LOS ANGELES (AP) — When her daughter was diagnosed with cancer, Tatiana Shatokhina returned to Ukraine without hesitation to help her recover from surgery and take care of her 14-year-old grandson.
But a 75-year-old US citizen with a disability is trapped with her family in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which has been the target of a night of shelling and bombing since the Russian invasion just over a week ago.
Their underground shelter was not large enough for all three, so Shatokhina, her daughter Elena Yarova and son Yarovaya, despite the risk, remained on the ground. Two lay under the table; Shatokhina, nearby, on the floor. They took turns sleeping, turning off the lights and talking quietly, hoping that the Russian military would think the house was abandoned and walk past them.
“Every time we go to bed, we don’t even sleep,” Yarova said in a whisper in Russian over the phone before the family left the city and headed west towards Poland, hoping to cross the border.
This family is one of many stranded in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, including American citizens caring for family members who are citizens of Ukraine. The closure of the US embassy in Kyiv has delayed many visa interviews and limited the services the country can provide to people wishing to leave Ukraine. Families have turned to Congress and U.S. immigration attorneys for help.
There are no known estimates of how many Americans remained in Ukraine after weeks of warnings urging them to leave before the invasion.
The State Department is “just completely useless,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican whose office has been working for days to advance the visa application of a Ukrainian woman whose husband lives in the Malliotakis area. “I know some of my colleagues have had the same experience and it is very similar to what happened in Afghanistan when we tried to evacuate families and help people get out of Afghanistan.”
The department maintains support teams near the Ukrainian border in four neighboring countries to assist US citizens and has opened a “reception center” in Poland. But people seeking immigrant visas who are trying to transfer their case to another US embassy should contact that particular embassy for a list of requirements, the ministry said this week.
After several emails sent by Malliotakis’ office, the State Department agreed to transfer the woman’s case to Moldova, and the couple has now arrived in that country.
Thousands of miles away, in a house on a hilltop in Los Angeles, Shatokhina’s son and daughter-in-law were also awake. They called their representative in Congress and the State Department, desperately trying to get the family out.
They want to take them to the border with Poland — a stretch for Shatokhina, who herself recently had surgery and needs help walking — and then to the US consulate for the long-awaited green card interview for Yarovaya, for which she was sponsored. many years ago.
“I actually called the State Department and they told me there was nothing they could do until she was in an EU country or any other country outside of Ukraine,” said Galina Blank, Shatokhina’s daughter-in-law. “The State Department can’t do anything. They don’t do anything for the citizens of the United States.”
“She sold. She’s sick. She’s a citizen,” she said.
In 1990, Eduard Chatokhin, then 21 years old, left his hometown of Kharkov for the former Soviet Union to try to make a living in the United States. Years later, he married Blanca, who had moved to Los Angeles as a child as a Soviet refugee.
After Chatokhin became an American citizen, he sponsored his mother Shatokhina for a green card, and she went to live with them in California. When she also became a US citizen, she applied for Yarovaya to join them.
Although US authorities approved her application, Yarovaya still needs to pass an interview at the consulate in order to receive a green card. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many of those interviews have been postponed, and Blank said she’s not sure how long it would have taken before the invasion. She said the State Department told her that if Yarova could travel to another country, they would expedite her interview.
According to the family, the situation in Kharkiv is dire. They were running out of food. They cut off the water. The weather is very cold.
When the invasion began, they thought the Russians were trying to scare them. But it only got worse, Yarova said.
“No mercy, no one at all. We could imagine anything, but not that they would drop bombs on us, ”she said. “I just want to save my child.”
In Los Angeles, Blank, a lawyer, and Chatokhin, an Internet entrepreneur, were working on phones trying to find someone to help the family escape. At first, a friend offered to give them a lift to the border, but a nearby bridge blew up and he couldn’t get to them, Blank said.
When his mother left Los Angeles about two months ago, Chatokhin said he was not worried about the situation in Kharkov. Even as rumors of a possible attack surfaced, he said he and his friends considered it nothing more than media hype, adding that the two countries share a common language, history and culture.
Last Wednesday, his nephew, as always, went to school. The next day there was a war.
“We are the same people. It just doesn’t make sense,” Blank said. “That’s why no one ever believed that something like this could happen.”
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The trader reported from Washington. AP diplomatic commentator Matthew Lee and Washington-based AP journalists Padmananda Rama and Lynn Berry contributed to this report.
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The attribution in the first quote has been corrected to Elena Yarova.