The sun’s setting rays caught rows of potted sunflowers strategically arranged on tables in front of WVU’s Mountainlair at the end of a mellow afternoon last May.
Each petal flared briefly, making for a metaphor – one which could have gone either way, regarding the flower that is the national symbol of Ukraine.
Is the country glowing in its moment of defiance?
Or, rather: is Ukraine simply in the twilight of its modern-day democracy, stomped down, as it were, by Vladimir Putin’s invasion?
With the war coming up on a year, and with his elderly, war-refugee parents now safely in his house in Morgantown, Sergiy Yakovenko says he’ll take the former every time – just because.
“Well, back then, no one knew what was going to happen,” the WVU neuroscience professor said, of that rally on the ‘Lair plaza.
“What we found out,” he said, “was that Ukrainians are pretty tough. I’m proud.”
Yakovenko hails from Kharkiv.
Kharkiv is the country’s second-largest city and was the site of intense shelling early on, as the tanks began tearing the earth across the border last Feb. 24.
The 45-year-old researcher grew up speaking Russian in the city.
The family lived in “one of those typical Soviet-style apartment buildings,” as he describes it.
Nothing was typical, after the tanks came.
The professor’s mother and father, both in their 70s, had left that blocky building for a house and some land outside of town in recent years, where they raised vegetables and enjoyed a little greenery over lots of Cold War concrete.
Bomb and missile attacks suddenly became part of the day-to-day.
Yakovenko’s brother, who had worked for a now-shelled hospital in their hometown, once famously dodged a bomb during his morning commute.
The matriarch and patriarch are hearty, their Morgantown son said, but all that hunkering down caught up with them, physically and emotionally.
“It was a toll,” he said. “They’re better now. Or, they’re getting better.”
He prefers not to divulge details of how they got here, only to say they are living with him and his family in the University City.
Khrystyna Pelchar can only wish, she said.
Pelchar, a 24-year-old doctoral student in political science at WVU, is from Lviv, a sprawling city in western Ukraine.
She was already worried, and when the Russian shells finally started hitting their targets there, she became even more anxious.
That’s because her mother, grandmother and sister, won’t leave.
Instead of slipping over the border to relative safety, they dug in for the home front effort.
Now, both Pelchar and Yakovenko are thinking about the weather.
“It was really cold here last week,” Pelchar said, “but it’s like that all winter long in Ukraine.”
“Yes,” Yakovenko said. “In Eastern Europe, when winter sets in, it really sets in.”
Which is why, both the professor and the doctoral student said, grimly, Putin is now targeting Ukraine’s electrical grid and other utilities.
“People are strong,” Pelchar said, as they are now languishing in the cold and dark, with no heat or electricity.
“They have the resolve,” she said. “Putin was not counting on that.”
A resolve, Yakovenko said, bankrolled by the West, for which he is grateful.
“We have to acknowledge that,” he said.
“Without international aid, Ukraine would have been conquered.”
Which is a word he doesn’t use lightly.
Not in a country that’s had 100 years of war.
Not in a country where “Slava Ukraini” – “Glory to Ukraine,” in English – is both a call to arms and a daily greeting.
Yakovenko and Pelchar are part of group calling itself the Ukrainian Community of Morgantown, which has been raising money for the cause.
Many in the group are from the region, or have ties to it.
Others are just kindred souls, a fact Yakovenko discovered anew, looking at the houses up and down his street, through the eyes of his parents.
“There are a lot of Ukrainian flags,” he said.
“And my neighbors aren’t Ukrainian. I’m moved by that. This is a caring, giving place.”
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