Local Ukrainians Mourn 3 Years Of War

Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine — and began a war that President Trump now falsely claims Ukraine started — 75 people gathered on George Street for a somber Sunday mass to try to figure out how best to support the country they love in such tumultuous times. 

Andrey Zinkchuk, a Yale ICU doctor and director of Doctors United for Ukraine, put the question most directly to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal at St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church on Sunday.

“What can we do now in the situation we’re in?” he asked.

Blumenthal’s appearance, which followed the mass, was at the church’s invitation. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had just returned from the Munich Security Conference, where Vice President J.D. Vance maintained that European democracies ​“must step up in a big way to provide for their own defense,” increasing concern that Washington may no longer come to the continent’s aid. 

The mass also took place amid a maelstrom of recent events that has President Donald Trump turning on Ukraine and embracing Russian leader Vladimir Putin following Russia’s full-scale invasion and three years of bloody warfare.

“The world leaders that I met with in Munich, they will stand with Ukraine because they know that Russian aggression there will eventually threaten them,” Blumenthal said on Sunday. ​“That’s why Poland and Finland and Sweden are standing with Ukraine, but America must do it as well.” 

The senator recalled his visit to the George Street church three years before when, he said, ​“Putin began a murderous assault on a free country with the tactics that have made him a war criminal.”

Since then, Blumenthal said he had been to Ukraine six times and had met with President Volodymyr Zelensky on multiple occasions. ​“He told me when I first saw him, just weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when they came within a few miles of his bunker, ​‘We will fight with pitchforks if we need to,’” he said. 

“I visited the mass grave site in Bucha,” Blumenthal continued, referring to the discovery of 116 bodies of those massacred by Russians behind a church in a Kyiv suburb in October 2022. ​“I saw the hospitals that have been bombed, the schools, the apartments that have been hit by Russian missiles and bombs, and I have seen the suffering, but I have also seen the resolve and courage of Ukrainians to continue this fight.”

He emphasized the strength and unity of the Ukrainian-American community. ​“Your voice and faces can move my colleagues if you reach out to them, whether by phone or email. We’re seeing that in town halls.” He encouraged attendees to attend a rally in Hartford that afternoon.

Anna Salemme, advocacy chair of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, Branch 108, amplified his message. ​“Don’t just reach out once and think you’re done,” she said. ​“Call, email every day.” 

Magdalena Bandyk Munley pointed out that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was previously a supporter of Ukraine. ​“Is there any expectation that he will continue that support or is he just a tool of Trump?” she asked.

Blumenthal said he met with Rubio in Munich, reminding him that he had been a supporter of Ukraine. ​“He said, ​‘I’m still a supporter,’ and I said, ​‘You need to be a supporter not just in words, but in action,’ and I will continue to remind him,” he said. 

“Marco Rubio should know that Munich in history is synonymous with appeasement,” he went on, in reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolph Hitler to turn over Sudetenland in exchange for Germany’s promise to abandon all other claims to nations on the continent; Hitler broke his word, ushering in World War II. ​“We know appeasement doesn’t work.” 

A man who introduced himself as a Vietnam War veteran said he had voted for Trump. ​“But when I heard that Zelensky has no right to engage in negotiations, that Zelensky is a dictator, are you kidding me?” he said, referring to plans for the United States and Russia to forge ahead on peace talks without Ukraine.

“You should be angry,” Blumenthal said. ​“Americans should be angry. To say Zelensky is a dictator, to say Ukraine started the war, that Ukraine should sacrifice its territory, and that it has no right to security, that’s un-American, in my opinion.” 

Blumenthal, ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said veterans across America have spoken of their admiration of the Ukrainian fighters. ​“They have taken drones that Americans said wouldn’t work and they are making a thousand drones a day to push back the Russians,” he said. ​“They are the most advanced fighters, the most inventive, and they are fighting against a country six times their size.” 

At the end of the day, the ICU doctor Zinchuk pointed out, ​“the issue of Ukraine is not a Democratic issue or a Republican one. What matters is that it’s an issue of freedom, of self-determination. Can people exist as they wish to exist? Can they have freedom of choice to be who they are? That is the ultimate question.” 

As parishioners filed out into the unseasonably warm February air, Lyudmyla Kobylyanska talked about her son Nicholas Gritsik, an Army veteran of the war in Iraq who came to the U.S. from Ukraine in 2002. 

“He feels very depressed at what the United States is doing now,” she said. ​“He is asking himself: What was the point of fighting for freedom in Iraq? Ukraine was free and wanted to be left alone. What does freedom even mean? 

“I have no answers for him,” she said.