The view outside Lesia Yaroshenko’s home looks much different nearly a year since Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine ripped her family’s life out of place. A horizon filled with deciduous trees dusted by a recent February snowfall now stretches beyond her Winnipeg balcony.
“I just had a normal, let’s say, life. I had good job, family plans for future and dreams about future,” Yaroshenko said, reflecting on the one-year anniversary of the war, seated on a donated sofa in her living room.
More than 8,000 km away, her husband continues to fight on the front lines.
Global News has been in contact with her since last April after she’d arrived in Poland via Hungary and Kyiv. She was celebrating long-awaited visa approvals to come to Canada.
“I bought cakes for us and our Polish family. It was a real holiday,” she told Global News at the time.
Yaroshenko and her two boys, Hnat and Vlad, landed in Winnipeg May 10, while her husband stayed back to fight.
They stepped off the plane with only a backpack and Hnat’s guitar, grateful to be on Canadian soil.
“I hope to find our peaceful home here,” Yaroshenko said days after touching down.
Nine months later, the family has battled the challenges of settling in a new city.
“I still believe that my husband will come here, and we’ll live that life that we dreamt about,” Yaroshenko said.
They’re able to send messages occasionally, and for a time when he was in Kyiv, they saw each other over video calls.
“I do not know that reality, and I wish I never knew in depth, but I’m very grateful to him when he tells me what he is concerned of … or (the) opposite, like what he’s happy about … a new book he read,” she said.
“We do our best to feel that we’re still a family.”
In Winnipeg, she works around the clock to keep up with the high cost of living.
“The most challenging for me here is to have two jobs all the time and no weekends at all,” she said. “Everything is designed for two adults who are working.”
Yaroshenko clocks between 70 to 90 hours a week, sometimes working 24-hour shifts.
Outside of work, she finds solace caring for her two children in the comfort of an apartment they call their own — where they moved after staying with friends.
She chops onions and tosses them into a frying pan. Yaroshenko’s preparing pork loin for dinner that she picked up on sale, she tells Global News proudly. Her sons, 12 and 17, have just walked in the door after school.
“I don’t let me think that I’m tired. I just have my purpose to settle — when I have my purpose — to ensure my kids are safe.”
Her eldest son Hnat has immersed himself in school bands, just like he hoped all those months ago. His dreams of studying music after high school are still intact.
“That’s like my way to, to relax, let’s say.”
But the challenges of warfare that his Ukrainian friends face daily are sobering. Hnat didn’t imagine his life would change so much in the last 12 months.
“I was not really prepared for that, but things happened really fast, and when things happen fast, you just need to adapt and to keep going, so that’s what I’m doing,” Hnat said.
His mother adopted a similar outlook. Yaroshenko just started her fourth job since arriving in Winnipeg, the first in her field. She’s keeping her eye on the positives amid the upsetting flashbacks accompanying the invasion’s one-year anniversary.
“Whenever I feel that this glass is not that full, it needs to be. I know the sources were to find that water, and they are all around,” she said.
Generous, welcoming communities in Winnipeg have softened the transition, Yaroshenko said.
“I feel hopeful, but I feel that all the world is threatened.”
Yaroshenko encourages Manitobans to appreciate their relative safety and be unwavering in their support of Ukraine.
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