The owner of a Ukrainian bakery in Vancouver is breathing a sigh of relief now that her sister and nephew have made it safely to Canada from their war-torn country.
“We were driving from the airport, and I was pinching myself to check whether or not it’s true,” Iryna Karpenko told Global News.
“We haven’t seen each other for eight years.”
Global News first spoke with Karpenko just days after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, as she used her business to help fundraise for humanitarian aid.
At the time, she expressed growing anxiety about her family’s safety, and not without reason.
Her sister, Tetiana Rozlach, told Global News she woke up on Feb. 24 to the sound of bombs exploding in her Kyiv neighbourhood.
“The first bomb was not far from our own, from (my son) Nickita’s school,” she said.
“We had only approximately 15 minutes to pack our documents and the main things. We ran not far from Kyiv and stayed there for one week while we were thinking where to go next.”
Rozlach said she and her husband had to call everyone they knew to scrape together enough gasoline to make the perilous 20 hour journey to western Ukraine.
Karpenko had to convince her sister to leave the country from there — a decision that was not made lightly.
Rozlach’s husband, who cannot legally leave Ukraine because he is a man of fighting age, remained behind to work for a charity organization, while her parents stayed behind out of concern for other relatives.
While deciding to leave was hard, any hesitation melted away when she landed in Canada on Monday.
“(Such) tears of happiness when I saw my sister, my nephew,” Rozlach said.
“I’m very happy because we are safe now. It is the main reason we came here, to be safe — me and my child. My main goal was to rescue my child. I’m very grateful.”
Rozlach is now helping her sister with her business, Kozak Eatery.
She may soon be joined by others fleeing the war. Karpenko has pledged there will be a job waiting for any Ukrainian refugee who can make their way to Vancouver.
But even as Rozlach settles in to a new life in Canada, the war is never far from her mind.
“It is very hard. Every day I take my phone and I scroll all the news, see what has happened for the last day. I call my husband. I call my parents. Thank God there is still a connection with them,” she said.
“Because our relatives who live in Chernobyl area, we don’t have a connection with them from the fifth of March, so we don’t even know are they still alive. We hope, it’s very scary.”