Arina Boryslavska and her husband, Bogdan, on the Casco Bay island where they live with their two children. They come from Ukraine and fled Kyiv when Russian missiles started falling on the city. Concerned about their security, they asked to hide their faces and location. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Arina Boryslavska left a mug of hot coffee on the table in her family’s Kyiv apartment when she fled.
She and her husband, Bogdan, were asleep when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Bogdan woke just after 5 a.m. to the sound of a missile in the darkness, a whistling he did not want to believe. He walked into the kitchen and made coffee. When he heard the sound again, he roused his wife and rushed the blocks to the lot where their car was parked.
“While I was running on the street and my wife was still packing something that we could take with us, I heard it twice more, right above my head,” Bogdan said. “I was scared to death.”
That dash was the first leg of a journey that would bring them from the war in Ukraine to the quiet of Casco Bay. For years, they had been planning to move to an island where they had longtime connections, and that plan suddenly became their escape route. Now, they are starting the new life they dreamed about in Maine but watching a nightmare in their homeland from afar.
“We wanted to do this,” Bogdan said. “But the reason why it happened sooner is, you know, it’s very hard to think that you had to move because of the war, because you wanted to save your children. Now you want to save everybody who you know.”
The family has spent the last month establishing new routines. They moved into a house where they fly an American flag and a Ukrainian one. They take their two beagles on walks and ride the ferry to get groceries. Their daughters, ages 8 and 11, have been getting extra English lessons from their grandmother after school. They are private people, reluctant to draw attention to themselves or their story.
But they have also spent the last weeks in fear and despair. They have had to console their older daughter as she waits for days between messages from her friends in Kyiv. They have read the Ukrainian headlines that tell the truth about the invasion and raged at Russian propaganda that spreads misinformation.
They have paid particularly close attention to the news from Chernihiv, a northern city where Arina was born and where they both used to live.
Russian forces encircled the historic city, bombing residential neighborhoods and destroying bridges that could bring critical aid. Bogdan and Arina speak of friends who spent days in darkened basements with no food or water. Her father was in western Ukraine at the time of the invasion, but he has since joined humanitarian convoys bringing food, water and medicine to the city.
Arina Boryslavska and her husband, Bogdan, pose for a portrait on the Casco Bay island where they live with their two children. Bogdan, who is originally from Ukraine but is now an American citizen, was in Ukraine with his family over the winter and they fled their home in Kyiv after the Russians invaded. They had a long journey back to the Casco Bay island where he has ties to. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Thousands of miles away, the couple wanted to help. So they launched a GoFundMe to buy vans to enable volunteers they know in the country to deliver those critical supplies. They hope to raise $35,000.
“That’s my town,” Arina said as video footage on her phone showed house after house in Chernihiv destroyed.
‘WE WERE GETTING READY’
Bogdan and Arina, who are both 31, met as students at the Kyiv Conservatory. He was studying to be a choir conductor, she to be a pianist. But his mother had met a man from an island in Maine while he was visiting Ukraine, and the two later married. From his first visit as a teenager, Bogdan had his sights set on the United States. He left the conservatory and spent most of each year working in construction on the island or at a golf course on the mainland. Eventually, he became a naturalized American citizen.
Arina and their daughters stayed in Ukraine, where she had a scholarship for her graduate studies. Bogdan would visit during the winter months when work was scarce in Maine, and Arina and the girls would spend their summer breaks on the island. The girls liked the freedom they had to explore there, and their parents liked the streets unclogged by traffic jams and the clean ocean air. The four of them dreamed of a life together on one continent as soon as Arina finished her studies.
Their plans were delayed first by the pandemic, then by the process of getting travel documents. Arina has legal permanent residency in the United States, and the two girls are American citizens. The most difficult paperwork to secure was for their two beagles. Finally, in 2021, Bogdan arranged housing on the island for the whole family the following spring. In November, he headed to Ukraine for the winter.
The family began receiving alerts from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, warning of increased threats of Russian military action and advising American citizens to leave the country. Bogdan and Arina said they had been seeing signs of Russian aggression for years, even before Russia annexed Crimea and invaded the eastern region of Donbas in 2014. The conflict in Donbas in the intervening years seemed somewhat distant from their lives in Kyiv, but the specter of war haunted them.
“We were getting ready that something will happen,” Bogdan said. “But the surprise was that it happened everywhere at once.”
