Russian man in B’klyn gives love and support to friend in Ukraine even as bombs fall
Ukraine sympathizer Aleksei Davydov has a direct line to the war raging in Eastern Europe from his home in Brighton Beach.
Every morning, as surely as he washes his face or brushes his teeth, he wakes in his Brooklyn home, unlocks his phone, opens an app and checks in with one of his close friends — to make sure he’s still alive.
“Are you OK?” he types, and waits for a reply.
He’s more anxious than a teenage boy asking a girl if she likes him.
“I’m OK,” his friend replies, and Davydov can start his day.
Since Russia started pounding Ukraine last week with missiles and rockets, more than 1 million Ukrainians have left the country. Not Taras Kolomiyets, Davydov’s friend. Not yet, anyway. Last week, Kolomiyets and his family were strategizing a trip to the border of Hungary that he expected would take at least a couple of days.
There, friends on the other side have plans to take his wife and two children to Germany. Kolomiyets said he will stay and fight.
“On the fifth or sixth day of war I finally understood that nothing works, nothing changes, only in a bad way,” Kolomiyets told the Daily News in a WhatsApp message, the same tool he uses to talk to his friends. “That’s why I bring my family abroad so I can do something here, like go to the army. From day to day it becomes very dangerous.”
But what gets Kolomiyets through the nightmare, what keeps him from giving up after every bright flash of light or deafening explosion is the support of friends like Davydov, who, despite being Russian, is as big a Ukraine cheerleader as the president of Ukraine himself.
Kolomiyets and his family live in Cherkasy, near the Dnipro River about 150 miles south of Kyiv.
What frightened Kolomiyets nearly as much as the air raid sirens that blare like car alarms or the Russian rocket that landed in a garage at the entrance to his city is the sense of isolation.
“For the first two days we felt, all our citizens, like nobody, wanted to help Ukraine with Russia,” Kolomiyets said. “It helps to feel that the rest of the world wants to help us, that we’re not alone.”
Davydov and Kolomiyets met in 2005, when Davydov was working and living in Kyiv. Their friendship was forged over a shared love of basketball.
“Taras, he was always a very good organizer,” said Davydov, who supported the rival Budivelnik team. “At that time, he was one of those who created a huge basketball event in Cherkasy.
“When Budivelnik was playing versus Cherkasy we met together both in Cherkasy and Kyiv. I am Russian, and I never felt anything wrong about my nationality, my language with Taras. I felt like one of the Ukrainians. Ukrainian people are the most welcoming people.”
The evil war has consumed Davydov. With each report of a Russian advance, or a rise in the death toll — both sides — his heart breaks.
“As soon as the war started I immediately contacted my friends from Ukraine,” Davydov said. “It’s terrible. As anyone living in 2022 in the civil world I never could expect that people would be dying in this war, and the bombs and the attacks of missiles.”
Before they left for the border, Kolomiyets and his family had been staying in a “big, secure” basement that felt less and less secure each day.
“Now it’s calm but a few times in the day we hear rocket alarms,” Kolomiyets said. “You saw what happened in Kharkiv. You saw what happened in Kyiv when they shot the TV tower and the opposite side of the basketball gym. A lot of children played there. It was also destroyed.”
Davydov sees the destruction, too, though he watches from a world away. But he’s comforted, some, that his friend has been able to charge his phone and send him a message when he can.
“Sometimes we’re waiting for hours for them to be in touch,” Davydov said. “For us it’s very important just to hear that they’re alive.”