Workers clear rubble from the street outside a damaged building in Kharkiv on Wednesday, the day after a Russian missile barrage spread across Ukraine.
'I am not AFRAID of dying'
Torn by the suffering in Ukraine, Katya Aksenko decided to take refuge in Canada. But the horrors she survived in the destroyed city of Mariupol were never far from her mind.
She had hidden with more than 100 others in a three-room basement during the first winter of Russia’s invasion. Bodies of friends and neighbours shot or burned alive lay scattered outside, the 33-year-old told the Star in December 2022 at an aid centre where she volunteered in Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine.
“We buried them,” she said, sobbing. “Some died in our arms.”
She came to Canada as one of the more than 210,000 Ukrainians who have emigrated here due to the war, under the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program.
But Aksenko, who was a pharmacist in Mariupol, was too affected by what she’d seen to build a new life in Canada. After two months of living with close family in Etobicoke, she returned to Ukraine to help the war effort.
“I thought I could come to Canada and live for myself. But the war has changed me. I believe I only survived Mariupol to help others,” she said in an interview in Etobicoke, shortly before she went back in September 2023.
Aksenko’s impossible choice between a safe life that she had found and trying to help save her country is a cruel dilemma faced by countless Ukrainians over the past two years. It is a choice in which each option comes with devastating consequences — and that has become increasingly agonizing as the horrors in Ukraine seem unlikely to end soon.
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