News this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin was ordering troops into eastern Ukraine made Yanina Nickless vomit, something she thought only happened in movies.
The 26-year-old lives in Old Orchard Beach but hails from a small farming village of around 200 in southern Ukraine where residents speak a dialect mixing the Ukrainian and Russian languages. She said the crisis was casting a “deep, dark cloud” over her life.
“I was so mad,” Nickless said. “I was sick to my stomach.”
She is one of the roughly 2,500 Mainers of Ukrainian ancestry who are closely watching the conflict with Russia, with several hoping that their country is not erased after the invasion. They also fear for Ukrainian family and friends who could be at risk in the event of an all-out war.
Nickless moved to Maine around five years ago to attend the University of Southern Maine, where she studied political science and was the student speaker at the 2019 commencement ceremony. After graduating, she settled in southern Maine with her husband but maintains an unbreakable tie to her home country.
Most Ukrainians had expected a Russian invasion at some point while the country gravitated from Russia and toward Europe in recent years, she said. There is an expectation that it could eventually join the European Union as well as the military alliance NATO. Those notions have long worried Russian leaders who see it as traditionally in its sphere of influence.
“I was born in an independent Ukraine,” Nickless said. “My generation is more prone toward Europe.”
The biggest shares of Ukrainian-American Mainers today are in Cumberland and Sagadahoc counties, where around 1 in 300 people report some Ukrainian ancestry. Soviet refugees from Russia, Ukraine and other regions formed a community opposed to communism in Richmond in the 1940s that swelled to more than 500 at one time. One Orthodox church remains there today.
Anna Stasiv, 39, of Yarmouth, a nurse practitioner, grew up in the western Ukraine city of Lviv before moving to the United States in 2000 to pursue an education. For her and many Ukrainians, Putin’s intentions are clear: He wants a return of the Soviet Union, where Ukraine was ostensibly a republic but major decisions were made in Moscow rather than Kyiv.
The tensions have caused Stasiv’s parents to cancel plans to visit her. That is not just because of an uncertain future, but national pride, she said.
“My parents are in their 70s, but they are ready to fight. They are not leaving the country if there’s a war,” Stasiv said. “They are patriots. That’s the spirit in the country right now.”
Nickless called her parents on Wednesday to ask how they were doing. Her mother cried. While Nickless hopes the U.S. can protect them from an invasion, she has no doubt her village would take up arms and fight the Russians if they came.
“Life is going on until it doesn’t,” Nickless said. “They just live their day-to-day life, and they are adjusting to it.”
Natasha Brewer, 50, of Presque Isle, grew up in Kyiv in Soviet Ukraine before moving to the U.S. after college in the 1990s. She lived in Caribou for some years with her late husband, who hailed from Aroostook County, before moving to Presque Isle.
She said people she knew across Aroostook had been supportive during the recent crisis. Given what is happening, they often ask her if she and her family who still lives in Ukraine are OK. But the question leaves her at a loss for words.
Brewer, a teacher, noted that the reasons behind the conflict were complex: Ukraine is a strategically located country with natural and agricultural resources, often called the “breadbasket of Europe.” But the real tragedy to her is how it has divided people that have so much in common culturally and had for so long existed peacefully side by side.
“Russia and us used to be like brothers and sisters,” Brewer said. “Now, seeing this, I feel like it’s a civil war.”