The stories of three Ukrainian citizens who lived ordinary lives until Russia invaded their country. Now, they're helping the resistance.
As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its third month, ordinary Ukrainians continue to upend their lives to protect their homeland. Today, we’ll hear the stories of three Ukrainians who came to the aid of their country in its hour of greatest need.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times foreign correspondent Kate Linthicum
More reading:
Full coverage of the war in Ukraine
Ukraine war heroes: A student spiriting supplies to soldiers. A DJ answering calls about the missing
Ukrainian citizens trapped as Russia attacks hospitals, schools and refuses evacuations
Kate: What was it like to have your city, your peaceful city suddenly attacked?
Olimpia: Yeah, it happened Uh, early in the morning it was around 5:00 AM. I woke up because my husband came to me and he told me, "Wake up as a war begins."
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Gustavo: War has been raging in Ukraine for two months now.
Olimpia: We will not forget this day never. Never forget this date.
Gustavo: On February 24, Russia launched the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.
AP Clip: Russian president Vladimir Putin, in a televised address, announced a military operation in Ukraine claiming it's intended to protect civilians.
AP Clip: Air raid sirens sound in central Kyiv as big explosions were heard in the capital just before dawn.
AP Clip: Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.
Gustavo: And as the casualties and atrocities have mounted in the weeks since, ordinary Ukrainians upended their lives to protect their homeland.
Galina: I realized that the only way to live somehow with this is to start working somewhere to have this feeling of being helpful.
Gustavo: And Russia's invasion is nowhere near over.
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano, you're listening to "The Times," daily news from the LA Times. It's Monday, April 25th, 2022. Today, the stories of three Ukrainians who came to the aid of their country in its hour of greatest need.
Les: I can't say it was a hard decision actually, because it was really impulsive decision.
Gustavo: LA Times foreign correspondent Kate Linthicum has been talking to people in Ukraine since the war began. She joins us today to tell us about three of them: Olimpia, Galina and Les.
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Kate, welcome to "The Times."
Kate: Thank you.
Gustavo: Millions of people have left Ukraine in the last few months in search of safety, but millions more have stayed. And you recently wrote a story about some of these people. What did you learn in talking with them?
Kate: I think what I learned is how war can transform a person's life overnight and how it has transformed the lives of most of Ukraine's, you know, 40 million people. These are people who were doing regular, every day jobs and who now have taken on these amazing heroic roles and it's coming from the sense of duty, I think. Nationalism, Ukrainian nationalism has been really strong in recent years, you know, really ever since the Soviet Union broke up there's been kind of this ever-growing sense of what it means to be Ukrainian. We had protests related to this several years ago and when Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time, in 2014, you saw, sort of, this big upsurge of, of Ukrainian pride at that point as well. So these are people who care deeply about their country, who care deeply about their identity, who feel really pissed off that Putin has invaded them and who want to find ways to be useful.
Gustavo: And those who have stayed to help defend their country, just reading your story, their stories are just so incredible, like Olimpia's. Who is she and how did you meet her?
Kate: Yeah, so Olimpia Whitemustache is a DJ in Kyiv.
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Olimpia: Hello. I hear you. Do you hear me?
Kate: I met her through this queer activist I had been interviewing for another story.
Kate: How are you?
Olimpia: It's fine.
Kate: And he described her to me as, like, the "it" girl of Kyiv.
Olimpia: I often attended social events. I went to restaurants with my friends.
Kate: You know, she's super beautiful, like modelesque, 33 years old, has kind of a Snow White look, like, striking blonde hair. And she had a very luxurious life. She DJ'ed for, like, fashion events.
Olimpia: Events like Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel in Kyiv and so on, a lot of these events.
Kate: And was a muse for artists.
Olimpia: Now, of course, has been put on hold.
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Kate: Now, life looks very different.
Gustavo: So why did Olimpia decide to stay in Kyiv? I mean, given that she was a popular DJ…she probably could’ve gone anywhere…
Kate: So the morning of February 24th bombs start dropping across Ukraine in Kyiv. Olimpia and her husband, you know, wake up before dawn, realize they're at war.
Olimpia: Yes, and we started to get ourself ready to run away anywhere because…
Kate: And their first instinct actually is to get in the car and start driving west.
Olimpia: We sat in our car and, uh, drive, drove to other city of Ukraine…
Kate: They start trying to escape to Poland or other, you know, parts in Western Ukraine that are safe. We saw those really striking images from those early days of the war, where you just had thousands of people in cars waiting in these snaking lines, basically trying to escape.
Olimpia: We drove for two hours and then returned and came back to Kyiv because we realized that it's not possible for us because...
