LANSING, Mich. — With Russian troops invading Ukraine, Ukrainians who live in Michigan say, they are worried about their families back home and angry with the Russian government.
“My heart is with Ukraine right now… This conflict to me is not about land, territories, culture, language. It's a conflict between democracy and dictatorship,” said Ukrainian Alla Grushcha, a resident of Waterford, Michigan.
She lived most of her life in Ukraine and some of her family is still there.
“They are not going to leave the country to run away. No, they are going to fight,” Grushcha said.
Margaryta Stevens who moved from Ukraine to Lansing at the end of 2020 is thinking of her parents who are still in Ukraine.
“I feel so bad that I'm not there with them and there's nothing I can do. It doesn't seem like there is any safe place anymore. It’s not like they can just go to different city,” Stevens said.
David Jesuit, the chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Central Michigan University said Wednesday that, “the tragedy is that the people of Ukraine are the ones who will be suffering. Tens of thousands, possibly 50,000, will be killed as a result of an invasion.”
The Ukrainian-American Crisis Response Committee of Michigan is advocating and collecting aid for Ukrainians.
“If there is going to be a full-on invasion, we're expecting millions of people to be displaced from their home s within Ukraine and one to 5 million refugees spill into Western Europe,” said Mykola Murskyj, the chair of the committee and a political science lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University. “We've all heard somebody say ‘Hey, it's sad, but it's not my problem.’ That’s terrifying. It's the exact same kind of attitude that would step over a bleeding man on the sidewalk. That attitude terrifies me, and it should terror terrify us domestically and internationally.”
Ukrainians said there is a lot of misinformation being spread, such as Ukrainians hating Russians or people who speak Russian.
“My mother tongue is Russian. I do speak Ukrainian, but my primary language is Russian. We have nothing against Russians or people who speak Russian in Ukraine or people who are from Russia in Ukraine,” Stevens said.
Iryna Pavlov, a Ukrainian who works as a project manager at Gambyt in Livonia, said that there was never hate towards Russian people.
“What matters is Ukrainians’ right for independence. We are an independent state, a legally independent state, not some banana republic. And another country is intruding and trying to take us by force,” she said.
Besides climbing gas and food prices, the consequences of an invasion could be significant well beyond Europe.
“My concern, though, is that there is some miscalculation by (Russian President) Putin, that leads to an invasion of a NATO country. An attack on a NATO country would be war with Russia,” Jesuit said. “I'm fairly confident that the intensity of the cyber-attacks will increase.”
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