Soon they were traveling alone, leaving behind family, friends, homes and schools, fleeing Russia’s deadly invasion of cities like Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv.

One sat for hours at the border with his father stalling his departure for as long as they could. The parents of another took just 30 minutes to decide to send her to America. She called home once she had landed in New York, to be reassured family was all right, only to hear bombing in the background. 

They are all safe now, all students at St. George Academy in New York City’s Little Ukraine neighborhood in the East Village. They feel comforted to hear a language they know, customs they cherish, grateful to have a future.

Still they yearn for home.

“My whole life is left in Ukraine,” said Victoria Luchkevych, 16. “Oh my God my heart is crashing because of Ukraine.”

But their lives move forward and even as they sort through their fears and try to focus on their studies, they must adjust to a new, faster paced life. 

“There is nothing like New York City in Ukraine,” said St. George Academy’s principal Andrew Stasiw, “other than Kyiv, and Kyiv is like a quarter of what New York City is.”

The 74 asked three of St. George Academy’s newest students to talk about their experiences of living through war and leaving their lives in Ukraine earlier this year:

Maksym Kosar

Maksym Kosar considers himself “lucky.” 

Because he had family in the U.S., money and papers, the 17-year-old could escape his war-ravaged town, Ivano-Frankivsk, in Western Ukraine. 

But coming to “the safe place,” America, wasn’t without heartbreak.

On the last day of February, Maksym reunited with his mother in New York, but days before he said goodbye to his home and his father, who drove him to the border of Poland. 

There, they parked and stalled his departure for hours — talking and rearranging Maksym’s small suitcase, editing which essentials would be coming with him.

“I just packed winter clothes for about three days and my electronics and chargers,” Maksym said.

With reassurance from his father, Maksym boarded a small bus driven by a Ukrainian firefighter and began his journey.

“[My father] just told me ‘you’re going to be good, safe. Call me whenever you can,’ and that’s it,” Maksym said quietly, carefully reciting the facts of their farewell, uncertain if he will ever have a return to Ukraine, to his father.

“I was more worried, not about myself,” Maksym said, “but the people who stayed behind me.”

He calls his dad when he can, although the time difference makes it hard. He’s also been able to keep up with friends, some of whom have been juggling constant chaos with online school and volunteering for the army. 

“Their minds get crazy because of the sirens,” he said. “They don’t get enough sleep. The conditions are pretty harsh.”

Victoria Luchkevych

Just a few weeks ago, Victoria Luchkevych was anxiously bracing for the relentless barrage of sirens in Ternopil, a small village-like city in Western Ukraine when her parents deliberated, in just 30 minutes, to send her to America.

She packed just two backpacks with clothes, books, her phone and headphones, and said goodbye to her parents, sister and brothers who didn’t have the documents to leave. Now, she’s in a country she doesn’t know and left as an infant, 4,500 miles from everything that matters to her.

“My whole life [is] left in Ukraine,” said Victoria. “My heart is left in Ukraine. Oh my God my heart is crashing because of Ukraine.”

Now, Victoria lives her life moving between her uncle’s apartment in Brooklyn and her cousin’s in Queens.

In Ukraine, her mom made her breakfast and drove her down the road to school each morning. Now she fends for herself each morning.

“It’s really hard because my uncle is busy, and so is my cousin, so I’m trying to cook for myself.” Victoria said. “And then it takes like an hour to get to school.”

Between her new schedule, immersing herself in her studies and the different time zones, there’s little time to talk to her family. But when she does, they paint a picture that all is fine — something Stasiw, the school principal, has noticed many Ukrainian family members doing. 

“When my wife calls her family in Ukraine they’re all very cheerful. They’re all very light because they don’t want her to worry,” Stasiw said.

“Dad usually just wants to know how my grades are,” Victoria said.

But often, it’s impossible for families to shield their kids from the truth. 

“It’s really hard not to be stressed because two days ago I talked to my dad and while I was talking to him they bombed my city.” said Victoria. “I heard the explosions in the background.” 

Marta Slaba

Marta Slaba, the youngest of the group at just 13, has lived through war and escaped to a new country — alone.

“It all happened so fast,” said the teenager from Western Ukraine’s largest city, Lviv. “I never traveled on my own and I never thought I’d do it so soon. It was very nerve wracking for me.”

Her dad stayed in Ukraine, even though, because he is over 60, he could have left. “Because he has two companies he doesn’t want to leave,” Marta said.

The two have a typically rocky relationship for a young teen and her father, but the circumstances of her departure, the war, not knowing when she will see him again, makes things even harder. 

“I hope I can see him soon,” she said. “He’s still my dad and I’ve had very good times with him.”

Her mother is staying in Germany, because it “would be too much money” to come with her to America.

Living now in her grandmother’s Little Ukraine apartment, Marta said her life is “pretty OK” and she’s “trying to keep it together.” But she longs for her family and friends who are now scattered across the world. 

When she does evade tricky time zone conflicts and gets her friends on the phone, they mostly talk about “normal things” like “what we’ve been watching.”

“We don’t really talk about the war,” Marta said. “It brings on negative energy and we don’t like that.”

She mused about home and what so many are wondering.

“I do wonder if somehow,” said Marta, “someday everything will stop in Ukraine and I can return.”

Someday, perhaps, their hearts will stop crashing because of Ukraine.

