Ukrainians in Canada facing tough choices

Many with Canuck visas agonize over whether they should return to homeland

The UN refugee agency says 6.5 million Ukrainians have been listed as refugees around the world as of February. Some 960,000 have visas to come to Canada

It was 4:40 a.m. when bombs started to drop on Lilyia Dvornichenko’s hometown of Kharkiv in Ukraine, just an hour from the Russian border.

“Everybody thought it was gonna be over tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow it will be over,” she says, recalling her journey while sitting in a hotel coffee shop in Warsaw, Poland. “It got worse and worse.”

With a grim laugh, she describes the effect the stress had on her body — how she resembled a skeleton after only a few days.

Dvornichenko helped organize a convoy of vehicles to take her family members across the country and slept in an abandoned kindergarten building where they weren’t allowed to turn on the lights for fear of being targeted by airstrikes.

She made it across the border by brandishing a crowbar to prevent other cars from blocking their path on a lawless road as millions of people headed for the safety of Poland.

It’s only when she talks about her decision not to return to Ukraine that her voice quivers and she covers her face.

“The patriotically correct thing would be to go back, right? To create jobs, to take jobs, to pay taxes, to restore,” she said. “But I kinda lost faith that it’s fixable.”

The UN refugee agency says 6.5 million Ukrainians have been listed as refugees around the world as of February. Some 960,000 have visas to come to Canada.

But, with the deadline to make good on those visas expiring Sunday, many Ukrainians are facing hard decisions about where their future will take them and whether they ever plan to return home.

Canada seems to have seen a sharp increase in Ukrainian newcomers in the past month ahead of that deadline. As of the end of February, 248,726 Ukrainians had journeyed to Canada, though it’s unclear how many have stayed.

By the end of March, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the number of newcomers was expected to be close to 300,000.

Though the visa that allows Ukrainians to work and study in Canada is temporary, the vast majority who have come to Canada and stayed plan to settle permanently.

Few make the costly journey lightly. While many people in Dvornichenko’s family got the visa, they all made different decisions about what to do next. While one niece opted to come to Canada, other family members stopped their journey in Poland, while others still remain in Ukraine.

As a single professional who speaks fluent English, Dvornichenko said Canada offered an appealing option as she stands a good chance of eventually getting permanent residency. But she also supports her parents, who are unlikely to ever attain Canadian citizenship.

“I can drag them to completely foreign country for three years, and then send them back?” she said. “I can’t . ... It’s absolutely pointless.”