Kate: They realized they couldn't leave. Their family is in Kyiv. Their friends are in Kyiv. It's their city. It's their place.
Olimpia: If we would come to some other city where it's not so dangerous, we will think all the time that we left our family in Kyiv, that we left people in Kyiv and that we don't do nothing.
Kate: Olimpia told me, you know, they would've felt terrible if they had been in a really safe place and, and watching the people they love be in this place that was bombed. And so they turned right around and went back to the war zone.
Gustavo: And now Olimpia works at an emergency center, answering calls about people missing or killed in the war.
Kate: Yeah, Olimpia works at Ukraine's emergency call center. So this is the number you call if you have a family member or another loved one who has gone missing, who has died. This is the line people call when they need really serious help when they're in a really bad situation.
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Olimpia: So I'm like an ear of war here. So I listen a lot of stories about the people who disappeared in this bad times.
Kate: She spends like 14 hours a day answering calls on this hotline.
Olimpia: 300 calls every minute, or like. A lot of military boys or girls disappeared and, um, they are relatives calls to find them.
Kate: She told me the story of one woman who lived in the city of Irpin, which is near Kyiv, and was one of these places that just suffered a terrible onslaught from the Russians at the beginning of the war.
Olimpia: I remember it because of the voice of this woman.
Kate: The woman had been there with her son. Her son was killed by the Russians. In her desperation to flee she couldn't take his body with her, so she ended up leaving him in the bathtub in the bathroom.
Olimpia: And she called to ask her for help to bring this body of her son to, to her.
Kate: So she could give her son a proper burial.
Olimpia: Why I remember the story; she didn't cry, but she spoke with such voice, like she have nothing in her life anymore.
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Kate: Olimpia told me this was not the most horrific story she had heard, but that she remembered this one because of the way the mother's voice sounded.
Olimpia: She's so cold. Her voice was so cold. She spoke like robot.
Kate: And Olimpia said she would never forget it.
Gustavo: What has that transition from being a fashion DJ to now hearing these stories as an emergency worker; what has it been like for Olimpia?
Kate: I think she's trying to learn how to, kind of, take on all these really difficult stories and return to her regular life at the end of the day. She says that she's falling asleep. She often sees these, these scenes that she's heard describe play across her eyes, basically.
Olimpia: It's like a record in my head sometimes. I have my own movie, my own horror movie, because I remember everything. I remember the names. I remember every situation in details. So I have a small room in my brain where I keep all the stories for life. I don't know.
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Kate: That sounds incredibly difficult.
Olimpia: Yeah, it's difficult, but uh, one day I understood that I just need to do it, because somebody needed to do it and I need to help people…
Kate: But she does try to find beauty. She tries to stay optimistic.
Olimpia: Actually, I still try to do my hair and I try to dress well every day even though…
Kate: She still puts on cool outfits because fashion was, was kind of her passion before this. And she tells me that when she can find flowers, she buys flowers, kind of anything to remind her that life is not only war.
Olimpia: Sometimes I ask myself, even if I can return to creativity after the war. I stand, for example, in the bathroom and I think about this. I answer myself that I still want beauty around me.
Gustavo: Coming up after the break, how one woman went from teaching English to cooking meals for hundreds of people each day.
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Gustavo: Welcome back. Kate, before the break, we met Olimpia Whitemustache, a DJ who now answers emergency calls about the missing. You also spoke to Galina, who is she?
Kate: Her name is Galina Batozska.
Galina: Hi again.
Kate: She's super funny, super down to earth.
Galina: I will just find some place; quiet place.
Kate: Mother of two; just a really good-natured, good-humored person.
Galina: So I’m ready.
Kate: Thank you so much for talking...
Kate: Before the war, she was an English teacher, but once bombs started falling across Ukraine, she lost her students overnight. And anyway, she said she really didn't feel like teaching at that moment.
Galina: No way. I felt so empty inside that I couldn't give any energy to my students. You know, when you are empty inside, you cannot teach.
Kate: You know, when, when everyone in Ukraine was glued to their devices, trying to figure out what it meant to be under attack.
Gustavo: And what does she do now?
Kate: So she said she was going crazy for a few days at home, kind of scrolling through social media feeds.
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Galina: I was nervous. I was frustrated. I was crying. I was scared of future. And I realized that the only way to live somehow was this is to start working, to have this feeling of being helpful.
Kate: So, she decided to volunteer. So she found an opportunity in, like, a cafe near her house to cook for police officers, for soldiers, for people at a hospital nearby.
Galina: My young colleagues who are, I don't know, 18, 19, 20 years old, they are singing some Ukrainian songs and I never hear the sounds of war when I'm inside.
