Effects of Ukraine-Russia war not too far from Southeast Texas

Even some 5,900 miles away from the front lines, two Southeast Texas residents found themselves directly affected by the war.

For Lamar University Development Officer Uliana Trylowsky, turning on the television that Feb. 24 morning overwhelmed her with fear.

"I was surprised," she said. "I think, even if you're looking at (the situation) and you're thinking, 'Oh my God, this is going to happen,' you still can't believe it's going to happen."

Trylowsky, 59, grew up in Canada, after her parents immigrated from western Ukraine. Her mother arrived in the Quebec City harbor on her ninth birthday in 1948 as her family escaped the rule of Joseph Stalin.

"My mother's father was a Uniate Catholic priest, and Stalin was killing all the priests. So, they had every intention to leave (Ukraine)," Trylowsky said. Trylowsky's paternal grandfather was a member of parliament in a party that opposed the Communists, necessitating his family's departure from Ukraine as well as the Soviets took over in the wake of World War II.

Trylowsky's parents ultimately built a life in Canada -- getting married and building a family. But the connection to their home country remained.

Shortly after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in December 1991, Trylowsky's father returned to his hometown.

"He was very inspired by this idea that Ukraine was going to be independent -- that Ukraine had an educated workforce, had resources, had intelligence," she said. "He was very excited about that."

While there, her father took note of the young people helping to build a new, democratic Ukraine and encouraged Trylowsky, who was then in her late 20s, to join in the effort.

"I was raised in a very Ukrainian family -- I speak Ukrainian and I speak Russian because I studied it," Trylowsky said. "So, I signed on with a Canadian volunteer group that was sending people like me over (to Ukraine) and giving us assignments. I was working in the Ministry of Culture, and they wanted to reach out to the West, and they didn't really (know how). A lot of them didn't know English, they needed somebody to write letters for them or help them do things."

Shortly after arriving in Ukraine, Trylowsky began working for Open Society Foundations where she met her eventual husband, Lamar University English and Modern Languages instructor and Beaumont native Jesse Doiron.

"That was kind of crazy because my grandmother, who was still alive at that point (in 1992), was excited that I was going to Ukraine because she thought I'd meet a nice Ukrainian man to marry," Trylowsky said. "She was very upset with me for meeting a Texan, but she got over it."

With Open Society Foundations, Trylowsky helped set up non-profit organizations in Ukraine to help unhoused and disabled people and address women's and minority issues, among other things. Trylowsky worked in Ukraine for just under three years before moving to Tbilisi, Georgia to set up a sector of the foundation in that country.

She and her now-husband ultimately came back to the United States before the turn of the century and have kept in touch with her Ukrainian relatives, a task made easier by social media. When war broke out last year, she reach out immediately -- eager to learn how she could help.

Though not Ukrainian and without a direct tie to the country, Lumberton native and KBMT Technical Director TJ Rodman, 40, had a similar reaction.

He knew he had to do something to help.

He was driving back from a work event in Houston when his Ukrainian friend Ari messaged him a year ago, writing, "They're shooting and there are bombs falling, I don't know what to do."

He immediately began researching how to assist Ukrainian aide organizations while still stateside, but ultimately, he knew he wanted to do something more.

Rodman left Texas at the end of April 2022, spending a week in Poland before heading to eastern Ukraine where he remained until early May. The volunteer group he worked with was based out of Kyiv, and they spent divided their time between Kyiv and Dnipro at the southern end of the Dnieper river, some 3 to 5 kilometers from the front line.

"Originally, I was going to spend about a week in a town right on the border of Poland and Ukraine...but plans changed once I got there," Rodman said. The volunteer group Rodman was originally slated to work with in Europe dissolved. So, Rodman connected with another group that was partnered with various non-governmental organizations.

"I ended up going into Kyiv and started getting more into logistics of people moving, supply moving. mainly focused on pulling people (out) who couldn't care for themselves -- elderly people, young people, injured people -- away from the front line into Dnipro," he said. "From there, we would decide if they were going to be moved to the westernmost cities in Ukraine to stage them there, find other places for them to go, to receive medical treatment, move them from there into Poland or to refugee camps or find sponsorships to go to Canada or another country."

