Alla Blazhko is staying at her daughter’s cabin in the upper Chilkat Valley. She has no return ticket home to Ukraine.
Of the roughly 3.8 million Ukrainian refugees who’ve fled their country since Russia’s invasion last month, one, an 82-year-old woman from Odessa, is now living in the Upper Chilkat Valley with no return ticket home.
Alla Blazhko-Getman is living with her daughter and son-in-law, Natalia and Hans Baertle, across the bridge at 26 Mile Haines Highway.
Natalia, a former high school teacher in Ukraine who moved to Alaska in 2010 after marrying, said she attempted to fly her mother out of Kiev to Frankfurt, Germany before the invasion, but Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, stopped flying in Ukrainian airspace. Then on Feb. 24, she started getting text messages from friends around the world asking if her relatives were okay. No news had broken yet in the U.S. about the invasion.
“It was five or six a.m. in Ukraine,” Natalia said. “I called my sister and she told me, ‘It’s panic in our city right now. I cannot talk to you but we are under attack from the sea. I heard bombing.'”
Natalia’s sister lives on the outskirts of Odessa, where two residential homes were bombed by Russian troops. Blazhko has an apartment in downtown Odessa, where residents were being warned by officials that Ukraine was under attack. The news was markedly different when Natalia reached out to some of her Ukrainian friends in America who support Putin. They told her that Ukrainians were shooting and bombing each other and that the Russian army would peacefully march to Kiev in two days and change its government.
“He told me, ‘It’s not a war. It’s a peaceful mission,'” Natalia said of one Russian friend who lives in the U.S. “Odessa is a Russian-speaking city where Putin claims we are all Russian and he was going to liberate us. Liberate us from what? This is longtime Russian propaganda.”
Because the airspace was closed, on Feb. 25 the day after the invasion, Blazhko stayed in Natalia’s sister’s cellar before they could arrange a ride out of Odessa to cross into Moldova, a 40-minute drive. They waited in a 30-hour-long line at the border. Moldovans prepared hot meals, tea, coffee and cookies, blankets and warm clothes for the refugees. From there they drove through Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany before boarding a plane to Seattle from Frankfurt.
Natalia’s sister decided to return home and volunteer for what Natalia calls the “volunteers for territorial defense.” Natalia scrolls through her phone and shows pictures sent from relatives and friends: a mullah donned in body armor, a group of civilians filling sandbags on the shore of the Black Sea, her cousin in full battle gear in a Kiev bunker. Natalia scoffed at Putin’s claim that his forces were sent to “denazify Ukraine,” also the message on a sign that appeared on Third Avenue and Main Street in Haines earlier this month.
“It makes me sick,” Natalia said of the sign. “Right now, my Ukrainian friends and relatives are part of the resistance. A lot of my Jewish friends and their rabbi didn’t leave Odessa. They try to liberate? People who want to be ‘liberated’ are making sandbags.”
Blazhko doesn’t speak English. Although she’s visited her daughter in Alaska before, Natalia said she’s lonely, bored and wants to return home. Her daily life in Odessa included walks to the Black Sea beach, shopping in markets and conversations with friends. Natalia describes her as a “social butterfly” who misses her friends and family.
“She’s worrying about Ukraine,” Natalia said. “Yesterday she was crying and said she needed to be there. I asked why. She said, ‘I need to die there.’ She thinks she will not be back before she dies.”
Natalia translated for her mother, who said she was shocked that Russia would attack Ukraine, and although she supports an independent Ukraine, said she never saw a stark difference between Russians and Ukrainians.
“It’s hard to tell the difference, but I was born in the Soviet Union when we were brothers and sisters,” Blazhko said. “I don’t know what happened.”
Blazhko said she doesn’t like to talk about politics. As Natalia was being interviewed, her mother told her she “shouldn’t talk so much. It’s dangerous.” That mentality comes from living for the bulk of her life in the Soviet Union, where dissent was met with imprisonment or worse, her daughter said. When Natalia’s grandfather purchased a vehicle in 1963 that his neighbors considered bourgeois, they reported him to the police. He was imprisoned for six months.
Despite hesitancy to speak about politics, Blazhko is decidedly against Russian political influence in Ukraine. She said she’s heard rumors that Putin wants to restore former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and is now exiled in Russia.
“No Putin, no Yanukovych in Ukraine,” Blazhko said. “I don’t like to talk about politics. But if Yanukovych decides to return to Ukraine, and he is supported by Putin, we will eat him alive.”
When asked what her vision is for the future of her country, she said it wasn’t her place to answer.
“I will die soon,” she said. “And I am not going to discuss this question. (It doesn’t matter) what I want. I am done.”
Natalia said her mother is conflicted because of her upbringing, and because even some of her friends and family are divided on issues related to Russia’s influence on their country. Growing up under Soviet Union rule in Odessa, Natalia said, they were encouraged to speak Russian and that Ukrainian was considered a “pig language.”
Like her mother, they were taught that Russians were superior to the rest of the world, and that they were hated and mistreated by the U.S. and the West. She said Russian propaganda specifically attempted to divide Russian-speaking Ukrainians from western Ukrainians using fear tactics after Viktor Yushchenko was elected to the presidency in 2004. He campaigned, in part, to become more closely aligned with the European Union and to join NATO. On television, Natalia said partisan news outlets told Russian- speaking Ukrainians that Ukrainian nationalists in the western part of the country would harm or even kill them.
“I believed we would get killed because we were speaking Russian,” Natalia said of traveling to Lviv in western Ukraine. Encouraged by her ex-husband, a Russian, to travel there, they soon discovered they were being lied to. Traveling to Lviv, they approached a man waving a Ukrainian flag celebrating Yushchenko’s election and told him what they had heard.
“He started hugging us and told us, “Don’t believe them. We are for union. All of us, Russian speaking, Jews, whatever. We are for union,'” Natalia said. “After that, no propaganda about Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking people in Ukraine worked with me.”
Natalia said she’s disheartened by some of her Russian friends back home, and even in Juneau, who are still supporting Putin’s invasion. She said they, and some Americans she knows, blame NATO, the West or Biden for pressuring Russia and influencing Ukrainian politics.
Alla Blazhko, 82, stayed in her daughter’s cellar on the outskirts of Odessa near the Black Sea while her family arranged travel out of the country on Feb. 25.
“We’re talking about influence, who’s going to be influenced in Ukraine. I’m perfectly okay if it will be the U.S. Record this. I’m perfectly okay with this,” Natalia said. “Europe? Okay. I don’t want to be back in Russia. I want to speak freely. If I don’t like my president, nobody will send me to prison.”
She said after the invasion she received a text from a former classmate, who’s lived in Russia for the past 20 years, that they are no longer friends because America and London divided them.
“We are going to put you and the U.S. on your knees,” Natalia said, describing the text. “You will ask us for forgiveness but this time you will not get this from us.”
She acknowledged that Ukraine has significant corruption issues that need to be addressed when the war is over. But she considers herself a Ukrainian American who wants the country she was born in to be free from Russian influence.