Philadelphia is where the Russian flag was stolen twice from Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and Ukrainian American activists demanded that it be removed permanently from the rows of iconic banners on the boulevard .
Local Ukrainians petitioned the city government to end the relationship between their sister city with the Russian town, saying that the tie had lended legitimacy to the murderous Moscow regime.
Now President Donald Trump is leaning towards Russia, denounced the war that began with the Russian invasion in 2022, killing 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers, destroying cities and towns, and since World War II It prompted the biggest refugee crisis, with nearly 7 million people being forced to force them. Run away from Ukraine.
Many Ukrainian Americans in the Philadelphia region live in one of the nation’s largest Ukrainians – they’re sloping and wondering what’s next.
“It’s beyond words to see an American president betray Ukraine like this,” Mary Karina said. “Ukrainian Americans who voted for or decided not to vote should really bow down before their ancestors.”
Currently, local Ukrainian-American leader Karina, and many others, are looking into what this order means for Ukraine, and how they can help the country they struggled with. To make a decision, you are trying to decide on the best way to move forward. Rallyings were planned this weekend around the country to mark the third anniversary of the invasion.
The Ukrainian Education and Culture Center in Jenkintown will organize buses for travelling to a great Saturday gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and rallies and marching at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be set at 2pm on Sundays.
The Ukrainian Centre is also planning to mark the anniversary of the invasion by welcoming everything to the Monday evening ceremony honoring the Ukrainian defenders.
The Philadelphia area was a major resettlement area for those fleeing the war due to the vitality of Ukrainian communities, which are tens of thousands of people. Everything from medicines to sleeping bags, baby bottles and Ukraine was shipped to help the war effort and civilians there.
“It’s really difficult for us,” said Irina Mazur, the honorary consul of Ukrainians to Philadelphia, who spent countless hours on the Ukrainian cause. Trump “needs to straighten his facts,” she said.
“Ukraine didn’t ask to be killed, raped. We didn’t want this war. But the peace of the conditions currently being offered is not peace, it’s surrender. President Putin (Russia) You cannot surrender in front of President Vladimir.”
Calling for support to Ukraine
Mazur, the organizer of the events in Philadelphia Rully and Washington, said he received repeated calls from Americans who are not Ukrainian but are worried about Ukrainian futures.
“It gives me a lot of hope,” she said.
“This is a very important time,” Mazur said. “We want peace, but this peace must be fair, it must be fair, the voice of the American people must be clear and reach the White House.”
She called elected representatives and urged people to tag Trump on social media posts. And she encouraged ordinary Philadelphians to come out on Sunday and support Ukraine.
This week, Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war, repeating the topic of the Russian president, saying it was time for elections in Ukraine, saying, “This could have been very easy to resolve.”
“You’d never have started it,” Trump claimed he had agreed to a Ukraine agreement, saying, “You’d given almost all the land, all the land, almost all the land. Demolished cities. There wouldn’t be.”
Ukrainian President Voldimia Zelensky, who was cut off from Trump’s administration’s talks with Russia, replied that Trump “relaxedly lives in this disinformation field,” allowing Putin to appear as a victim of the war. did.
Trump called Zelensky a dictator.
“We were given totally misinformed,” said Roman Andrichk, a retired US military colonel who is the leader of the local Ukrainian community, explaining Trump’s statement. “His comments are totally false. The United States is a beacon of freedom and should be an example.”
Other countries at risk?
Andryczyk said he fears that a US pivot to Russia could put additional allies at risk, including Asia and Southeast Asia.
“We have to support democracy,” he said. “Ukraine is an important strategic partner of the United States and helps the United States maintain peace and stability in this and other regions.”
America’s support for Ukraine became an increasingly partisan issue during the presidential election, with Trump claiming that the war was costing the United States too much money. His running companion, Vice President JD Vance, called on the Ukrainian government to make concessions to Moscow to end the war.
On Wednesday, Trump reiterated his claim that the US spent $350 billion on the war.
Since Russia was invaded in February 2022, Congress has allocated about $183 billion to Ukraine, according to an inter-ministerial oversight group that presents its report to Congress. That money includes $65.9 billion in military aid to defeat what the Biden administration called “a planned, unprovoked, brutal, full-scale invasion.”
At the start of the war, Philadelphia and surrounding suburban counties were home to approximately 15,000 Ukrainian immigrants and 52,000 Ukrainian ancestors. Philadelphia became the epicenter of Procrane’s activities and support, but a few months after the war began, people persuaded local authorities to defeat the Russian flag and cut off sister ties. I couldn’t do it.
Ukrainians moved to the United States in several different waves. Around 1870, poor peasants, previously slave workers from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, were drawn out by promises to pay employment. He settled in farmland in the eastern United States and anthracite coal mining towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
In the early 1900s, as many as 250,000 Ukrainians arrived working for large steel, glass and railroad manufacturers in industrial cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit. Ukrainian immigration was suspended at the start of World War I, and then everything stopped after the parliament set a limit on the number of newcomers.
Replaced after World War II
After World War II, tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians came to the United States and were helped by Ukrainian American organizations that said immigrants had revived and expanded. The Iron Curtains of the Soviet Union blocked new immigrants for 40 years. It resumed with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the official independence of Ukraine in 1991.
Thousands more have come to the Philadelphia area as people have escaped violence and destruction since the Russian invasion, and new locals come among new locals with an estimated 550,000 Ukrainians allowed to the US I did.
Those figures include nearly 200,000 people who arrived through unity of the Biden administration’s Ukraine Naini initiative, and 350,000 people who came outside the sponsorship process, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Karina, who lives on Mount Airy, helped organize Ukrainian rallies and marches. And she helped her Germantown church begin a hopeful garden of the sunflowers, the Ukrainian national flower blossom. She is scheduled to speak at the museum on Sunday.
She said she was thinking about her parents and other relatives’ experiences, blood, sweat and tears, and survival of World War II and creating a new life in this country.
“It’s embarrassing to see what’s going on right now,” Karina said. “The Trump administration is not friendly with Ukraine. They don’t have us on their side. They act as if Russia is an ally. That’s just shameful.”
