Missionary Randy Marshall with his wife, Shelley, in Budapest, Hungary, where they now live after fleeing the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.
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For some families and individuals with local ties, Ukraine is a second home.
Center Grove High School graduate Jessica Schwarz planned to live in the country for 2 ½ years, working in community relations in Voznesensk, a small city in southern Ukraine. She spent eight months there with the Peace Corps, and left prematurely in March 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. But she formed connections with people who live in various parts of Ukraine, connections she maintains to this day. Now, the people who welcomed her into their homes are fighting for their lives amid a Russian invasion that started in late February.
“These are people, multi-generationally, who have experienced one hardship after another. They are a developing country, and in some areas they do but in other areas they don’t have what we could consider modern amenities,” Schwarz said.
“Sometimes the hot water and electricity works, sometimes it doesn’t. The food is different. They value more farm-to-table, because that’s what they know. The people in general (who) I saw, there is a level of humility there for people to know who they are and what they are rather than what I see is a consumer mindset we have here.”
That sense of identity has taken on a new meaning in the past week, as Russian armed forces crossed into Ukraine from several directions. Men have taken up arms, carrying guns on the streets where they live to defend against approaching Russian soldiers. Women have made Molotov cocktails, improvised handheld firebombs, and sacrificed their sugar to pour into Russian tanks with the hope of immobilizing them, she said.
“There’s many life situations we have where we’re up against the wall, and these people are giving it everything they have,” Schwarz said. “People are feeding local militia from their own pantries, and you see that level of collaboration. They’re giving it everything they have and it’s becoming their greatest strength.”
But as Russian soldiers have advanced, life has become more harrowing. Schwarz knows families who are hiding their children in crawl spaces and have bricked out their windows to protect from shelling. The Ukrainian government has instituted a 5 p.m. curfew. On Wednesday, Ukrainian radio station Suspilne quoted Sumy Oblast governor Dmytro Zhyvytskyi saying Russian soldiers were taking residents of the Ukrainian city of Trostyanets out of their homes and shooting them.
The military aggression is likely the rest of growing frustration from Russian president Vladimir Putin, Schwarz said.
“It’s been a hard morning. I’ve been trying to get business trainers from the Peace Corps out of there,” she said. “It’s like hell. It’s another level of genocide.”
Ukraine isn’t a member of the Cold War-era North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, an organization that includes the United States, Canada and 28 European countries, so those countries aren’t sending in their militaries to help fight Russia. Instead, they’ve imposed economic sanctions, limiting Russia’s access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. Since then, the value of Russia’s currency, the ruble, has plummeted, losing about 30% of its value compared to the U.S. dollar.
Russia’s aggression is likely a reaction to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who hasn’t shied away from challenging Putin, and the potential for Ukraine to join NATO, which would further distance it from Russia, Belarus and other countries that are part of the former Soviet Union, said Milind Thakar, an international relations professor at the University of Indianapolis.
“This has been building since December. Essentially, Russia began making threats, where unless Ukraine would agree not to become a member of NATO or apply, Russia would view it as a threat to its security,” Thakar said. “From a Russian point of view, the best scenario is Zelenskyy — who is considered anti-Russian — if he was replaced by an obedient leader. The best case scenario for Ukraine is if Russia leaves and goes away. Most likely, (it will end) if there’s a guarantee that for 10 to 15 years, NATO membership is not mentioned.”
During the past week, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have fled the country to neighboring nations, such as Hungary, where longtime Ukrainian resident Randy Marshall has lived since January, partnering with One Mission Society, a Greenwood-based nonprofit.
With Russian forces stationed in Belarus, just hours away from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Marshall made the decision to leave a place he called home for almost two decades.
Marshall lived in Kyiv as a missionary for 18 years. Originally from Colorado, he moved to Russia in the 1990s, also to work as a missionary, following his cousin in the same line of work.
“My cousin was working with an organization called Operation Mobilization, and he was living in Vienna, Austria during the Cold War. He would work smuggling Bibles and Christian literature across the border to take to people who were Christians and didn’t have access to that,” Marshall said. “He would tell me stories when I was young. It was exciting stuff and made me interested. It was not until I was married, when I was working as a newspaper reporter in Colorado, that a man in ’93 told me I had an opportunity to come to Russia and teach Christian ethics after the fall of the Soviet Union.’
But during his seventh year in Russia, he was told to leave.
“We ended up having our visas taken away and told not to come back,” he said. “Other missionaries were getting rejected and sent away at that time. After six months back in the (United States), Ukraine came up as an option.”
Marshall continued his work in Kyiv, where he also taught university students English, Marshall said.
One Mission Society had five families in Ukraine at the start of the year, but just one remains, in Lviv, a city in the western part of the country. The organization has maintained continuous communication will all five families, spokesperson Susan Loobie said.
“We just had a meeting with all our major leaders in Europe,” Loobie said. “We broke it down to three phases. The phase right now is getting supplies to people who need it most. Phase two is setting up temporary housing and care centers where people could get counseling and prayer and shower if needed. Phase three will be helping them rebuild and sending physical teams in to rebuild.”
Unrest in Ukraine isn’t something new to Marshall. He was in Ukraine during the 2004 Orange Revolution, which turned an election in favor of a democratically-elected candidate, and in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, a region on the northern coast of the Black Sea near eastern Ukraine.
This time, though, he’s had to leave a place he’s come to call home. Now, he’s living in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, making trips in a van to bring food to Ukrainians at the Ukraine-Hungary border, and bringing refugees to Budapest, he said.
“I think none of us expected this result,” Marshall said. “Even if there was some kind of additional invasion, we thought it would be isolated to the east where the two republics are wrestling. We didn’t expect a full-country attack. We were thinking we would come back. We grabbed our most important items — clothes and important documents, electronics and hard drives — and left everything else. I don’t know what the future holds. I hope there’s a possibility to return.”
The Ukrainian people have a fierce national identity and will fight to defend it, he said.
“Ukrainians are standing up and resisting. Normal people passed out 18,000 machine guns to normal people. Ladies in one town are making Molotov cocktails in their free time. It shows a passionate desire for freedom. I have a lot of respect for Ukrainians with our history of desiring freedom and seeking freedom. I resonate with not returning to the old ways that used to be under the Soviet system,” Marshall said.
“We’re thinking of them, praying for them and doing what we can to support Ukraine. We’re proud of them, and have a lot of respect for how much they love their country and are willing to stand up for it and defend it.”
