”We are all Ukrainians!”, says a woman who was passing on the sidewalk of Second Avenue when she saw, on the door of a building, posters asking for support for Ukraine and denouncing the invasion led by Vladimir Putin.
With about 150,000 immigrants or descendants, New York is the city with the largest Ukrainian community in the United States, estimated today at 1 million.
Real estate speculation has reduced the number of shops and restaurants frequented by immigrants and descendants in Little Ukraine, in the East Village, south of the island of Manhattan. But as soon as Russian bombs began to fall, the area became the scene of protests and demonstrations of solidarity.
The community anchor in the Village is St. George, a Byzantine-style temple attached to the Catholic school of the same name. The church has hosted Brazilian priests from the large Ukrainian community in southern Brazil, the most recent being Cyril Iszezuck, a native of Roncador, who consoled parishioners in a low voice as a woman read prayers in Ukrainian into a microphone.
The priest says he can barely explain the experience of the last few days. “All of us are feeling a great pain in our hearts, even we, who are not Ukrainians by birth, have love for our country, we are binational.”
Father Cyril does not comment on Jair Bolsonaro’s trip to Moscow or the statements of support for Putin, but he says he believes the president has shown determination to help Ukraine.
On weekends, families who go to Mass often fill two Ukrainian restaurants close to the church. The quiet evening in one of them was interrupted by noisy young people, all employees of a company that does business with Ukrainian traders.
Jennifer Lee, at the head of a long table, says there are no Ukrainians in the group, who have never been there before. “We chose the restaurant to show solidarity with our partners,” she said, as colleagues ordered shots of Ukrainian horseradish vodka and studied the menu with typical dishes like varenike, a dumpling, and borsch, a beetroot soup. .
But Little Ukraine’s main attraction remains the revered Veselka on Second Avenue and 9th Street, which opened in the 1950s. The line on the sidewalk is long. While they wait, strangers chat — not about the menu, but about the war.
The place is a legendary hangout for bohemians and its menu is so coveted that, in a scene from the last season of the series “Billions”, a character promises to send for pasta snacks from Veselka for his brokers to work all night.
The restaurant has been operated by the same family for three generations. The current owner, Jason Bichard, is a Ukrainian citizen, as are many of the employees, who use the site to coordinate donations for affected families, inside and outside Ukraine.
Nearby, the Ukrainian butcher is close to closing time, but the manager lets the story in. He can barely contain his outrage at the Russian invasion, but he doesn’t want to give his name or identify other employees whose families are in the Russian troops’ firing line. He only asks the press to tell the truth about the invasion.
Across the Hudson River, which separates New York and New Jersey, journalist Andrew Ninka attends to sheet by phone, three days after he managed to escape from Ukraine via Poland.
He is the editor-in-chief of two of the oldest Ukrainian publications in the US, Svoboda, founded in 1893, and the weekly Ukrainian Weekly, published since 1933. New Jersey has the second largest population of Ukrainian origin in this region, estimated at over 70 thousand.
Ninka was born in the United States but lived in Ukraine, where he covered the Orange Revolution in 2005. He says his small newsroom is trying to identify and list credible organizations to make financial and humanitarian aid actually reach those who need it. Ninka’s anguish is visible as he explains that he was convinced by relatives to leave as soon as the bombings began.
“They took me from Lviv to the border. I spent 24 hours on my feet and saw scenes of chaos that I won’t forget.”