Rodman was then connected with another logistics group where he focused on "high-intensity extraction" situations, finding groups of people closer to the fighting that needed to be evacuated.

It's been nine months since Rodman returned from Ukraine, but he still finds some of his experiences difficult to talk about.

"It's kind of hard to put into words, because I've never really had any experience in violent or explosive environments," he said. "The people that we ended up helping, a lot of them were elderly. We hear a lot in the United States that when a natural disaster happens, the elderly communities will suffer the most. (There was a) retirement community in Izium (in Kharkiv Oblast, one of the hardest-hit regions of Ukraine) that was essentially abandoned by the workers. (But) the community around them really came together to take care of them until we could get people in there to load them on ambulances and get them out."

Going from a relatively peaceful environment in Southeast Texas to a war-torn country was difficult to adapt to, Rodman said.

"Here, we just go about our daily lives and then drop down in the middle of a city like Kyiv where everything opens up at 7 a.m., everything closes at 7 p.m. -- they're on a very strict curfew," he said. "You hear the sirens going off for 10 to 12 hours a day. You'll see Russian jets fly over, you'll hear explosions in the distance."

Rodman experienced bullets buzzing past him, sounding like bees. A bullet even ricocheted off a nearby wall, striking his body armor.

"I think the hardest part about coming back here (was that) I've been told that I'm a Nazi sympathizer or that I'm a 'war tourist,'" he said. "To go over there and experience some of the things I did and come back and be (trolled) for it...that has been the hardest part about it because I didn't go over there for attention. I didn't go over there for accolades or anything like that. This was something that I legitimately felt like I needed to do."

Throughout her childhood and prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, Trylowsky recalls periodically keeping up with news coming out of Ukraine, noting that it was hard to maintain communication with relatives.

"My grandparents had some relatives that they would write to, but the mail was always being intercepted," she said. "When Ukraine became independent and my dad went back and my mom went with him in the summer...they were seeing relatives that they hadn't seen since they left when they were kids -- seeing people you hadn't seen in 40, 50 years."

Now, with the relative ease of communication through social media, Trylowsky maintains a much more stable line of communication with her relatives, who still live around Lviv, in western Ukraine.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Trylowsky immediately started contacting them.

"I started reaching out to family and friends, (asking), 'What are you guys thinking, what are you guys doing, what are people out there saying?'" she said. "Soon after that, I started thinking, 'What do I do, how do I help?'"

Relatives from the same generation as Trylowsky or older are adamant about not leaving Ukraine, while some younger residents have chosen to leave, moving to Poland or other countries.

"The younger generation is leaving only because their kids are little, and they want to keep them safe," Trylowsky said. "And the older generation, (is saying) 'I'm not leaving. This is my home. This is my country. I'm not going anywhere. If they want to bomb me, so what? Bomb me.' It's hard. I can't even imagine what it must be like."

Trylowsky got in contact with her friend Ella, from Kherson, who was working to support women and children escaping the conflict zone.

"(I had to find out) how do you send money to Ukraine?" she said. "Western Union. I had to figure out quickly how to do that and started sending her money. (My husband) was like, 'This isn't going to be over in a day, you need to calm down and think of what you're really going to do.' But it was a panic."

As the then-Rotary Club of Beaumont Vice President, Trylowsky worked with then-president Brad Brown to raise money. They connected with the Rotary Club in Lviv, raising about $70,000 and were partial supporters of two fire trucks that were sent to Ukraine.

"That was pretty cool," she said. "I felt really good about that."

To say the least, the experience in Ukraine was life-changing for Rodman.

"When I got back I was officially diagnosed with (posttraumatic stress disorder) based off of the experienced that I had there," he said. "Going to some of these places (such as Bucha) and seeing these things that happened to innocent people that were just trying to go about their daily lives and all of a sudden it's ground to a halt. There are times (since I've been back) that I would hear a loud noise and hit the ground. It's getting a little bit better through talking with my therapist and some counselors and things like that. And my friends have been really great about it. It is a life-changing experience, but at the end of the day, at the drop of a hat I would go back over there and do it again."