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Kate: So she goes to this cafe every day and peels potatoes and cooks soup and borscht and stews.
Galina: So now I can peel and cut potatoes now very quickly. I mean, the very big sack of potatoes now is not frightening for me at all. I know that I can do the job within two hours, really. So I can peel it and then I cut it and then our chef, she cooks just, you know, potatoes with some meat and carrots and onions.
Kate: And they feed like 500, 700 people each day.
Galina: So I just asked myself if I could feed 100 people. Now, I am absolutely sure that I can, uh, we cook for...
Gustavo: Sadly, this isn't Galina's first experience with war, she's originally from Donetsk.
Kate: Right. Her story is it's such an important reminder that this war between Russia and Ukraine didn't start on February 24th. It really started in 2014 when these pro-Russian separatists started fighting in Ukraine's east and it created tons of refugees and among them was Galina and her family.
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Galina: And that was the first time when I realized and felt what it meant to be a refugee.
Kate: She had lived in the east and when the fighting got so bad there, she, her mother, her husband, their cat moved to Kyiv and tried to start over.
Galina: Just to flee the place you live, it was horrible.
Kate: It made her realize she didn't want to be a refugee again.
Galina: You know, you cannot flee every time. It's just impossible.
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Galina: You can compare it with a plant, which was just taken out from the soil and it doesn't have any roots because the roots they left in the soil.
Kate: So she decided not to leave when fighting broke out this time.
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Kate: I mean, Galina is someone who is funny, capable, smart. And yet she described just the total challenge of starting over in a new place. Um, particularly at her age, she was in her fifties when she first moved to Kiev. Now she's 62.
Galina: Can I start a new life somewhere? I don't know. Hypothetical maybe, yes, but practically not.
Kate: She said she simply can't imagine fleeing to Poland or to Germany or any of the places where the 5 million people who have left Ukraine have ended up and trying to start a new life. She basically said, I'd rather be here, you know, listening to bombs than having to restart my life yet again.
Gustavo: I'm sure all of this is just taxing on her.
Kate: Yeah, I mean, you could absolutely hear it in her voice. You know, she's been basically at war for eight years now. Her sons are now volunteering with Ukraine's war effort. One son is spiriting supplies to the front lines. Another is working with journalists, actually, who are covering the war. She's exhausted. And she said this one thing that I can't stop thinking about, which is…
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Galina: I want to feel relaxed. But all these eight years, I haven't been relaxed.
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Galina: I like this feeling of being relaxed so much. It's the feeling, you know, when you're lying on the beach, for example, watching the sea. And I know that there are a lot of people who have this feeling, not only on the beach, but they live, they spend their lives, they live with this feeling. But… it's not us, unfortunately.
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Gustavo: After the break, a student bringing supplies to the frontlines.
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Gustavo: And we're back with my LA Times colleague Kate Linthicum. And Kate, before the break, we met Galina Batozska, an English teacher now volunteering as a prep cook. And you also spoke to another Ukrainian, Les. Who is he and how did you meet him?
Kate: Yeah, Les Yakymchuk is a 29-year-old director/videographer who was studying in Ohio.
Les: Hi. Hi again.
Kate: I met him through a journalist friend who has Ukrainian roots and who knew Les from his stint in the U.S. So, Les is this really energetic // passionate young man who was very excited to be studying in the U.S., kind of a dream come true.
Les: So we had some plans. We had, um, teaching and studying in university, some probably career.
Kate: That was what was happening when Russia invaded on February 24th.
Les: But now we dropped everything to go here, to come back to our families and friends and to help with all this.
Gustavo: So he was in the U.S., how did he make his way back to Ukraine?
Kate: So he made what he describes us as a pretty rash, pretty emotional decision to leave the safety of the United States and return to Ukraine.
Les: And when you have your mom in the city bombed by Russians and occupied by Russians, you have no possibility to make a rational decision.
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Les: How, like, in the hell, you can make a rational decision in such conditions? It's, it's impossible because you're staying in Ohio 3000 miles from Ukraine and you don't know what's going on there in Kyiv, it's first day of war, you have some connection to your mom through the Facebook or something, some messenger or WhatsApp, and then that's it. And then my mom isn't answering...
Kate: He makes this decision to go back. He said the gravity of what he had decided really struck him as he was crossing the border from Poland into Ukraine.
Les: Because when I crossed the border, I understood that there is no turning back for me as, as a man, because I'm a conscripted, so I can't leave the country now.
Kate: Shortly after the war started Ukrainian President Zelensky issued this decree that said, if you're a man in Ukraine of fighting age, you're not allowed to leave.
