Mykola Vashchuk may be thousands of miles from Kyiv, his home town, but life has never been busier.
He runs pierogi food businesses here in Cleveland and back in Ukraine, works part-time for a local charity, while studying for a law degree at Cleveland State University. His wife works at a daycare and the couple is raising two sons. He and his family have built a new life on the shores of Lake Erie, having fled Ukraine after a Russian bomb blew out two windows of their Kyiv apartment in December 2022.
“There was no electricity, no water, so we decided to come to the US,” he says.
But the Trump administration’s threats to end programs that have allowed Ukrainians to live and work legally in the US has cast a pall over all his efforts.
“I applied for TPS [Temporary Protected Status] five days ago, but who knows [what will happen]. Our applications are still pending,” he says.
Three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have forged a new life in the US. One of the largest communities – about 15,000 people – has come to Cleveland, a city that’s been hemorrhaging residents for decades.
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