In the days before the invasion, Bogdan and Arina took their daughters on a ski trip in western Ukraine, the first vacation they had taken in years. They wanted to distract the girls and themselves from the increasingly alarming news reports. But those reports were still dire at the end of their time on the mountain, and they decided to accelerate their move from Ukraine to the United States.
The couple left their children in the western part of the country with family and drove back to Kyiv to get necessities, including medicine for one of their daughters. They packed the car that night and woke up to missiles.
The first day, Bogdan and Arina traveled hundreds of miles to get close to the border. The last 30 miles took them three days. They sat in their car, waiting in a line of traffic, inching away from their old life. Their luggage could not fit some of their most personal possessions: Arina’s electric piano and 100-year-old sheet music given to her by a teacher, a candle from their wedding, family photographs. One of the only mementos in their bags was a traditional cloth that they knelt on at their wedding, red with white embroidery, an heirloom passed down through Arina’s family.
Arina Boryslavska holds the cloth her grandmother gave her that she was able to bring with her from her home in Ukraine as she, her husband and two children fled the country after the Russian invasion. Boryslavska said there were many sentimental things she had to leave behind. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Arina can tell the whole story without crying, until she talks about the flowers she left in their apartment.
“Now they’re all dead, of course, because nobody is watering them,” Bogdan said.
TRYING TO HELP FROM AFAR
Parents and children reunited on the other side of the border checkpoint.
During the hours in the car, Bogdan and Arina had tried to chart their course to the United States. They had thought of their island community — and a couple who visits from Munich in the summer.
They sent emails to island friends and eventually connected with the couple in Germany, who welcomed the family into their home. They spent a couple of days there and then boarded a direct flight to Boston. One of their dogs barked from the cargo hold the entire trip, his cries reaching the passengers above him. They reached the island March 3, one week after they fled Kyiv before dawn.
When they think back to that week, they feel lucky. Lucky to have had the right documents to travel to the United States when they needed to, lucky they had a car, lucky the girls were in western Ukraine when the missiles began falling on Kyiv, lucky to have gotten those last crucial documents for their dogs, lucky that their small island in Casco Bay was also beloved by a generous couple in Munich.
“If I compare our situation to those people who we saw on the way. … All night long and all day long, we saw people walking to the border,” Bogdan said.
They left so much behind, but not their fear. An unfamiliar face on the island or a strange plane flying overhead suddenly is a cause for concern. They feel both secluded and exposed in their small community, and the Portland Press Herald agreed not to identify their island or show their faces because they are worried they could still be a target for Russians. They despair at Russian misinformation and take every opportunity to state the truth about the invasion of their homeland, and they find themselves educating Americans who know little about a country the size of Texas.
“Ukrainian people, they’re proud to be a sovereign country,” Bogdan said. “Ukraine is not Russia. People still don’t know what Ukraine is. You know what is France, what is Brazil, what is small Portugal? But you don’t know, where is Ukraine?”
Arina’s parents were in western Ukraine when the siege on Chernihiv began, but her father has traveled to their hometown repeatedly with humanitarian convoys. The Russian attack destroyed every bridge out of town, bombed a residential neighborhood that included a hospital and forced people to shelter in basements for weeks. Officials have estimated Chernihiv’s death toll to be in the hundreds.
Her father has told them that those trying to help desperately need vehicles to transport more supplies to the broken city, so Arina started the GoFundMe under the heading “Chernivhiv needs humanitarian help delivered.”
Once they have raised enough, Bogdan plans to travel to Poland to purchase and deliver the vans to trusted volunteers.
“These vans will be used by a group of volunteers, so the people in Chernihiv can get the help that they desperately need,” Arina wrote on the fundraising page. “During the war a large number of vehicles were burned, some people had to evacuate to Europe, and the remaining number of vehicles left in Chernihiv cannot bring all the needed items.”
Safe in Maine, the family adjusts to a new country with small questions (why do Americans put the flag on socks?) and big ones (why are Americans complaining about gas prices when so many people are dying in Ukraine?). They emphasize how grateful they are for the support they have received from the small community they have gotten to know over many years, and they chat easily with locals on the ferry dock. The couple stood on that dock on an early spring day, feeling the warmth of the afternoon sun after a rainy morning. A man in a faded Maine cap walked up to them and gently touched Arina’s arm.
“How are you?” he asked.
She dug her hands deeper into her coat pockets.
“I’m strong,” she said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