Les: Well, this condition of being here without any chance to leave the country, this is huge tension.
Kate: So by entering Ukraine, you know, Les was essentially locking himself in. There was no turning back.
Les: But it was right. I have no regrets about that.
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Gustavo: So what's Les doing now?
Kate: So before he left Ohio, some friends started bringing him like medical kits and he ferried those with him all the way to Europe. And once he got to Ukraine, he took them to some friends who were on the frontlines and he said he was really shocked once he arrived there because the soldiers had very, very little supplies.
Les: We have a lot of soldiers now because it's a huge war, so everybody's conscripted. So, yesterday they were all civilians, but now they're in territorial defense, so they don't have any supplies. I'm not talking about like guns or something, even, clothes or helmets, or...
Kate: In some cases they really lacked sufficient medical supplies.
Les: So I decided to help with the supplies.
Kate: So he started using his connections in the U.S. and in other European cities to get the supplies that he needed. So he has this massive network at this point of volunteers who bring supplies to Poland. He helps them get this stuff to Poland. Then he has someone carry them across the border. He brings them to his apartment in Kyiv. And from there...
Les: We here deliver it to the frontline, like driving there, physically to people meeting some military soldiers and giving them all that medical supplies for safe kits, tourniquets, etc.
Kate: He and other volunteers, like, literally put them in their car and drive through war zones to the frontlines to deliver them directly to soldiers.
Gustavo: Gustavo: And these supply lines that Les and the other volunteers are running from major cities…how dangerous is this kind of work?
Kate: It's very dangerous work delivering this to the frontlines. Recently, Les had given a load of supplies to a couple of friends who were driving to meet some soldiers. They were on the highway when a missile struck and it killed them immediately.
Les: And then the next day I heard that they didn't deliver anything cause they're dead.
Kate: Les found out about this when he, you know, got a call from the frontlines saying that your supplies haven't arrived.
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Les: I have a few friends on the frontline. And I'm really worrying about them everyday.
Gustavo: Two months in, what does Les think about his country’s future?
Kate: He struggled to answer that question, actually. He's very worried about, kind of, the long-term effects of the war, just from a trauma perspective on him and other people doing this kind of work.
Les: I'm just worrying that I'm going to have like some consequences, like mentally after this, I have to go to a therapist or something.
Kate: He does think Ukraine will prevail eventually.
Les: I know that we will win this war. We already won this war actually, uh, mentally and culturally, but the only thing, I just don't want more people to die on this war.
Kate: But I think he has a pretty realistic understanding that it's going to be a really long, bloody painful slog until then.
Les: The war has not ended. That's something everybody has to know, yet sometimes Ukranians is already starting to talk about the end of the war. I would not say that it's, it's the right thing to think.
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Gustavo: Finally, Kate, we've highlighted three, every-day Ukrainians who have been completely transformed. What does Ukrainian society look like right now?
Kate: I mean, Ukraine has changed in such dramatic ways over the last eight weeks. You know, 5 million Ukrainians have left the country. Something like 7 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced.
Kate: And Les had sort of an interesting perspective on how Ukraine has changed and what it's going to look like going forward. He said that in this country, where in the past you had teachers and bakers and doctors and taxi drivers, now it feels like there's just three types of people.
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Les: One category is soldiers. Some of my friends are soldiers that are fighting. Second category is the volunteers who are riding to places, buying stuff and evacuating people, getting supplies, delivering and so on. And third part of our society is people who earning money, actually for that. They're earning money and sending it to volunteers to buy stuff to the soldiers. So everybody's working in this process.
Kate: Everyone virtually is uprooted. Everyone's lives are really different now. But one thing I heard over and over as I talked to folks was there is this new sense of unity, of Ukrainian pride and Ukrainian identity. And that was for a lot of the people I spoke to, a bit of a silver lining.
Les: The only thing we have to do is to hold on. That's what we doing successfully. That we are suffering through this terrible, terrible chapter in our history, but look at us, you know, we are helping each other through it and we hope that we can emerge stronger because of it.
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Gustavo: Kate, thank you so much for this conversation.
Kate: Thank you.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of "The Times," daily news from the LA Times. Tomorrow, big tobacco is using black trauma to promote its products. Kasia Broussalian was jefe on this episode and our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia, Ashlea Brown, Angel Carreras, and David Toledo. Our engineer is Mario Diaz. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan.
Gustavo: Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. Like what you're listening to? Then make sure to follow "The Times" on whatever platform you use. And, hey, we want your feedback, so call or text (619) 800-0717, (619) 800-0717.
Gustavo: Tell us who you are, what you think of our show. Thanks in advance, and of course me, I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadre, gracias.