Ukrainian community faces ‘sense of bewilderment and fear’ as peace deal uncertainty remains

In March 2022, Pastor Peter Kucher’s church, the Christian Worship Center in Lombard, raised $20,000 in just a couple of days to support the needs of Ukrainian refugees.

Three years later, Kucher, who was born in Ukraine, said that within the Ukrainian community, “there’s a sense of bewilderment and fear.”

“Many fear that Ukraine will be forced into a peace deal that will benefit [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and inflict further pain on Ukraine,” Kucher said. “There is also bewilderment at what happened at the White House between President Trump and his team and [Ukraine] President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. There’s a shock at why the conflict began over petty issues like dress codes and debate on exactly how grateful or how much respect or lack thereof the Ukrainian president showed. Ukrainians are fighting, praying and hoping for peace, but also very much feeling like a pawn in a geopolitical game between East and West.”

There are about 100,000 individuals of Ukrainian descent living in the greater Chicagoland area, and the local community is left with feelings of uncertainty following the meeting last week between Trump and Zelensky.

Following the meeting, this week the U.S. announced it is halting military aid and no longer giving intelligence information to the country which has battled Russia for the past three years.

“We are very disappointed,” said the Rev. Poliarny, a pastor with Saint Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Bloomingdale. “We feel that President Zelensky was set up by President Trump.”

“I don’t think that someone that is more powerful should intimidate somebody that is in their third year of a war,” Poliarny added.

“That is not the way to treat somebody that has been our ally for all these years,” said Poliarny, an American of Ukraine descent.

Still, he is optimistic that “eventually this will settle down, and with the help of the European Union they will reach some type of consensus.”

In fact, U.S. and Ukraine officials will meet next week in Saudi Arabia in an effort to create the framework for a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia and a peace agreement.

“Most of us have relatives back home,” Poliarny said. “They are the ones that are being punished. Every day they don’t know if they are going to wake up or have something to eat.”

“We are very concerned,” he said.

Although the most recent invasion began just over three years ago, this has been going on since 2014,” Poliarny said.

In 2014, Russia invaded Crimea in a move that laid the groundwork for Russia to invade the Ukraine in 2022.

“Little by little they started to take chunk by chunk of Ukrainian land,” Poliarny said. “Today, they have taken over 20% of Ukrainian land.”

“A lot of young people have sacrificed their lives for their country,” he said.

Calling the scene at the White House, a “fiasco,” Poliarny said, “President Trump insisted that Putin would keep his word. In the last 11 years, they have broken the truce 21 times.”

The truce is the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.

As part of that agreement, Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal, a leftover from the Soviet Union days, and transferred all nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantlement. In return, Ukraine’s borders would remain.

Many of the Ukrainian descendants in the area came to the United States—not because they wanted to leave the Ukraine, but to save their lives, Poliarny said.

“They were being persecuted by the Soviet Union and would have ended up in Siberia,” he said. “Lucky us, who live in this part of the world. We haven’t had any bombs dropped on us. The United States is the best country in the world. Unfortunately, sometimes the leaders we elect don’t live up to the Reagan era standards. He cared about the United States, and he cared about the entire world. He was not an egotist.”