Seated in the living room of her home in Fox Chapel, Iryna Haak speaks on the phone with her mother who lives in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, on Saturday, Feb. 26.
Amid alarming reports from family and friends in Ukraine, Pittsburgh residents with ties in the embattled country and invading Russia shared their anxiety and anger.
Photographs and text by Quinn Glabicki, PublicSource
Iryna Haak wrung her hands when she hung up the phone. Her blue eyes were tinted red. Her voice cracked as she spoke.
“I’m hysterical right now,” Haak said, after another sleepless night. It was 1 p.m. on Saturday at her home in Fox Chapel, and 8 p.m. in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, where her family lives.
“My mom is making Molotov cocktails,” said Haak, and her sisters were standing “in line with thousands of people waiting to donate their blood.”
She extended her phone to display images sent by her friend Nadiya earlier that morning. Bodies, or what remained of them, lay in the wreckage of a vehicle that had been hit by a Russian rocket.
“She says she is trying to be brave. She says everything is fine,” said Haak of her friend. “That’s really difficult for me because I know that it’s not fine. She’s such a strong person for me right now.”
Among Pittsburgh’s Ukrainian diaspora, the Russian invasion of their homeland presents a crisis that they feel deeply despite geographic distance. As loved ones face direct threats and violence, they pray in safety and watch as the conflict escalates.
“It’s a hard feeling. You can’t sleep well, you’re always thinking about them,” said Misha Radetskyi from his seat across the table in Haak’s living room. “There’s nothing you can do here, there’s nothing [you can do] to help.” He and his brother, Ivan, gathered along with their friend Max Kryvenko at Haak’s home on Saturday afternoon.
“I would go crazy if I had to be by myself right now,” said Kryvenko, a U.S. Army reservist whose mother and sister were sheltering at their home outside of Kyiv during the intense fighting. Relaying information from his family, Kryvenko said that all the bridges between their home and Kyiv have been destroyed, either by Russians or Ukrainians trying to stop the invasion. “All the ways to escape Kyiv are gone.”
Read entire article here
About Post Author
