‘We know this will be disappointing’: How NZ is keeping Ukrainian families separated
Our Government promised refuge for up to 4000 Ukrainian refugees – so far, writes Tova O’Brien, just 289 have made it here.
We’re just 15 seconds into our interview when Anna Zaichenko starts to cry. It’s tough to watch because she is so tough. In her military style cargo pants and khakicoloured T-shirt, she looks it, too.
But the monument to her physical toughness – the home gym in her small flat in Howick with its huge dumb-bells – is lying unused. Anna’s lost the motivation to work out or to even leave the house.
She now spends her days weeping.
From Auckland she feels helpless, watching as the war in her home country literally destroys her family.
For all Ukrainians, February 24 is the day Russia invaded. For Anna, it’s also the day her mother died of a heart attack.
A week later her grandmother died.
Then, in a cruel trifecta of trauma, her brother was blown up in a Russian missile strike.
George was at the front lines. He was in a convoy moving through the Donbas region in the east of Ukraine when the missile struck the last vehicle in the line – it was his.
Anna has lost her only brother.
Her niece, Olga Zaichenko in Kyiv, has lost her father. The family resemblance between the two women is unmistakable.
The mannerisms too. Stoic and yet sensitive. Before the war, Olga’s father had been urging his daughter to follow in her aunt’s footsteps. To be brave, to travel, to start a life somewhere safer, like New Zealand.
Anna doesn’t have children; she wants to be able to care for Olga. Like her brother, she also wants to keep Olga safe, away from the war.
But when she tried to get her niece to New Zealand, applying for the Ukraine Special Visa, Anna received a cookie-cutter response from Immigration NZ refusing to help.
‘‘We know that this will be disappointing to you,’’ the email reads.
‘Disappointing’ is not the word for what this family have gone through.
‘‘Devastating more than disappointing,’’ Anna says. ‘‘I always cared about her, it would mean a lot if I could help out.’’
For Olga it would mean a lot too.
Every time the air raid sirens wail in Kyiv, Olga’s body tenses up, her breath quickens. This has
happened hundreds of times. She’s afraid to die.
‘‘I want to go to New Zealand very much,’’ Olga tells us from her apartment in Kyiv, ‘‘because it’s safe there.’’
‘‘Each time I hear the air sirens I have anxiety attacks. When the war started my father wanted me to leave Ukraine to go to a safer place too and we always thought New Zealand.’’
We were in Reitarska St, the trendy hipster-come-intelligentsia part of Kyiv’s Old City, when we heard our first siren. No one in the streets around us blinked, let alone hustled into a bunker.
Her panic might seem an overreaction to a sound which has become part of the landscape for Ukrainians in the capital where life is getting back to normal.
But for Olga there’s a level of trauma that’s melded into her nervous system with every reminder of the war.
Fun, funny and talented, her father George was the kind of guy that everyone wanted to be mates with.
He had retired from the military and had plans to settle down, plant exotic trees and just relax.
On February 24, that all changed. He whisked Olga to safety in the countryside but he just couldn’t stand to stay still himself. George rejoined the military, part of a medical team saving lives on the frontline.
At first, Olga felt detached from the war. Thanks to her father she wasn’t home for the battle of Kyiv – though the medal her father received for his defence of the capital is pride of place on the small shrine she’s made to him in her living room.
It was only when her father was killed, that reality struck. It’s also when the panic attacks started.
The New Zealand Government has the power to help by broadening the Ukraine Special Visa to extended family members.
As it stands, the visa programme isn’t achieving what it was supposed to – helping Ukrainians with family in New Zealand escape the war.
Only close family members are eligible but families in Ukraine will not split. They’ve already been through enough.
Had Olga’s father not died, there’s no way he would have accepted the visa he was eligible for and left his ineligible daughter in Ukraine.
The Special Ukraine Visa was supposed to offer shelter to 4000 Ukrainians. So far just 289 people have been accepted and made it to New Zealand. There have been 1098 applications; 962 have been approved.
More than a hundred families like Anna and Olga have received the same automated email denial from Immigration New Zealand.
In an interview with Today FM, the new immigration minister, Michael Wood, promised to review this broken visa, promised to consider extending it. That was on June 28. At least 724 Ukrainian civilians have died since.
Today FM
Tova O’Brien’s interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will play on Today FM on August 17.
Tova O’Brien meets President Zelenskyy airs on Prime TV on August 22 at 7.30pm.