MIAMI -- When Iryna Timoshenko left her woodland home near Kyiv on a cold February day, the Russian bombs had not yet set the Ukrainian skies alight.
She would have taken more than a business-trip suitcase filled with work clothes and her laptop. She would have packed all her country if she could have. Instead, Timoshenko said goodbye to her family and traveled from the Ukrainian capital to Lviv, an architectural jewel near the Polish border.
Less than 24 hours later, she awoke in her hotel bed to a flood of messages.
Did you hear what has happened?
A war with Russia was unthinkable. No missiles rained at daybreak in Lviv.
But the frantic flurry of messages continued — from friends, family, parent group chats intended for play dates and homework. Russia had begun attacking by land, sea, and air across the north, east and south.
Timoshenko, 36, decided she could not return home. One last time, she went to work and conducted a visit for her longtime American employer. Back in her room, the mother of three let go of any sense of normalcy the distance from the violence had offered.
“I never thought I would be in such a situation,” she said, “Every time I saw something on the television, regarding Afghanistan, Syria, it was crazy, but it was far away.”
She called her husband, who was still near the Ukrainian capital with their three young children, and devised an escape plan from the only home she had ever known.
Three million refugees, overwhelmingly women and children, have left Ukraine since Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, ordered an invasion on Feb. 24. They have left behind husbands, fathers, and sons whose government has ordered them to stay put to possibly take up arms. Russian airstrikes and shelling have killed civilians and pulverized homes, schools and hospitals.
Refugees are streaming from Ukraine into border towns in Poland, Romania and other neighboring nations. But some have flown over the Atlantic Ocean and found refuge in South Florida, far away from Eastern Europe.
And Miami, as it has done time and again, has become a safe haven for Ukrainians like Timoshenko, fleeing the death and devastation that turned her homeland into a war zone.
Timoshenko arrived in Miami on March 2. Her three children, 9-year-old Maksym, 7-year-old Liza and 3-year-old Mia, think they will soon go home after a surprise vacation in Florida. Her husband of 10 years, Oleksandr Timoshenko, 46, stayed behind after most men were banned from leaving Ukraine.
For now, the young mother and her kids are in the Cooper City home of a kind stranger they had never met. Timoshenko is navigating the U.S. immigration system, English-language schools and motherhood with six months on a tourist visa. She has no U.S. bank accounts, no car, no Social Security number. She does not know when she will see her loved ones, her dogs and cats, or her home again.
Timoshenko could do her job remotely, but she has no work authorization in the U.S. The family missed — by one day — the March 1 cutoff date for Temporary Protected Status, which allows people who are already in the U.S. from countries in turmoil to temporarily live and work in the U.S.
“TPS is always retroactive, so as not to encourage future migration,” said Randy McGrorty, an immigration lawyer and executive director of Catholic Legal Services. It remains to be seen whether the federal government will change Ukraine’s TPS designation, announced March 3, to a later cutoff date.
But Timoshenko has been encouraged by the help others have offered as she plunges into a limbo life with no return date. Her determination to protect her children, she says, keeps her steady after losing all solid footing.
“I don’t think I’ve realized that I cannot come back home. I need to be strong,” she said, “because I’m the only one my babies have here.”
‘A perfect life’
Timoshenko and her husband, who is known as Sasha, got together a dozen years ago, after meeting in the building where they both lived. Since then, the couple has built what she calls “a perfect life” with their boy and two girls.
She has traveled all over Ukraine as a clinical research associate for Pharmaceutical Product Development, a drug development company, for the last six years.
Three years ago, the young family and Timoshenko’s mother, Liudmyla Nahorna, moved to a large house they built in a forested community near Kyiv. The cream-colored home is adorned with angular windows and brown roof tiles, and surrounded by a wood and stone fence. In the winter, the yard becomes a wonderland of snow, trees and lights.
Before the war, their small neighborhood was filled with families with young children. The front door was always unlocked. Every evening, the neighbors would get together, she said.
“When we are walking and see the bicycles, we understand where our kids are,” recalled Timoshenko.
Son Maksym went to hockey practice on school days. Their dogs, wolfish Archie and tiny Lola, played in the forest around their house. Their three adopted street cats — Krzhuk, Karamelka and Kompot, named after the kitten protagonists of a local kids cartoon — lazed inside.
“It was Iryna’s dream, since she was a girl, to build a house near a peaceful place,” her mother, Nahorna, 66, said.
Now, their serene sanctuary sits empty. A neighbor is looking after the family’s beloved animals.
The violence is closing in on the quiet suburb of the capital they call home. Thirty minutes out, the small town of Irpin has become a front-line battleground. An hour’s drive away, Bucha was bombarded in the Russian effort to capture Kyiv.
On the day the war began, with Timoshenko away on a business trip, Sasha and the children heard explosions. Without an underground shelter, they gathered with neighbors out in the open as they waited for the bombs to stop. They prepared one suitcase with official documents and winter clothes for the children.
“All my life, I am just working to have a good life, to have the best childhood and future opportunities for my kids,” said Timoshenko. “Putin has taken all of this from us.”
A train to Przemysl
As the sun set on Kyiv, Sasha and his children drove away from the heart of the country towards the western border. From the other end of the journey, Timoshenko watched on her phone as her family inched closer and closer to her as traffic inundated the roads out of the capital.
