Roman Korol
Age: 24
La Cañada Flintridge
Saturday, March 12, 2022

I am a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena doing a degree in Theoretical Chemistry. I'm also a Ukrainian citizen and have a strong connection to my home country. I go to Ukraine at least once a year. And my entire family is there except for my wife and child who are with me.

I went to Canada in 2014, after finishing high school in Ukraine, to do my bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto. I met my wife there, and made a lot of friends. In 2018, I moved here to start a PhD.

My parents are from two towns in northwestern Ukraine. My mom is from Lutsk, the city center of Volyn region in Ukraine. It’s a city of about 200 to 250,000 people. My dad is from an even smaller town called Volodymyr, right next to the Polish border.I grew up going back and forth between the two towns.

I started school in Lutsk and lived with my grandmother there for many years while my parents were working. She was a primary school teacher. She knew about Ukrainian traditions, all sorts of folklore that she taught my parents and then taught me as well. I did Ukrainian dance since I was five and a half years old and I got quite good at it. When I moved to Toronto, that's part of what helped me get established in the community. I was a member of two different dance ensembles there and met a lot of wonderful people through that. Here in Los Angeles I’m in an ensemble called Chervona Kalina, at the Ukrainian Cultural Center. The last three rehearsals were canceled for obvious reasons, but other than that, every Saturday I go there and practice dancing. Then we perform at different festivals and weddings and all sorts of events.

This war is a continuation of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. It has been treated as Russia's colony for a long time. Since it regained its independence about 30 years ago, it has struggled to decisively establish its sovereignty while sharing a border with a powerful and unpredictable country. Whatever you do, you can’t anger Russia too much.

For over 30 years, people have been vacillating between a pro-Western move and pro-Russian move. You can see that in the history of Ukraine. Ukrainians have become increasingly reluctant to join trade deals and economic relationships with Russia and have started to focus more on the European Union countries, which we hope will bring us more money, more benefits, better lives. I myself am from Western Ukraine, so you can imagine I'm very much pro-EU, pro-Western democratic freedoms, but I can understand others who weren’t ready for those, or didn’t accept them, or didn't think they were valuable or something they needed.

I think that on one hand, the oscillations between Russia and the West, and on the other hand, this fear that Russia will again be aggressive towards Ukraine, were holding us back. We can see now that it was a justified fear. Since 2014, it's stopped being a fear and started being a reality. Russia has been at war with Ukraine since they annexed the Crimean peninsula. These past eight years were sort of a gentle war. The war that nobody, neither side, wanted to escalate. And that's no longer possible as of 15 days ago.

The women and children in my family all went to Poland when Russia invaded. And of course, my father, my uncle, my grandfather are still in Ukraine and doing everything they can to help. It isn’t possible to describe with words the feelings, the emotions that you feel when your family is in the war zone and is in danger every day. I certainly wouldn't wish that experience on anybody.

It’s important to know that Ukrainians are fighting for their identity, their freedom and their ability to elect a democratic government independent of tyrants’ influences. This fight is costly and bloody, and it’s important not just for Ukraine, but for the entire world, that we win. I would like to build a stable environment where Ukraine can prosper with its neighbors and not against them. But it's going be a tough job for somebody ten years from now. Whatever the timeframe is, it's going be a long one.