Ukrainians in New Mexico distressed by Russian invasion

Feb. 25—Nataliya Edelman began receiving calls from friends and family members in Ukraine after Russian forces invaded her homeland early Thursday.

They all shared the same disbelief that Russian President Vladimir Putin followed through on his longtime threat to order a full-scale attack on Ukraine.

People Edelman knew in Kyiv, where the native Ukrainian grew up, described hearing explosions they thought were near Boryspil International Airport just outside the city.

"They were just in shock," said Edelman, who moved to New Mexico 10 years ago. "They just can't believe it. They're scared."

Edelman, who lives in Rio Rancho, is president of the Ukrainian Americans of New Mexico, a community network with 3,000 members, roughly half of them immigrants.

Russia launched missiles at targets near Kyiv and artillery at Kharkiv near Ukraine's eastern border, while ground forces invaded from three directions, according to news reports.

As Edelman described it, Ukrainians thought Putin massing troops at the border and threatening war was all show.

Ukrainians hoped that Putin, at worst, would escalate the civil conflict at the eastern border and limit it to that region, even though he had armies on three flanks, said Stephan Welhasch, 72, a Santa Fe resident and second-generation Ukrainian with close family ties to the country.

"They really didn't want to believe and were praying he wouldn't do it," said Welhasch, cultural affairs liaison for the Ukrainian Americans group. "I was praying the whole time it would not happen, but in my gut, I felt and knew it was going to happen."

Welhasch said he is most worried about whether his great-nieces in Kyiv will be able to flee amid the crush of people trying to escape before the fighting intensifies.

He's less afraid for a great-niece who has twin infants and lives a half-hour from the western border and could slip into Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic, he said.

Still, he finds it disheartening that the country where his parents grew up and where he has so many close relatives is suddenly under siege by a nation that won't accept its sovereignty.

"It's a sad situation," Welhasch said.

Putin has said publicly for more than 20 years that Ukraine is an extension of Russia and became a separate state by accident after the Cold War.

Russia seized Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, in 2014 through an illegal annexation and, at the same time, backed separatist rebels in the country's eastern Donbas region. The insurgents have waged a civil conflict ever since, leaving an estimated 14,000 dead.

In November 2018, the Russian Coast Guard rammed and fired on three small Ukrainian vessels passing through the Kerch Strait between the Black and Azov seas, injuring six. Russian authorities said the vessels were unauthorized and detained two dozen Ukrainian crew members for two months.

It marked the first time Russian forces had openly engaged the Ukrainian military. U.S. leaders have said Putin feels at liberty to bully Ukraine because it is not a NATO member, which is why he is vehement about Ukraine not joining the alliance.

Welhasch said Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly after the Cold War to become an independent state like neighboring Lithuania, Slovenia and Romania.

But Putin has never accepted Ukraine becoming a free, democratic country and probably has planned for decades how to regain control of it, Welhasch said. Right now, Russia is conducting limited, measured assaults to see how the world reacts, including political allies such as China, he said.

A large population of Ukrainians lives in Russia and vice versa, with a lot of intermarriage, making a war between the nations a messy proposition, Welhasch said.

"No one wants to kill their grandchildren," he said.

Edelman said Russia wants to keep Ukraine in its grip because of its proximity to the Black Sea — which gives it great economic and strategic value — and because it's rich in resources.

But Ukrainians were eager to break free from Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, given the oppressive history, she said.

In the early 1930s, nearly 4 million Ukrainians starved to death in what historians agree was a famine created by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Edelman said her mother told stories of people being so hungry they swallowed rocks so their bellies wouldn't feel empty.

She suffered a personal loss in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine. Her husband, who worked as a technician at the plant when a reactor exploded and caught fire, died of radiation poisoning at age 25.

The Soviet government didn't inform the public of the radiation spewing from the damaged plant for days, resulting in countless people being exposed to lethal radiation.

Edelman said many of the people she knows in Ukraine have made it clear they won't bow down and return to Russian rule.

"They say they will stand, and they will fight; they will die for freedom and independence," Edelman said.