AUBURN – For Olga Dolgicer, the invasion of Ukraine is personal.
“I can’t breathe since yesterday,” she said Thursday after watching the news from her native land almost nonstop since the Russian attack began Wednesday.
“It’s terrible,” she said.
Dolgicer, who owns The Munroe Inn on Pleasant Street, said she watched in horror as people “who talk like me” and “look like me” and “dress like me” scrambled across Ukraine to stay out of the line of fire.
“My eyes were crying for those people,” she said. “It’s all my heart.”
Born in Kharkiv, Dolgicer grew up as a Russian-speaking resident of the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas, a territory that Russian President Vladimir Putin this week called independent from Ukraine in a move that runs counter to international law.
He followed up that announcement with a full-scale invasion, the first time a European power has attacked a neighbor since World War II.
Dolgicer said the Russians want to turn the country into a puppet state for Putin, but they’ll find it tough going because its people will resist.
‘When your land is being raped, you defend it,” she said.
Dolgicer said that when she was young, “Ukraine was a happy place” during “a stable era” that offered good schools, jobs, easy access to colleges and a chance to choose a profession.
Though Dolgicer left the former Soviet Union in 1985, her parents lived in Donbas until recent years and her children visited with them every summer.
After her father died, her mother moved to the United States a couple of years ago. But many members of her family remain in key cities across the country there, places under assault as the Russian military roars in.
She said Americans should know that Ukrainians will fight for their freedom and their independence against Putin’s forces for as long as it takes. They have a sacred duty to fight for their homeland, she said.
“Ukraine is going to be occupied for sure,” Dolgicer said, but its people “will never accept the Russian invasion.”
Americans and other nations should aid and support, Dolgicer said, but their troops should stay away.
“Nobody wants America to run this war,” she said. It’s a fight the Ukrainians themselves must win, she said, confident that they will.
“They will not accept this rape,” Dolgicer said.
She said Putin’s excuses for the invasion he launched are based on lies and madness.
“Putin is crazy,” Dolgicer said. “He is a war criminal and should be tried as such.”
She said Ukraine has always been a country since long before Russia itself was one. By the 12th century, it already had its own leaders, borders, language, literacy and religion.
“Ukraine is the mother of all Russia,” Dolgicer said.
She said Ukrainians are different in their temperament from most Russians. They’re less aggressive, funnier and “very fast to laugh at themselves” in ways Russians rarely do, Dolgicer said.
They also don’t have any ambitions to be global leaders either, she said. They just want to live peacefully in their “sacred land.”
It agreed in 1924 to become one of 15 republics in the Soviet Union in part because the constitution it signed provided the right for any of the constituent states to quit the union.
In 1991, they all did just that, blowing apart the Soviet Union, which Dolgicer compared to “a fat old bear” that had its problems but respected the integrity of borders.
In the three decades since, Ukraine has “not done anything to provoke a war” with its larger neighbor, Russia, she said.
The Maidan Revolution that swept aside a Russian-friendly government in 2014 for one that’s more friendly to Western Europe put Ukraine into Putin’s crosshairs.
Dolgicer said Putin that year backed “real, hardcore criminals” in Donbas – masked men who wouldn’t even speak to her parents – who created two enclaves at the border that Putin controlled. She called the areas “a total invention” of Putin that had little support from anyone in Ukraine.
She said Ukraine, which now has a “very rooted” sense of independence has only an understaffed, undertrained military that can’t match what Putin can put in the field.
Dolgicer said they are resisting “almost with bare hands,” using hand grenades against a foe armed with long-range missiles.
She said that even though Putin can launch a blitzkrieg that has every major Ukrainian city under assault, Ukrainians will never, ever accept defeat.
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