BREVARD, N.C. (WLOS) — Since 2022, it’s estimated that several hundred thousand Ukrainians have fled their war-torn country for the United States using a legal pathway called “Uniting for Ukraine.”
In late July, President Donald Trump said those hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians can likely stay here until the end of the war, but their future is still up in the air.
In Brevard, one of those families is adjusting every day to their new American life.
We interviewed Anastasiia, her husband Yuri, their son Kirill, and their sponsor, Keith Mast, over two visits to their home earlier this year.
Anastasiia and Yurii spoke mostly in Russian, translated by a third-party observer. Kirill also helped translate at times.
Anastasiia learned how to cook at an early age. Now, she preps dinner for her family thousands of miles from home.
“To me, the family is everything,” Yurii said.
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In Mariupol, a coastal Ukrainian city near the Russian border, Yurii worked in a factory.
“Life was wonderful before the war,” he said. “Our city was flourishing and developing. They were innovating a lot of stuff and planting a lot of trees, and it was very beautiful.”
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
For weeks, 13 people piled into their family’s basement, unsure if they’d wake up the next day.
“Our idea was that we didn’t want to get buried all at once, as a whole family, so we split between two different locations so if somebody would be killed, then the other would be able to dig them out and bury them,” Yurii said.
As the war continued, Yurii and Anastasiia said, “the alive became jealous of the dead.”
“We were waking up not because it was time to wake up, but because every morning at the same time they were bombing the city from the planes,” Anastasiia said. “So sometimes we were under the floor of the house, so we were in the cellar. Sometimes it was shaking so much that we thought the bomb would go through and everything would cave on top of where we were hiding.”
Yurii, Anastasiia, and her then-12-year-old son, Kirill, fled Mariupol in March 2022.
“We were the first ones to get out because our house was hit with a shell and one of the walls caved,” she said. “From the very beginning, the district where we lived was cut off from the rest of the city because we were on the other side of the bridge, which was destroyed, and if people tried to escape through Russia, they were basically being shot at. Their cars were shot at; they were killed. We were in a situation where we thought that we would either be killed if we stayed or we would be killed if we tried to escape, so we had to get out of there and go somewhere. I was actually in shock when we were leaving town because that was the first time that we got to see what it looks like, and by that time, about 90% of the city was destroyed, and 80% of the buildings were destroyed, and everything looked black, burned – like we were watching some horror movie. There were dead bodies lying around, and so we only realized how bad it was when we were leaving. We didn’t know before.”
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The family of three wanted to evacuate from Ukraine, but couldn’t.
Initially, they made it to Lithuania; however, Anastasiia’s parents refused to leave until her mother knew whether her other child was alive.
If he were dead, she wanted to bury him.
Meanwhile, across the seas in the United States, Keith Mast was organizing.
“I was explaining, this is what I’m doing, and people would come up to me and say, ‘I want to help.’ And it ended up being seven couples, 14 people, and it made the whole thing a lot easier,” Mast said. “I created a website, started an organization alone, and then I asked a couple of other people to join me, and the goal was to sponsor a family in Lithuania, or Poland, or Latvia for a year.”
They raised $20,000.
“The main thing about this program, Uniting for Ukraine, is that the sponsor is responsible financially and also helping them get settled,” Mast said. “Where are they going to live? Do they need to enroll in school? And we needed insurance, medical insurance, we needed driver’s license, social security number, but the main thing was that there was someone in the [United] States who was going to take responsibility for them as opposed to them just arriving and then trying to find out what services they might need.”
Coincidentally, Yurii and Anastasiia were considering their next move.
Yurii’s cousin, who lives in the United States, encouraged his family to come.
One plan was to come through the Mexican border, but Yurii’s cousin helped coordinate a better alternative.
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He hopped on a video call, and Keith Mast popped up on screen.
“We literally had one day to decide if we were going to sponsor them, so we all kind of looked at each other, ‘What are we going to do?'” Mast said. “‘I said, ‘Okay, I will sponsor them.’ [I] signed the papers, and Uniting for Ukraine and everything went through so quickly, so within I’m going to say 10 days, they were in the States.”
Mast met Yurii, Anastasiia and Kirill at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport on May 21, 2022.
The war began three months prior, and Anastasiia was pregnant the entire time. She and Yurii welcomed a daughter three weeks after they arrived in the United States.
Her name is Nicole; she was born at Mission Hospital as an American citizen.
“We’re really happy that she’s a U.S. citizen because even if we have to go somewhere else, she’ll always have an option to come live here,” Anastasiia said.
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Mast lived with the family for the first three months after they arrived. He doesn’t have any children of his own, but that’s not exactly true anymore.
“When you think of helping a family, you think of maybe getting them settled, providing for essentials, and then maybe then they kind of start their own life, and you have more casual involvement, and we just hit loved each other right away,” he said. “We didn’t have to say now we’re a family, it just kind of happened. It’s not just they are benefiting; I am benefiting every day. I get the photos out of Nicole, see my granddaughter, because everyone is showing me their photos, and so now I get my photos out [and] look what Nicole did today.”
Mast and Kirill grew close.
“He’s been, it’s more than just helpful, it’s like he’s our protector, honestly,” Kirill said.
Although they no longer live together, they are still very much a part of each other’s lives.
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When we went over, Keith was there for dinner. We ate Borscht and Vareniki.
Dinner lasted hours, and the conversation was unending despite the obvious language barrier.
Kirill, a sophomore at Brevard High School, helped translate for Yurii and Anastasiia.
“Our older son is pretty much an American boy now. He has American friends, behaves like an American boy, and we expect that there would be some kind of psychological issues if we have to move to a different country, and as far as our daughter, she was born here, and that would also be a psychological stress,” Yurii said.
The family is legally protected through May 2026.
“It is literally a presidential decision for these types of things,” Mast said.
In June, the family submitted an extension request to immigration services, but has not heard anything back.
“Well, of course, we are scared of deportation with what we see in the news when people get stopped, arrested in the street, put in immigration jail, and being deported,” Yurii said.
Mast tries to keep the end of their parole out of his mind.
“I actually ask myself, ‘When is it going to hit me?’ But it hasn’t yet,” he said, tearing up.
“It’s a whole different feeling to wake up without hearing a bomb flying by or hearing soldiers fighting,” Kirill said. “You wake up, there’s quiet outside. You know you’re safe because you’re in a different country. You know your family members won’t get killed any minute, or honestly, yourself.”
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“We resettled once, which was a very big undertaking. It’s very difficult to start living a new life in a new place, and so if we have to do it again, I don’t know how many people can live through that and stay sane,” Anastasiia said.
Anastasiia and Yurii, like Mast, focus on what they can control.
Yurii works as a mechanic at an auto shop.
Anastasiia works in the kitchen at Brevard College.
Both are surrounded by immigrants.
“I don’t consider immigrants different or bad. They’re all very nice people. They all help us,” Anastasiia said. “If there are some bad apples, maybe they are breaking the law, maybe they should be punished, but most people are working and they are paying their taxes. They’re living by the rules of the land and so if they are following all the principles and the laws in the United States, then I don’t see why they should be treated badly.”
Anastasiia baked her first cake when she was 11.
She dreams of opening a Ukrainian bakery where she can make apple cake, but for now sells her sweets and Vareniki at farmers’ markets nearby.
In Ukraine, Anastasiia said you don’t get up from the table until all the food is gone. We fell short that night at her house in Brevard.
Outside their home, a Ukrainian flag waves proudly at its American counterpart.