Ukrainians who left before invasion carry guilt, fear for loved ones

PHILADELPHIA — When Maryna Bondar and her husband knew they would be moving from Ukraine to the United States, the culmination of a yearslong immigration process, they never expected that something they didn’t pack would prove to be the heaviest to carry: a sense of guilt.

By pure accident of timing, the couple were admitted into this country Feb. 23 — the day before Russia invaded their homeland, starting a war that has killed thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians and destroyed parts of major cities.

That turn of fate delivered the couple to safety in Northeast Philadelphia. And trapped their parents, family members, friends, and coworkers in a war zone.

“I have a bad emotion,” said Liubomyr Dykyi, Bondar’s husband.

Friends have called him from Ukraine, suspicious, accusing him of having had secret knowledge about the invasion. How else could he have so perfectly timed his departure?

It’s a crazy idea, Dykyi said, a conspiracy theory. But it doesn’t make him feel any better.

In the Philadelphia region, home to one of the nation’s largest Ukrainian communities, the same tortured feelings plague other arrivals whom the U.S. immigration system happened to land here just before the war broke out.

They had applied for admission as long as five years ago, often under what’s called the Lautenberg program. It provides a path to this country for historically persecuted religious minorities in former Soviet countries — including Bondar, 28, and her husband, Dykyi, 36, who are Baptist.

Romana Gordynsky, a resettlement manager at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia, said she has routinely seen new Ukrainian arrivals struggle. Americans call it “survivor’s guilt.” In Ukraine, the expression is slightly different, “to survive by accident.”

“I had four new people and all four were overloaded with emotions of guilt,” said Gordynsky, who came from Ukraine in 1994, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “‘We were able to escape, but our kids are there, our parents are there. …’”

One woman was so overwhelmed that she needed medical care, repeating, “I want to go home, I want to go home. …”

Gordynsky told her — and tells others — that returning to a Ukraine under siege won’t help anyone. That she’ll work with them to try to bring their family members here. And that they can provide meaningful assistance by sending goods and supplies, and by working to raise awareness around the war.

Mykola Kukhar and his parents spent more than four years filing immigration applications and supporting documents. It seemed a departure date would never arrive. But it eventually did, by chance sending the three of them out of the country about seven hours before Russia invaded.

“I feel guilty that I’m not there, that I’m not helping my country,” said Kukhar, 26.

He learned his homeland was under attack when his plane landed in New York City. And, at the same time, that his wife was now in the middle of a war.

The couple married in October, deciding that Kukhar would immigrate and she would come later, rather than risk more delay by adding a new name to the application.

Kukhar’s family belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which Stalin sought to destroy as far back as the 1940s by imprisoning, torturing and even killing bishops, priests, and laity. The church was not legally restored until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

His parents decided to pursue immigration after Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea in 2014, feeling it was “dangerous to be Greek Catholic in Ukraine.”

The Lautenberg program offered a way out.