In London, a sister remembers her brother killed on the Ukrainian front. In Glasgow, a truck driver receives a call from his wife in Lviv: the war has arrived in their homeland. And in Connecticut, a university professor is thinking about unraveling Putin.
For the Ukrainian diaspora, Putin’s war has a deep echo. We asked Ukrainians, immigrants and political experts from around the world to judge. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.
Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian, writer and director of the Ukrainian Institute in London. She told CNN that her older brother Vladimir was killed by shrapnel in 2017 during the conflict in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine.
“I am a historian. I realize that we are experiencing a moment that will be in every curriculum of European history. Now is the time to decide what place each of us wants to take in this story. Stand with Ukraine, “Khromeychuk said.
Ukrainian truck driver and father of two Alexander the Great, told CNN as he crossed the Polish border with Ukraine. His words are slightly edited for clarity.
“On Thursday I woke up in Glasgow (Scotland) at 6.00 in the morning, my wife called me and told me that the Russians were bombing our capital and our country. And that’s it. I drove my truck to London, took my car and started driving in Poland – I arrived there on Saturday.
“My family lives in Lviv. I have two children there. I am a truck driver, I work everywhere.”
“Ukraine is my homeland and if Ukrainians will not fight for our homeland, who will fight? We do not want to live with the Russian lifestyle, we want to live with our lifestyle,” the 39-year-old told CNN.
Marcy Shore is an Associate Professor of Contemporary European Intellectual History at Yale University with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“He is no longer the master of chess, the shrewd great strategist. He is no longer a rational actor, even in the coldest and most cynical sense. He looked bad and restless,” she told Putin’s speech last Monday.
It no longer looked like a high-stakes chess player, it now felt like a Macbeth scene. My intuition was that an aging man, facing his own death, had decided to destroy the whole world. Ukraine is probably fighting for all of us. “
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