On Thursday, next to Veselka, at the Ukrainian National Home – a community center with a Ukrainian restaurant – stood Victor Kurylyk, 53, a board member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr, who has been active in New York’s Ukrainian community since emigrating from western Ukraine 25 years ago.
Geopolitical events in the last week have shocked Ukrainians at home and overseas as well as US lawmakers and allies, as the US president appeared to heavily favor the Russian president Vladimir Putin to dictate peace terms on the eve of the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump had talked on the campaign trail of being against ongoing massive US spending on Ukraine’s defense, and boasted of creating a peace deal “on day one” of his second term in office, with many fearing such a deal would give Russia an advantage – but nothing quite as aggressively and comprehensively anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelenskyy as the remarks and actions of the last week.
In the Brighton Beach neighborhood by the ocean in Brooklyn, home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Angela Kravtchenko, a Ukrainian American Democratic party district leader for the area, said Ukrainian American residents there are feeling angry and helpless after this week’s turn of events.
Members of New York’s large Ukrainian community expressed a mix of disillusionment, betrayal, defiance and acute uncertainty about what the future holds for Ukraine after tensions escalated this week between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
