a young couple, and they were pretty career forward in terms of their outlook on life, and they arrived in this country where one of them doesn't really speak the language, and he had been a manager in a food company, regional manager, and so jumping from that to changing tires and coming home and smelling like this burnt plastic was a huge change. It would have been a huge change, even if they had just stayed in Ukraine. So that alone, and then not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to access certain services, all of that was a huge change for them. And once they reached Connecticut, and Vitalii had this job that was similar to what he had in Ukraine, then they kind of started to find their footing. And one thing that Evgenia particularly credited and that I mentioned in the piece is that Connecticut's social services and the different organizations that exist within the state kind of reduce these barriers.
WSHU: You specifically mentioned the children being able to get onto HUSKY and being able to get some medical treatment that they hadn't been able to for quite a while.
SR: Yeah, so during the first few days of the war, or even before it started, Angelina, who is Evgenia’s youngest daughter, had started to experience tooth pain. Obviously, they were caught in the whirlwinds of war and were unable to seek proper medical attention safely. This treatment was delayed, and they reached Arkansas, then they reached Florida and tried to seek medical treatment there, but the barrier of not having insurance was just too big, and so they had to wait until Connecticut. Fortunately for them, Connecticut's immigrant insurance programs and the barriers that are reduced compared to other states were very helpful in allowing them to seek the treatment that they needed, and Angelina has been able to follow through and complete the medical treatment that she had needed since leaving Ukraine.
WSHU: Well, that's fantastic. In the meantime, the services that were made available to them are no longer available. So what's the situation with that going forward? Will we be able to preserve any of these services? Or they're just gone?
SR: Well, in the case of IRIS, for example, they've had to close an entire office. So it seems like the future, I mean, some of these services just no longer exist. Entire portions of staff have been laid off in the past few months, and so it seems like we're in a pretty bleak position. Individual funding can't necessarily make up for all of the government funding that these organizations have lost. So I wish I had a better answer, but so far, the future of these organizations seems rather dire.
WSHU: However, this particular family has been able to tie into the local Ukrainian community, and that has been a lot of help to them.
SR: That's correct. So I mean, even just the way that I was able to connect with this family was through the Ukrainian community, by nature of just getting breakfast with one Ukrainian woman based in New Haven and chatting about the Ukrainian community that exists within Connecticut, I was able to connect with this family.
