People in Ukraine are finding unexpected support from around the globe — including Portland’s Slavic community
In a thick Russian accent, Mikhail Mitkov-Baklanovsky explains how the round adhesive bandage he’s just pulled from a cardboard box will keep a lung from collapsing after a bullet pierces it. As he speaks, he’s standing next to a small mountain of medical and military supplies he’s stockpiled in a small room off his lower-level den. The bandage will adhere through dirt, blood and sweat, he says, and the valve in the center will allow the punctured lung to breathe.
His wife, Tatyana Putra, points out that the wound dressing they’ve purchased is very special.
“It’s made of crab shells so it stops bleeding — in three minutes,” she says.
Mitkov-Baklanovsky is a Russian descendant and native of Ukraine. He attended high school in Donetsk, a Ukrainian city now occupied by pro-Russian separatists that, in many areas, has been reduced to rubble. He and his wife met while attending college in the south of Ukraine, and they immigrated to Portland with their children in 1992. He’s worked as a software project manager, and she runs a custom drapery shop in North Portland.
Since September, the couple has shipped more than $100,000 worth of medical and nonlethal military supplies from donors in Portland to the Ukrainian army and other groups fighting alongside it. Volunteers in Ukraine tell them what is needed, and then they send it — everything from splints and bandages to a $7,500 pair of refurbished night-vision binoculars.
Their 23-year-old son, Nick Mitkov, contributes by spray-painting camouflage patterns on black generic kneepads on the front lawn of their Southwest Portland home.
This family is not alone in its efforts. In Portland, Vancouver and other U.S. cities with large Slavic populations, grassroots contributions to Ukraine have been considerable. Locally, organizers report tens of thousands of donors.
Portland-based Medical Teams International, in collaboration with Ukrainian-American Cultural Association, is shipping 28 pallets of medical supplies to Kiev this week, including bandages, syringes, walkers and wheelchairs, says MTI spokeswoman Angie Allee. Many other local supporters send individual packages directly to friends and family.
“The old women send jars of borscht,” Putra says.
UACA board member Tatiana Terdal says Portland’s Ukrainian community is very diverse, with members of different ethnicities, first languages and faiths.
“What unites us is love of Ukraine and support for Ukraine. Russian propaganda has tried to portray the war in Ukraine as a civil war rather than the war of Russian aggression,” she says. “Many of the members of the local Ukrainian community are first-generation Americans who grew up during the days of the Soviet Union, remember it well and don’t want to go back to those days. Since most of us have close families in Ukraine, we don’t wish the return of the Soviet Union for them and support their struggle for democratic future.”
At last count, the Coalition of Communities of Color estimated that in 2011 there were about 22,000 Slavic immigrants — which includes Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Bosnians, Bulgarians and Croats — in Multnomah County.
Over a hot cup of Russian tea and a mound of colorfully wrapped Ukrainian candies, Mitkov-Baklanovsky expresses how he felt he had to do something when the conflict broke out in his homeland.
“It really scared me,” he says. “If you do nothing, you feel much more worse than if you do something.”
The first thing he says he did was write a couple of songs; he’s been known to play his guitar while the family parrot, Tony, chirps along on his shoulder. But soon his efforts turned to supporting the Ukrainian military.
And it hasn’t been easy. In order to get around steep bribes charged by corrupt Ukrainian customs agents, Mitkov-Baklanovsky says he’s relied on strangers he met via Facebook to transport truckloads of supplies from London to Kiev — a nerve-wrecking solution.
“He could not sleep that first night,” Putra says. But to their relief, every shipment has reached its destination thus far.
Most of the supplies he has sent were purchased from SAM Medical Products, a U.S. military supplier. The company, based in Wilsonville, has also donated free supplies to Mitkov-Baklanovsky and offers him a discount on items he purchases, says Corina Bilger, SAM’s director of global sales. She says Mitkov-Baklanovsky has bought “very large quantities” from them.
“He is the sweetest man in the world,” she says. “He’s practically buying our products and then giving them away.”
Putra explains the Ukrainian army is weak, and many fighters are volunteers.
“It’s just boys from the country. They have no military training,” Putra says. “A lot of casualties in Ukrainian army now is from their own weapons.”
In addition to an ill-equipped military, medical clinics and government agencies are unable to properly house and care for more than 1 million displaced Russians and Ukrainians who have fled from war-torn cities in the east.
Dimitry Mishchuk’s Portland-based nonprofit, Giving Hope, was founded in 2013 to create a children’s home in Ghana. The Ukraine native says that when the conflict broke out, he “knew the need was great and urgent.” Giving Hope began to collect and crowd-fund donations for the effort. With the support of churches and other community groups, his organization has sent five 40-foot containers filled with clothing, linens, toys and medical supplies to volunteers and churches in Ukraine that are helping the refugees. His goal is to send eight more containers by the end of 2015.
“There are medical clinics in Ukraine that haven’t gotten any new equipment in over 20 years,” he says.
Mishchuk says the generosity of American churches and local businesses has helped the effort immensely, with Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods donating grain and other food, DoubleTree Central Laundry donating a truckload of linens, and Providence Hospital donating medical supplies and offering financial assistance.
Small trucking company Brothers Express hauls containers full of donated items to the Port of Seattle for send-off, free of charge.