Videos edited by The 74’s Jim Fields

Wondering when life will return to normal in the States and abroad, they check social media for news of friends and loved ones, answer requests for cash from a relatively inexperienced yet robust civilian army and contemplate their return to the country they cherish. With no clear sense of the future, they pray for a quick resolution to the war while bracing for the possibility of a long and painful insurgency. Over the weekend, Russian troops retreated from their attempted assault on Kyiv, but what appeared to be a strategic victory quickly darkened with evidence that Russian forces had left in their wake.

Ukrainian national Marta Hulievska, 19 and a freshman at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, worries daily about her parents, with whom she speaks through WhatsApp. Her father has stayed behind in her hometown of Zaporizhzhia, eight and a half hours southeast of Kyiv, while her mother, two younger sisters and maternal grandmother fled to Lviv in early March. They’re staying with family in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment where, in an attempt at normalcy, they log onto their computers each day to continue with work and school. Hulievska’s mother is a law professor whose students struggle with unreliable internet in their own basements and bunkers. Her family’s efforts to carry on are frequently interrupted by sirens warning them to take cover. 

Sometimes, Hulievska said, they leave their building for a community shelter. Other times, they simply gather in the hallways — four adults and four children — hoping the walls can withstand a direct hit.

At least in the conflict and 2,038 have been injured as of April 2, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. But Intense fighting in areas such as Mariupol and Volnovakha and the newly discovered atrocities in Bucha outside Kyiv make it difficult to quantify the carnage.

More than Ukrainians have fled the country to date and millions more have been uprooted from their homes, but remain within its borders.

Yana Annette Lysenko, 27 and working toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature and Slavic studies at New York University, can relate to Hulievska’s worries. She fears for her aunt, uncle and cousin who fled to the outskirts of Kyiv weeks ago but have not been heard from since.

“I don’t know if their phones aren’t working or if something really bad happened,” said Lysenko. “No one can call them — even family members in Ukraine.”

William Risch, a history professor at Georgia College in Milledgeville, lived in the country for four years. He’s maintained friendships with the Ukrainian students who have passed through his classroom as well as the scholars, historians and activists he met there while researching a book on the beleaguered nation.

He recently joined a Facebook group that serves as a resource for those searching for missing or evacuated loved ones. It also lists the dead.

The professor does not yet know what happened to a who studied at his school in 2017 and who was, weeks ago, heading a territorial defense battalion defending the airport at Vasylkiv. The airport has been destroyed by the fighting.

“I did ask a friend who knows him more to tell me any updates,” Risch said. “I have not gotten any.” 

He takes heart in what little information he can find about his friends, including a former graduate student who has since joined the army and reached out asking for cash: The professor wired him $120 through Western Union.

“He said it was for food and other supplies,” Risch said. “They don’t get very much as volunteers.”

Hulievska, the Dartmouth freshman, is glad to be in regular contact with family, but it doesn’t always allay her fears. Her concerns for her parents are two-fold: She worries her father, a 57-year-old lawyer, will be drafted into the military.

“He will probably join because he thinks that is what is needed of him, that it’s his duty as a Ukrainian — and as a man,” she said. “I’m scared.”

And she knows, too, her mother, sisters and grandmother are no longer safe as Lviv has become .

Hulievska came to the United States in 2021 through an organization that helps students from low-income families attend top-tier universities around the globe. She hopes to major in creative writing and chose America for its diversity, which she believes will improve her craft.

She doesn’t know when she will see her family again.

“I was very much looking forward to going home,” she said, but, fearing the situation there will be too dangerous, she’s already asked her dean to help her find summer housing. “I miss them — a lot.”

Hulievska’s distress, which seems to grow overnight and erupt in the morning, has shaped into anxiety, a condition for which she is seeking treatment.

Yet even now, she’s inspired by the hope her family provides others: Her grandmother, a medical doctor, travels each day to a nearby train station to give urgent care and advice to those refugees who come to Lviv knowing no one at all.  

“I think it is a good example for me and a good inspiration to keep doing what I can do here on campus,” said her granddaughter. Hulievska has recently begun translating social media posts written by Ukrainians in the early days of war for one of her classes, Media Research and Creative Writing in Russian. She  receives the incoming messages from an organization called War in Translation: The translated missives appear on the group’s Twitter account.

Such a task, Hulievska said, helps those outside Ukraine feel empathy for those trapped by the conflict.

Lysenko, the fourth-year Ph.D student, has much to lose in the war. She’s concerned about her boyfriend, who lives in Odessa, and might soon be drawn into the fighting.  

“He lives between three military bases and sometimes sees rockets flying over his apartment,” she said.

The graduate student wonders if she’d be better off relocating to Europe so she could use her Ukrainian and Russian language skills to assist incoming refugees.

“I definitely feel I’d be doing something better if I’m helping in some way,” she said, adding it’s difficult to watch the tragedy unfold from afar. “My plan is to get through this semester and once I submit the rest of the work I have to do, evaluate then.”

Marina Shapar, 26 and who spoke to The 74 last month from her basement in Kyiv, a shelter she shared with nine other people, including her parents, siblings and neighbors, has since fled the country. After passing through the Slovakian border, she moved by train through the Czech Republic before landing in Poland.

She’s currently staying with a friend in Finland and remains on constant alert about the rest of her family, who plan to return to Kyiv — they’re temporarily relocated to the western part of the country — as soon as they deem it safe.

“To be honest,” Shapar said, “they said they planned to go home in one and a half months. I do not fully support this idea.”

As for Shapar, it’s unclear when she will be reunited with her family as her hopes for the outcome of the war might not be reached.

“I decided to go back as soon as the Ukrainian government confirms our victory,” she said.