In New York, the inhabitants of “little Ukraine”, a district nestled between two blocks of houses in the south of Manhattan, tremble for their loved ones 8,000 km away, for fear that Russia will invade the country of their families.
“It’s like a bad dream,” breathes Anna Shestopalova, met by AFP in front of the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Saint George.
Arrived in the United States in 1996, this woman, who refuses to give her age and her profession, simply expresses her fear for her sister and her nephews who remained in Ukraine: “I spoke to her this morning, she is very worried. never thought I would live in such a situation“, she confides.
“Little Ukraine” (“Little Ukraine”) or “the Ukrainian Village” (“Ukrainian Village”) is a tiny community enclave, like New York has hundreds, wedged between the first and third avenues of lower Manhattan, the along Sixth and Seventh Streets.
Part of the fashionable East Village, increasingly gentrified and less and less authentically Ukrainian.
– “The heavy heart” –
But in the center of this small community, there are always a few stalls, such as the Veselka restaurant which proudly displays the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. It serves the region’s traditional dishes, borscht soup and pierogis.
But it mainly talks about Russian President Vladimir Putin and the threats of invasion of eastern Ukraine.
“I am very sad, my heart is heavy,” owner Jason Birchard, a third-generation Ukrainian in the United States and whose grandfather opened this restaurant in 1954, told AFP.
And even “if we hope for a peaceful settlement, the situation is so explosive that we are very worried”, he admits.
Many of his customers support Ukraine, “express their wishes and prayers and inquire about the fate of employees and families”, explains the 54-year-old man.
His manager Vitalii Desiatnychenko, 30, suffers from being separated from his parents who live in Kiev. “Physically in New York, but my head elsewhere”, admits the young man: “Even if I have been here for ten years, I remain Ukrainian. I am an only child and I cannot help worrying about them”.
– “The same people” –
According to the 2019 US census, just over a million Ukrainians and people of Ukrainian origin live in the United States, including 160,000 in New York, a cultural mosaic of nearly nine million souls.
The megalopolis also has a large Russian population or population of Russian origin concentrated in “Little Odessa” (“Little Odessa”) south of Brooklyn.
And while Russian elderly in the United States may be sensitive to Moscow’s “propaganda” on Ukraine, Vitalii Desiatnychenko has not lost his Russian friends in New York.
“It’s just politics! We are the same people, we come from the same territories. The Ukrainians have family in Russia, the Russians have family in Ukraine”, sums up the 30-year-old.
But 8,000 km from the east of Ukraine, politics and the fear of war are on display in New York: there, a Ukrainian flag hangs from a window of the meat market in the East Village, here a placard calling for demonstrations in support of Kiev.
And at the entrance to the Ukrainian cultural center, a poster even dares to “say no to Putin”. Natalia Lemishka, a dance teacher, has a simple message for the Russian president who is threatening to invade his country: “Don’t do this, don’t do this”.
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