ATLANTA — Every morning, when Olga Westfall wakes up in her home in Decatur, she checks—did Russia invade?
“It is scary. It’s really scary,” Westfall said Friday.
She aches with fear for her family in Ukraine: uncles, aunts, cousins.
“You know, they wake up, every morning,” she said, “preparing to go to work, send kids to school, to kindergarten, wondering, ‘are we going to return home, is there going to be a war, are we going to be alive,’ and that is scary.”
Westfall moved to the U.S. in 1998, becoming a U.S. citizen, serving in the U.S. Army and then in the U.S. Air Force; she is now an Air Force Reservist.
She organizes rallies, speaks out about how important it is for the U.S. and its allies to defend Ukraine’s independence and make a stand against Russia right now.
“If we don’t stand up for what is right,” she said, “if we are quiet, the evil will spread.”
Another metro Atlantan from Ukraine, Kateryna Sopizhenko, shudders at the thought of what a Russian invasion could entail.
“I’m just afraid that they will absolutely destroy the country and absolutely destroy the nation,” she said Friday.
Sopizhenko said her grandmother in Ukraine told her, “’I’m just going to stay home, lay down on my couch and watch TV and wait for them to come get me, because I’m old, I’m not going to move nowhere.’”
Sophizhenko fears for her grandmother, and for her aunts, uncles, cousins.
“They do not have a way of getting out,” she said, “I don’t know the way out for them.”
The worst, for her, she said, is “just the feeling that you want to help, but there is no way of your helping, and there is no control over this.... We’re not Russia, we’re not a part of Russia, we’re not a region of Russia, we’re our own, independent country.”
She and others say they will continue to pray for their families and for Ukraine, and speak out, here—grateful for the support of the U.S. and its allies.