Mila Rybtsova, a 22-year-old film student, arrived a year and a half ago at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York from Dnipro, in central Ukraine and now near the war front. Mila can’t vote in the US presidential election, but a few days ago she went door-to-door in Pittsburgh with Kamala Harris’ campaign to ask those who can vote to do so.
If the experience of 2016 and 2020 is repeated, Pennsylvania will be the most decisive state next Tuesday.
“I am Ukrainian and I wanted to do something. I was surprised by the experience for the better,” says Rybtsova, who had already been involved in civic causes and protests in Ukraine, particularly around education and culture, the issues that interest her most. Her family is still in Dnipro, and she wants to return to her country to build her career as a filmmaker. After having seen the activism in Pittsburgh, she says she feels “optimistic, hopeful” and that she will continue making videos about what is at stake in Ukraine until the elections.
In Pittsburgh, also a steel city like Dnipro, there are several Ukrainian churches. On the other side of the river, near the city center, the Catholic church of San Juan Bautista shows off its golden domes and icons in the Byzantine-style window. Like others, it has collected aid to send to Ukraine and is a meeting point for families who emigrated generations ago.
Pennsylvania is the state with the second largest Ukrainian-American community in the country. More than 120,000 people identify as originally from Ukraine here with a history of immigration from central and eastern Europe dating back to the late 19th century. Another 800,000 people consider themselves Polish-American. They are key voters in a state where in the 2020 presidential election Joe Biden won by 80,000 votes and, in 2016, Donald Trump did so by 44,000.
The polls now show such tight voting intentions that it is impossible to predict the result.
In the presidential debate between Harris and Trump in Philadelphia in September, the Democratic candidate specifically referred to voters of Polish origin in Pennsylvania: “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in kyiv right now. And understand what it means, because Putin’s agenda is not just about Ukraine,” Harris said and then addressed Trump: “Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish-Americans in Pennsylvania how quickly you would go through everything for the favor of what you think is friendship with someone who is known as a dictator, who would spoil you.”
Different choices
Part of these communities have in the past leaned towards the Republican Party either because of the connection with the anti-communist opposition represented in particular by Ronald Reagan or because of other factors prominent for the most conservative, such as the right to abortion. These elections are different. The threat that Trump will push Ukrainians to give in to the Putin regime and leave NATO, leaving the Baltic republics and even Poland unprotected, has become a mobilizing issue.
Mary Kalyna, an activist of Ukrainian origin who has lived in Philadelphia for more than four decades, is now one of the organizers of the Stop Trump, Save Ukraine movement.
Kalyna just received an award from the city of Philadelphia for her decades of local social activism. She began as an activist in protests against the Vietnam War and for years was a social worker focused on helping women. In 2020, she was also one of the organizers of the Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests.
Now she is dedicated to campaigning for Harris. He organized a rally in Philadelphia of Ukrainian-Americans, goes door to door and distributes postcards asking to vote, his last mission in the last few hours, according to what he tells elDiario.es.
“I will know that I have done everything I could within my means for her to win. “Ukrainians are dying every day to protect freedom and democracy, so the least I can do is spend every waking hour of every day helping save them,” he says.
He says that his family suffered the Nazi occupation and his parents were sent to forced labor camps when they were teenagers, and that, a few years later, his grandmother died in a camp in Siberia. Kalyna’s parents were saved because they fled Ukraine after the war and managed to be accepted as refugees in the United States, where Mary was born.
New and old migrants
Those who have been in the United States for several generations now mix with the younger ones, some who arrived during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mila Rybtsova is one of Maria Sonevytsky’s students at Bard College. The teacher says that last year they admitted 23 Ukrainian refugee students displaced by the war, and they began to share their “deep concern” about the US elections and their impact on Ukraine. They wanted to participate, but they don’t have the right to vote, and “they didn’t want to look like they were meddling.”
Thus they created the non-partisan group to talk about Ukraine, organize talks and make videos. Some students have also connected with the Harris campaign, as in the case of the door-to-door in Pittsburgh. A few days ago, the group organized a talk with the historian Timothy Snyder and the actor, of Ukrainian origin, Liev Schreiber.
“Ukraine is not just an electoral issue for Ukrainian-Americans,” Sonevytsky explains to elDiario.es, who says she is moved by having seen so many people participate in the online conversation chat who were not of Ukrainian descent.
Snyder’s message
The group is focused on talking about Ukraine without directly asking anyone to vote. But in that conversation Snyder made a direct appeal to voters particularly in the Ukrainian-American and Polish-American communities who consider themselves Republicans.
“As a historian, as someone who has studied the difficult history of Ukraine and has written a book about Russia, Ukraine and the United States in the 20th century, I am of the opinion that there has never been an easier opportunity for the Ukrainian diaspora to save Ukraine than now. . And I don’t think there ever will be again,” he said in an impassioned speech.
The historian addressed especially the most conservative Republicans who do not want to vote for Harris for other issues: “Don’t vote for Trump. If you care about Ukraine, don’t vote for Trump. If you do it, you are going to regret it when you see what Trump and Putin are going to do to Ukraine.” Very seriously, he outlined Trump’s “long and documented history” “as a friend of the Russian regime,” his debts and his relationship with Putin. “He is a person who in general, sadly, is very passive in relation to dictators,” said Snyder, who recalled that JD Vance, the vice presidential candidate, continually spreads messages against Ukraine and boasts that he does not care what happens in that country. .
Some Republicans have already changed, like Vera Andryczyk, a Republican activist from a small town outside Philadelphia and one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Women’s League of America. After the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he resigned from all his positions in local Republican organizations and is now campaigning against Trump. “I am still a Republican, but this is not the Republican Party to which I have dedicated my life,” she said a few days ago to the Washington Post.
Reagan Republicans
The experience of other generations more closely linked to the Republicans is familiar to Sonevytsky. His parents emigrated after World War II to the United States and it was not until the 1990s that they managed to reconnect with their family, who lives in several regions of western Ukraine and kyiv. Some were sent to Siberia during the war and were not allowed to return home until 1972.
Maria first visited Ukraine on Independence Day, with the 1991 referendum. “I just remember my father hugging his cousin, who he may have met when he was a very small child. And my father never cried… It’s the classic Ukrainian immigrant American experience.”
His family is still in western Ukraine. “They haven’t died from the missiles yet, but they hear air raid sirens regularly. And the economy is difficult for them. They were already struggling financially and now it has become even more difficult,” he says. “Daily life in times of war is a different experience.”
Her father died a long time ago, but her mother is an example of change: she was what could be defined as “a Reagan Republican,” but she has not voted for Republicans in several elections and is definitely not a Trump supporter, although unlike others who find it more difficult to turn their back on their former party.
“Sometimes it’s those older Reagan Republicans who are so dedicated to the Republican Party in an almost tribal way… But it’s not always generational,” he explains. Some more recent immigrants, particularly men, are attracted to the “strongman idea” that Trump is trying to project.
She insists that the group be nonpartisan: “We are not specifically endorsing one candidate. We believe that through education, people will come to their own conclusions… We asked experts like Tim Snyder to weigh in. And he has given it loud and clear.”
In any case, he says that the Trump campaign has made no effort to reach these communities. “Harris’s team has been courting Ukrainian and Polish and other Eastern European groups in swing states in recent weeks,” Sonevytsky explains. “Part of the explanation may be that Harris has a stronger team on the ground than Trump. The other thing is that Trump and Vance have said things that are very anti-Ukrainian. I’m not sure it’s that important of an issue to them.”
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