Ukrainian refugees reflect on challenges, future
Many still settling into new life in US on invasion anniversary How Ohio professors are teaching about Russia-ukraine war
Sitting on her sister-in-law’s couch in Galloway, Hanna Harbuziuk, 42, recalled where she was one year ago today.
Violence had affected her life in eastern Ukraine since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists took up arms following the annexation of Crimea, but things became dramatically worse when Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
When Russia bombed the nearby Sievierodonetsk Airport, Harbuziuk, her husband and their nine children crowded into their unfinished basement, where they spent three days listening to gunfire and tanks roll by overhead.
“All you had to do was pray because you didn’t know when your life was going to end. You just pray and hope a bomb’s not going to fall on you,” she said in Ukrainian, speaking through an interpreter.
Harbuziuk said her home, in territory now controlled by Russia, was destroyed after the family evacuated on Feb. 28 last year. Following a stint in Germany, they arrived in Galloway last fall, where they are part of a growing community of around 600 Ukrainian refugees.
As the Russia-ukraine war
Eli Kaul still remembers that feeling of dread.
He was getting ready for bed in the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2022, when his wife got a call from her mother. They could hear the missiles firing off in the background as Russian forces invaded her native Ukraine.
Kaul, an adjunct political science professor at Kent State University, felt utterly helpless.
When he arrived on campus later that day to teach his Politics of War class, Kaul scrapped the whole lesson plan to talk about what the world was witnessing. He stopped teaching from his Powerpoints and instead pulled up his Twitter feed, deciphering Ukrainian news outlets and on-theground accounts to his students.
“There were a lot of sleepless nights that first week,” Kaul said.
The last year has been a whirlwind for university professors specializing in Russian, Ukrainian and Eastern European studies. As interest in Ukraine has waxed and waned, Kaul and other professors across Ohio have had to navigate the ever-changing conflict while helping students understand the complexities of the war.
Kaul, who also is a visiting assistant professor this year at Otterbein University, is teaching five
classes this semester at the Westerville college, all of which touch on Russia and Ukraine. One of those classes is a special topics series dedicated to discussing the war.
The one-hour lecture meets three days a week and spends that time unpacking the two nations’ intertwined histories and understanding their impact on the world stage. There’s only so much he can really plan for though.
“The class has a lot of embedded flexibility because it’s an ongoing war,” Kaul said. “I have assigned readings, but I’ve told my students that all of those could change. There are lots of TBDS on the syllabus.”
Kaul has 15 students enrolled in his special topics class, some of whom aren’t political science majors. He saw the same trend in his remote class last summer.
“It wasn’t a required course for them. Most of those students took it just to take it,” he said.
Steven Miner saw a similar peak in interest among his students.
In the early days of the war, Miner — a now-retired professor of recent Russian, Soviet and East European history at Ohio University — said his students would ask lots of questions not just about Ukraine, but also the region at large.
“I noticed that students know less about geography today than in previous generations,” he said. “Most people don’t know where Ukraine is or why it is geopolitically important.”
There was such a surge in student interest that Miner and some of his colleagues held a public lecture to discuss the Russian invasion. It went on for nearly two hours and was attended by more than 300 people, both in-person and virtually.
Similar lectures took place at other Ohio institutions, including the College of Wooster. Marieke Herrmann, a professor of German studies and chair of the college’s Wooster’s German and Russian studies department, organized a panel with her colleagues last March titled “What is Happening in Ukraine?”
Faculty from German and Russian studies, history, political science and English presented to students, faculty and community members on different aspects of the war and held a Q&A session.
The German and Russian Department also issued a statement denouncing the war and pledging their commitment to educating students on its realities and complexities.
The study of Russia in many ways is one giant complexity, said Zach Rewinski, a visiting assistant professor of Russian studies at Wooster. That’s because the context of most Russian studies programs is rooted in the Cold War.
“There were no Russian studies programs pre-world War 2. Russian studies emerge from the Cold War, and that antagonism has always been present,” he said.
Rewinski said those conflicts have always been present for academics. Now, he said, the challenge is explaining those nuances and complexities to students in an unprecedented time.
For some students, discussions about the Ukraine war have gone beyond just academic studies — it’s become a moral dilemma.
Rewinski said he’s had to help many students over the last year wrestle with their choice of major.
“I’ve heard a lot from my Russian students asking, ‘What are the ethics of me studying Russian now? If I’ve admired Russian culture for so long, how do I reconcile that with this war?’” Rewinski said.
“They’ve been questioning what it means to be a student and a human during this war.”
Some students have handled it better than others, he said.
Colleges and universities across North America and Europe saw significant declines in enrollment of first-year Russian-language students last semester, according to a report by Times Higher Education in September.
Academics at leading Russian and Slavic studies departments told Times Higher Education that they were seeing as high as 50% declines in enrollment figures for entry-level Russian courses. Many scholars blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing a hesitancy by students to engage with the culture and language in a way that might seem supportive.
Meanwhile, the war seemed to boost enrollment in other Slavic languages, like Polish and Ukrainian, at schools that offer such programs.
At Ohio University, the peak interest about Ukraine didn’t last once the U.S. military didn’t get involved, Miner said.
“It’s not that people aren’t interested; it’s just waned,” he said.
Miner said he’s concerned about that for a couple of reasons. For one, he said, the conflict continues.
The other reason is much closer to home: Ohio University no longer has a dedicated Russian studies program.
It wasn’t a decision made because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Miner said. Rather, it was a cut made long before the conflict began thanks to COVID-19.
Pandemic-era budget cuts at Ohio University eliminated much of the program when the university laid off two non-tenured Russian language professors. Miner, who started teaching about Russia at OU in 1986, retired at the end of 2022, making this semester the first in 75 years that no Russian-related courses will be taught at the university.
Ohio University once had a robust and thriving Russian program. Nearly 1% of all Russian language majors in the U.S. graduated with a degree from OU in 2019 and 2020, according to Data USA. But Miner considered himself “the last of a dying academic breed.”
“It’s a tragedy when this is so important right now,” he said. “My colleagues will certainly continue talking about Russia and the war, but to actually teach about this deeply ... that’s a loss.”
As for Kaul, he has no plans to stop teaching about Ukraine any time soon.
To keep that interest going, Kaul carefully plans what he calls “epiphany moments” throughout the semester. Whether it’s connecting the dots between how inflation in the U.S. is tied to agriculture in Eastern Europe or how what happens in Ukraine could impact Taiwan, this year has been an opportunity to offer his students some perspective.
“Everything ties together in the end,” he said. shendrix@dispatch.com @sheridan120