A Ukrainian refugee arrives in Michigan to meet her grandchildren
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
“Come here, my joy, my happiness,” Liubov Shchegelska tells her grandson, Tim, in Ukrainian as the 2-year-old boy plays in the yard outside his parents’ Traverse City apartment. Tim’s parents are Viktor Grebennykov and Diana Grebennykova, natives of Ukraine who moved to northern Michigan in 2019 when Viktor—an Olympian in the 2012 London games—became coach of the Lake Leelanau Rowing Club. (Read a feature story on the Grebennykovs in our March edition of the Sun.)
It’s early May, a bright sun warms the soft grass, and the fields are ablaze with the soft pink of spring blossoms. If she ignored the grim news popping from the Telegram app on her phone, Liubov, who is Diana’s mom, could almost tune out the war ravaging her homeland—the conflict that sent her across borders and into the United States just two weeks before—but also allowed her to meet her grandchildren, Tim, and his 4-year-old sister, Ellis, for the very first time. On this day she could almost tune out the war. Almost.
Liubov, her sister, her son Konstantin and his family fled their home in Kyiv at 6 a.m. on Feb. 24, the day the Russians invaded. They drove 16 hours (a trip that usually takes eight hours) in a long chain of cars and buses heading west, and sheltered in Kamianets-Podilskyi, a small city in western Ukraine near the Romanian and Moldovan border, where Liubov’s mother lives.
Winter cold still gripped Ukraine, and the family left the capital in such a hurry that they didn’t bring many layers of warm clothing. Liubov packed a suitcase and brought some money and a small amount of jewelry with her. But in the haste to find her cat and leave before the invaders were expected to arrive, she forgot to bring her passport. The men who took her west would later return to Kyiv to volunteer for the civil defense forces (they weren’t needed) and bring her key documents back to her.
She lived for nearly two months in Kamianets-Podilskyi, volunteering to help refugees find food and shelter. She spent hours on Telegram calls with Diana, Viktor, Ellis, and Tim, but had to leave their apartment sometimes 5-10 times a day to take shelter when they heard air raid sirens. During one video call, Liubov suddenly told the grandchildren, “We have to go to the bunker now.”
Viktor’s mother and brother, meanwhile, live near Mykolaiv, a city on the Black Sea which is under fire by the Russians as they try to take the crucial port city of Odessa and cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea.
In mid-April, after weeks of urging from Diana, Liubov traveled to Poland and two days later flew from Warsaw to Paris to Mexico City to Tijuana, from where she crossed the U.S. border into California on April 21 as a refugee. Twice before she had tried and failed to get a visa to visit the United States. On April 23, she flew from San Diego to Chicago to Traverse City, where Diana met her at Cherry Capital Airport. They touched each other and cried. Mother and daughter hadn’t seen each other in eight years, since Viktor and Diana left Ukraine in 2014 when the Russians invaded the Crimean Peninsula and fomented a war in the eastern part of the country.
Back at their apartment near Tom’s West Bay, Viktor had prepared a midnight feast of traditional Ukraine borscht loaded with beets, cabbage, beans, onions and potatoes. The next morning, Liubov met her grandchildren for the first time.
Since arriving in Michigan, Liubov has settled into life with her daughter’s family: cooking, shopping, going for walks, playing with the children, visiting Viktor’s rowing club at Fountain Point Resort on Lake Leelanau. They have also taken her to see iconic locations in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore like Pyramid Point and Good Harbor Beach. But Liubov is not a tourist, she’s a war refugee.
“I’m very happy I’m in this place,” she said. “Diana said to try and leave the war behind me, but I’m always praying in my mind for our soldiers. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to go back home.”
A blue and yellow flag that Liubov brought from Ukraine hangs from their porch on the second floor of the apartment building.
“The war changed everything. In one day, your life is suddenly crossed,” said Liubov, who managed a small company back in Kyiv. “I stopped making plans. I hope to go back at some point, but I can’t go back before the war is over.”
