Ukrainian refugees still on the move
Just over one year ago, on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. In a year’s time, the conflict has claimed at least 8,000 lives and caused a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people in many different parts of the world — including people with ties to Taos County: James Wisch, a former IT worker in Taos who was living in Kyiv a year ago, fled to a safer Ukrainian city nearby; Meir Kaminetzky, a teenager who was studying in Dnipro when the first Russian bombs dropped, escaped by train to Dusseldorf, Germany; and Chipp Taylor and his son, Danny, fled from Zalistsi to Questa, where they were met by the mother of their family, Lidia Taylor.
At the one-year anniversary of the conflict, the Taos News reached out to each of these subjects to see where they are now and how the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War continues to affect their lives.
James Wisch
As Russian forces approached Ukraine’s capital, Albuquerquean James Wisch and his wife evacuated Kyiv to her parents country home a few hours outside the city. In the year since, he’s spent a lot of time gardening, pickling produce and building makeshift appliances, like brick ovens, to use when utilities fail.
“After our interview [last March], in the first week of the war, I came down with a very bad case of long COVID,” Wisch told the Taos News last week. “I lost my voice and was unable to speak for a month. I did not fully recover until mid-May.
“While the war raged around me, I was bed-bound; sleeping 14 and 16 hours a day with extreme fatigue and brain fog for weeks. I felt powerless to do anything but feel anger. I did what I could from bed.”
Wisch, an IT worker who worked in Taos on and off before moving to Kyiv in 2019, took to the internet. He started his @whyukraine YouTube channel.
“In March, a friend in Nikopol near the now-occupied nuclear power plant asked me to help find and translate relevant excerpts from U.S. military manuals to distribute to civilian Ukrainian resistance fighters,” he said. “I combed through hundreds of manuals going back to World War II and pulled
together 10 translators to put the document together.”
Wisch said he next tried to organize fundraising and donation efforts online, but found a lack of interest from Americans — although he said he is grateful for the support of President Biden’s administration.
“Most Americans forgot about Ukraine again,” according to Wisch. “I intend to remain here until Ukraine wins and thereafter; I hope to help create a democratic school here.”
Wisch told the Taos News last year that he had hoped to pick up a gun and fight the Orcs, as Ukrainians refer to the Russian invaders, but has not been able to join the fight.
“In April, though I was still sick, I applied to the Ukrainian armed forces. And in May. And June. And September. And October. I applied again two weeks ago and am awaiting a decision. In general, there are so many applicants, they don’t need someone with no military experience who does not speak good Ukrainian yet.
“The same is true for volunteers,” he added. “Frankly, a lot of Western volunteers got a bad reputation here in the first few months of the war; so there’s little need for foreigners who can’t bring money, vehicles, drones, etc. I donated what I could months ago.
Wisch is currently with his wife in Transcarpathia for several months while she trains for a job.
“I intend to remain here, until Ukraine wins and thereafter,” Wisch said. “I can’t wait to get back to Central Ukraine. I hope to help create a democratic school here.”
Meir Kamintezky
When he was 14, Meir Kaminetzky left his home in Taos in 2020 to continue his study of the Torah in Dnipro, Ukraine, where his great uncle, Shmuel Kaminetzky, is the local rabbi. On Feb. 24, however, his roommate woke him up to tell him that Russian forces had invaded the country and, after a week of fleeing to his school’s basement when air raid sirens would sound, Kaminetzky and his classmates fled west to Dusseldorf, Germany.
Last August, however, Kaminetzky, now 15, moved with his class to Kiryat Gat, a city in the Southern District of Israel.
“If not for the war, I probably wouldn’t have come here. It’s divine providence,” Kaminetzky said, speaking with the Taos News by phone last week.
“They were very nice to us and all the Ukrainians who came here,” he added. “They’ve accepted us very nicely. Over the last few months, I’ve been a little bit around Israel, to all the holy places.”
Although Israel is, too, a country embroiled in a longstanding conflict with its neighbor, Kaminetzky said he feels “Israel is a much safer place. Even if it does get dangerous, I feel much safer here than in Ukraine.”
He said that he and the other Jewish students who fled from Ukraine a year ago remain abreast of the ongoing conflict, and note the ways in which the war has continued to defy expectations as to how it would unfold.
“When I was there, we were told it would be over in three days; that Russia would take it over and that’s it. First of all, I’m surprised at how long Ukraine has managed to stand up to the Russians. I don’t think any of us thought they would last this long.”
Some members of his large, extended family still haven’t left Ukraine since the war began, but for his own part, he said he remains grateful that he and his classmates were able to make their way to safety and that the war led him to Israel.
“It’s a special area. It’s definitely much different than all the countries in Europe that I’ve been to over the past year. Our school was throughout Europe and France and Belgium. To me, it’s much more familiar — being among my people, my language.”
Chipp, Lidia and Danny Taylor
Chipp and his then 7-year-old son, Danny, fled from their small farm and drug rehabilitation center in Zalistsi, Ukraine one year ago and made their way to Questa, where they awaited Chipp’s wife and Danny’s mother, Lidia Taylor.
Speaking with the Taos News this month from the family’s new home in St. Simons Island, Ga., Lidia Taylor — a native Ukrainian — said she stayed behind to help keep the farm running as a pitstop for refugees fleeing west into countries, like Romania, Hungary and Poland.
“People would stay overnight — maybe a couple of nights, maybe a week — and then went either to Poland or Germany or any other European countries. Sometimes they just stayed in the west of Ukraine, places like Lviv and Kharkiv.”
In March, Lidia took a train into Warsaw, which took about 25 hours to reach, she said, “because we had to stay behind a long line of buses and cars — a long line of vehicles heading west from Ukraine.’
From there, she fled to Estonia, where she has family. Then she flew to Miami, and then caught a ride to meet her husband and son in Georgia.
Lidia, Chipp and Danny, who’s now 8, all participated in a phone call with the Taos News this week to describe their new life on St. Simons.
“My sister lives here on the island, and we stayed in Questa until Lidia arrived,” Chipp Taylor said. “I still hadn’t found employment in Questa, still didn’t have housing, didn’t have a car, and so when I flew back here to pick up Lidia, it was our intention to drive back cross country together. Right now, it’s about 82 degrees here. I’m not sure exactly how cold it is in Questa right this minute, but when we were there, it was colder in Questa than it was in Ukraine. And there was more snow.”
In St. Simons, the Taylors started a nonprofit — a farm that they use to grow food and that also serves as a rehabilitation center for people struggling with substance abuse or homelessness, called Golden Isles Urban Farms.
But while young Danny is enjoying his new life, going to a new school and taking karate lessons, Chipp and Lidia Taylor remain focused on the war in the country where they plan to return and where Lidia still has family.
“Eventually we will go back. It’s just right now — because of the randomness of the bombings and the missiles, I can’t take my family back and certainly not my 8-yearold boy,” Chipp Taylor said. “If it were just up to me and Lidia, we’d be back there shooting Russians. But because of our child and the randomness of what’s going on over there, we’re just sitting tight for a while. We’re sending money back to friends or people in need. There was a bombing in a town called Neper about two months ago. They bombed an apartment complex. Forty-one people were killed. That’s where we used to work and where I taught.”