As time has moved on, Trylowsky said she believes continuing to talk about the war in Ukraine and making people aware that it is still going -- the best way she can contribute to the cause.

People may think that because they don't have a direct connection to Ukraine, that they don't necessarily need to care about whether certain parts of the country are getting bombed, Trylowsky said. But, the importance of the war is about the "stability of the world order."

"If you have a madman (Russian President Vladimir Putin), who is controlling a big country that has a lot of resources, a lot of people, he can throw a lot of bodies as cannon fodder and leave them lying there because he doesn't care," she said. "He's not working on a moral compass, so he's not going to stop. He's not going to stop at Ukraine. If we believe in democracy and the right of countries to exist, why would we just let this person, this corrupt system, take over countries and in essence, dictate what is the right way for the world to operate?"

Rodman said it will take the global community to stand up to Putin.

"If we don't stand up to the actual villains in the world like Vladimir Putin, who is just doing this for some self-serving grandiose need for one last push to put that Russian Federation back together, then it's going to spread," Rodman said. "We're going to see the same things that we saw in Bucha, Mykolaiv, Izium, and a lot of these other cities in Ukraine where young, innocent people are getting slaughtered. That's going to spill into Poland, Moldova, etc. We have to make this stand right here, right now."

Rodman still maintains some communication with members of various volunteer groups and does what he can to offer help. His aforementioned friend, Ari, who lived in Kharkiv, made it safely to Odesa, Ukraine where she now has a waitressing job. Rodman says he still speaks with her frequently.

Unfortunately, Trylowsky said she doesn't believe the war will end any time soon.

"(Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy has every right to say this. He's saying 'We're not giving in until (the Russians) are all gone, out of (Ukraine),'" Trylowsky said. "He has every right to say that. But, that means that you're committing to a long, protracted battle because Russia is a big country. It has a lot of resources, it has a lot of people, it can continue this battle."

Trylowsky encourages people, particularly Americans, to understand Ukraine's history with Russia to provide context to the current war.

"When people say, 'Wow, we're so amazed that Ukrainians are so brave and so willing to fight,' and it's like, well, that's because Ukraine has been being bombarded for hundreds and hundreds of years, being mistreated...it's a long-standing feud," Trylowsky said. "The other thing people need to understand is what Putin really is -- this man is evil. For him to say Ukraine never existed and Ukrainians never existed, that's completely a fabrication of his mind. But I think people don't realize what he is all about and he is an evil person. And there's no negotiating with a person like that."

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, Ukraine has a long road ahead of itself, regardless of the outcome, Trylowsky said.

"You've got a generation of (people) that are traumatized, totally psychologically traumatized that somehow have to rebuild their lives," she said. "You've got military veterans that have (posttraumatic stress disorder), that have amputations -- you've got entire cities and towns and villages just destroyed. You have nowhere to live, your economy is in shambles...after all of that ends, you still have such a long time to try and rebuild. It's like World War II in Germany."

The effects on Ukrainians will last for generations, just as previous conflicts have, Trylowsky said.

"My maternal grandfather was raised by his grandmother because his brother was in a partisan army fighting against the Soviets and he was killed in a battle. And because they found out who he was, they sent his mother to Siberia," she said. Trylowsky's former boss, Bohdan, still alive in his 70s, had almost his entire family sent to Siberia.

"You have all these people that were traumatized and abused by the KGB, the Soviet system," she said. "They're just working through all of that, they're processing that, they're happy that their children and grandchildren are in a nice world. And now this. It's a generational trauma and abuse by Russia."

One thing is obvious to Rodman: Ukrainians are strong.

"We went through (Tropical Storm) Harvey and all these devastating hurricanes -- take that attitude that Southeast Texas had during the recovery efforts and the aftermath efforts of those hurricanes and multiply it by maybe 50 times," he said. "That's what your normal person in Ukraine has, and that's an entire country that feels that way. (Ukrainians) have this amazing sense of national pride that's wrapped up in the individuality of the people who live there."

olivia.malick@hearst.com

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