GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The White House continues to warn Russia could soon invade its neighbor to the West.
Here in West Michigan, a woman is watching and worrying about the people in her home country of Ukraine.
5,000 miles away on a side street in Grand Rapids, Oleksandra Soltinksa is keenly aware of the danger facing her country and her culture.
That culture is one of the few things Oleksandra brought with her when she left home in Western Ukraine 24-years earlier to put down roots in America. The journey of a lifetime then brought her from Syracuse to West Michigan.
There, her family would find a waiting community of fellow Ukrainian expats among the burnished pews of Gold Street's century-old St. Michael Ukrainian Catholic Church, a tight-knit family everyone here hopes will grow and thrive, though Oleksandra's thoughts are never far from the homeland she left behind.
Discussions of Russian troops and political turmoil now regularly find their way into St. Michael's otherwise traditional Catholic mass.
“We came together pray for Ukraine, especially now in this situation.” Oleksandra said. “We don't want a war. But with this situation, we already [have had] war eight years… bombing, killing.”
Yet, with reports from the front growing increasingly dour, it’s become an all new source of daily anxiety.
“Every day, something new,” she related. “Even last night, even today, we have killing…they try to provoke us to do something.”
The U.S. announced days ago it would extract all but essential personnel from the American embassy in Kyiv as tensions worsened.
“It's more serious than the news says because they don't want to panic,” Oleksanda explained. “But they are worried a lot because… [there are] still a lot of kids in there.”
Oleksandra's cousins and mother-in-law will remain behind even as the invasion they hope will never happen seems poised to begin just beyond their doorstep.
“They will fight to protect their own country if they need to.”
A fight to preserve a way of life that extends well outside national borders, Eastern Europe and the ocean beyond into this sleepy corner of West Michigan.
“We want to tell the community, please be with us,” Oleksandra urged. “Pray with us. Save our world and especially Ukraine right now.”
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