“It’s not only brought together the Slavic community in Portland, Vancouver and Ukraine; the local community is working together more,” Mishchuk says. “Before everyone was kind of grouped by religion and beliefs, but now everyone — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, non-believers — it’s brought everyone together. I’ve never seen it in Portland before.”
Giving Hope is also sending aid to help with the evacuation of people stranded in war-torn areas.
“Most of the people left in the cities are elders and women with small children. Everyone who was able-bodied left, either to Russia or to fight, or they left a long time ago,” Mishchuck says. “Many people are stuck living in basements. There are mothers and children whose husbands abandoned them. We are helping to evacuate people who are willing to evacuate.”
For those who have already fled war-torn areas, there are other problems.
“People are sleeping in railroad cars. Local and official governments can’t do anything for them because of their lack of preparedness,” he says. “There are areas where they have no electricity, no water, no heat — and it’s still freezing over there.”
He says his organization is not taking sides.
“The goal is to help people in need, and both sides are suffering,” he says.
“People need to understand the peace agreement is on paper, but it’s not being upheld. There is shooting on an hourly basis, and people are living in constant fear. The humanitarian crisis is growing as we speak. Many people in the Ukraine grow their own food, and they can’t do that when there is shelling and bombing,” he says.
Since Street Roots spoke with Mishchuck, there have been multiple reports of an upsurge in fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Like many other Ukrainians who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, Mishchuck was escaping religious persecution. Both his father and his grandfather were jailed for their Protestant faith.
Just as much as the conflict has brought together Ukraine supporters, there is a divide in the local Slavic community between those who support Ukraine and those who support pro-Russian separatists.
Local Ukrainians who spoke with Street Roots all say Russian television stations are partly to blame for this difference in opinion. They say that they are more widely available in the U.S. than Ukrainian stations and that Russian President Vladimir Putin uses technology and media for propaganda against Ukraine.
“Parents and children — they fight over it because parents watch Russian TV and kids are just living their real lives,” says Putra, Mitkov-Baklanovsky’s wife. “So many divorces because wife is watching Russian soap opera and news and says Ukrainians are Nazis.” She and her husband say they have lost longtime friends over differences of opinion on the conflict. Their son says most people younger than him believe whatever their parents believe. He, too, has lost friends over the conflict.
While pro-Russian forces may be using television, Ukrainian supporters are using Facebook. It’s not only serving as a platform for organizing and sharing donation drop-off locations in Portland; it’s also how many U.S. citizens are connecting with volunteers in Ukraine. Social media, especially Facebook, played a significant role in organizing the 2013 protests in Kiev, the Kyiv Post reported.
“Thank God for Facebook,” says Vancouver resident and Ukrainian immigrant Mikhail Pavenko. The 28-year-old has used the site to solicit donations from people in Clark County, Wash. “(Ukrainian) kids are posting these things on Facebook that the whole world sees, and then we have people connecting from all over the world.”
He’s discovered through social media what supplies are needed and where.
“Ukraine was in shambles forever, they would post pictures of checkpoints, and these soldiers would be standing in Adidas with old AK-47 — I mean, they had nothing,” Pavenko says. He meets monthly with a group of about 40 other Clark County residents who are working to send relief and supplies to Ukraine.
He shared photos of supplies they’ve collected and presents for children at Christmas, clothing, potatoes and military uniforms. “Volunteers have dressed the army,” he says.
For him, the conflict hit close to home in June when two of his cousins were tortured and killed by pro-Russian separatists after being kidnapped from an Easter festival at their church in Slavyansk. He says he has fond childhood memories of playing with them at Sunday school and in his grandfather’s hayfields during summer vacations. They had remained in contact through the years, and even more so during the conflict. Neither of his cousins was politically involved in the conflict, but they were targeted because of their Protestant faith, he says.
Mitkov-Baklanovsky says he speaks regularly with soldiers fighting on the front lines.
“My friends, who are ethnically Russian and Russian speaking, are fighting for Ukraine. I speak to them through Skype, so I see the war real time,” he says.
He often Skypes with soldier Leonid Maslov. Maslov served in the Soviet Army 30 years ago, and he has since become a lawyer and mathematician. He left his family and life in Kharkov, in northeast Ukraine, to fight with the Ukrainian army after the conflict began last year. He corresponded with Street Roots via email about his choice to return to battle and how his American friend has helped his unit. His emails were translated from Russian to English.
“I did not abandon comfort and to risk my life out of any courageous effort, but from the fear of what might happen as a result of continued occupation of Ukraine,” he writes. “I do not want my wife and children to lose their freedom and lose Ukraine. I am ethnically Russian, but I do not want to live in Putin’s Russia — that would be worse than a death sentence. I can remember life in the communist Soviet Union all too well to understand that I never will go back there.”
He says the war with Russia began unexpectedly.
“The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine was definitely not ready for it,” he writes. “They still do not have the capability to provide first aid kits to the soldiers. But there was a miracle that no one was expecting! The Ukrainian army has been supported by volunteers, both locally and globally.”
He believes the medical supplies sent by Mitkov-Baklanovsky might just make his platoon the envy of other armies.
“Unfortunately, not all soldiers of Ukraine have such ultramodern medical goods, but somehow each soldier has a guardian angel as Mikhail,” Maslov writes. “Without such angels, defending our country would be impossible.”
emily@streetroots.org