“We packed the kids very fast,” said Nahorna.
The next morning, the family reunited in Lviv, which was already becoming a refuge for fleeing Ukrainians. They headed to the train station and waited hours for a train to Przemysl, a Polish city, on the other side of the border.
Timoshenko and her children boarded a cramped train filled with Ukrainian refugees running for their lives. She held Mia, her youngest. Liza sat nearby as a woman held Maksym on her knees. Martial law forced Sasha, along with most Ukranian men, to stay back.
When Timoshenko arrived in Przemysl’s train station, her passport was checked, but she had no set destination in mind. A volunteer army had assembled in the Polish city, helping Ukrainians made refugees by violence just over the border.
“The Polish people and its government provide such support because they understand, because they experienced the same in 1939,” said Timoshenko, referring to the German invasion of Poland, which marked the beginning of World War II.
Shortly after arriving in Poland she found out that there was a travel exemption under the martial law for fathers with three or more children. It was too dangerous to turn around.
Through a grapevine of strangers and friends on Facebook, Timoshenko found a woman in Warsaw willing to open her home. A week later, a plane carried the family over the Atlantic Ocean and they landed in South Florida.
Finding shelter in South Florida
In prior travels to the U.S., Timoshenko and her husband have explored California, Utah, and Colorado. She had delivered her youngest in South Florida in 2018, and tried to visit Miami every year since. This was the first time she had come to the United States without the anticipation and excitement that accompanied her travels.
“I came here not because I wanted to, but because I don’t have a choice,” she said, “if I did not have my kids, I think I would have stayed in Kyiv.”
A friend who lives in Miami picked Timoshenko up and found weeklong accommodation in Hollywood with a Ukrainian family, as she looked for longer-term housing.
A year ago, Timoshenko had visited St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Cooper City, a white building with three golden steeples and blue accents for Paska, or Easter. The Mass goers gathered outside the church, baskets of colorful Easter eggs at the children’s feet.
Now, she visited as a refugee.
“I wanted to come to meet people from the same country that know what happened,” she said.
The church receives donations for the Ukrainian army as well as medical supplies for the wounded, said Evgeniy Kucherenko, 40, a church volunteer coordinating the efforts. Including Timoshenko and her family, he has so far helped eight recently arrived people to get food and shelter.
Kucherenko’s mother has refused to leave the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, where he is from, since the war broke out. He said it is probable that more families will come to South Florida, but recognized the challenges of making it to Miami from the war zone.
“It is very difficult to get to the United States,” he said.
A family separated by war
Only days after Timoshenko arrived in Miami with her children, Sasha picked up his mother-in-law in Kyiv. For 22 hours they drove back to Lviv together, stopping only for curfew and sleeping in their car. As they left the capital, traffic inundated the main roads. They navigated the destroyed roads of Zhytomyr, a city west of Kyiv. Heavy bombing on its homes, buildings, and basic services have since forced residents to flee.
For now, Nahorna is living with a school friend at the border town. She did not hear the Russian airstrike on a nearby military base that killed at least 35 people on Sunday, but the war is creeping closer to the western border.
“The world doesn’t understand. The Third World War has started,” she said, “and Ukraine is fighting for the whole world.”
Nahorna has a passport, but she is not sure if she will stay in Ukraine, or where she will go next. Poland and other neighboring countries are overflowing with Ukrainian refugees, but she needs a visa to come to the United States. She has prepared travel papers for Lola, the Timoshenko family’s little white dog, who remains in Kyiv with a neighbor.
“On one hand, I don’t want to leave Ukraine, I want to stay home. On the other hand, maybe I will have to go,” she told the Miami Herald. “It’s not easy to do any transition, but I miss my family, my grandkids.”
From the forest to a tree-lined street
On Sunday, Philip Bradford, a 79-year old retired athletic director, heard his phone ring. Could he take in a family that had just arrived from Ukraine?
The longtime Florida resident has been reclusive since his wife was placed in a nursing home, he told the Herald. When he heard about the family, he asked himself what Sue, who was raised by a Ukrainian stepmother and steeped in Eastern European culture growing up, would do.
“When the war started, I thought, I must do something, so I went to the church and I made a contribution. When I left I said to Evgeniy, If I can help any more, give me a call. I never thought by making a contribution I was opening the door, so to speak,” said Bradford, the child of a Scottish father and a Croatian mother.
Two days after Timoshenko visited St. Nicholas she moved into Bradford’s home on a tree-lined street in Cooper City. His neighbors have showered her and her children with gifts: toys, clothes, a stroller for Mia.
For the retiree, who had a recent knee replacement and whose grandchildren live in other states, having Timoshenko’s young children running around the house has made him “feel like a young father again.”
“I’m happy to buy food, give them a place to sleep, drive them when I can,” he said.
Bradford’s home has offered the safety that Timoshenko escaped Ukraine to find. The children laugh as they play in the backyard pool. Every day, she is chipping away at what she needs to do to build a life here.
Timoshenko is grateful to be alive, and for her children to be safe in a time of war. But she misses her country, her husband and her mother, and the home she built on childhood dreams. She hopes to give back to her children their childhood in the forest, to find a way to Ukraine again.
“I hope in the future I will have a beautiful life in my own country with all the people that I love.”
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