Uliana Bazar and Frank Pichel on the Spirit of Ukraine

by Charles McGuigan 04.2022

Cover photo by Uliana Bazar

Cover design by Doug Dobey

Every cell in her body remembered, and as the memories persisted she could feel herself being drawn back. Something almost magnetic was at play here. It was as if the sediments of her homeland, liberally sprinkled among the threads of her DNA, demanded a reunion, a return to the rich soils, the ancient earth, tilled since time began by her own ancestors. Great tides of yellow flowed across this fertile land cradled by the Carpathian Mountains. Through the succession of the seasons, three distinct crops, each one yellow as a noonday sun, would erupt from the fecund earth, first with mustard, then with sunflowers, and finally with wheat—a harvest that could feed an entire continent, and fill the larders of half a world with oil for cooking and flour for baking. And above it all, a deep azure sky. Combined with the yellow fields below they created a permanent flag to her motherland.

So three years ago, Uliana Bazar, along with her spouse, Matthew Propert, left their home in the United States and flew to Ukraine, the land of her birth, and they settled into their new home. And then, a few short years later, just five hours before the army of a sociopathic war criminal invaded her beloved country, Uliana and Matthew fled to England, just outside of London, and since that moment, Uliana has watched the malevolent dictator attempt to crush the indomitable spirit of Ukraine, slaughtering her women, men and children in an act of genocide the entire world has witnessed. But Ukraine will not be toppled, will not relent. Of this, Uliana is certain. And it is something woven into the very fabric of their humanity—their love of freedom—that will ultimately defeat the mass murderer called Putin, this Sauron, this evil incarnate.

Three weeks after Russia declared war on Ukraine in an attempt to subjugate and perhaps even annihilate a peace-loving people, I had the honor of interviewing Uliana, via Zoom. She instructed me about her native land and its people, whose very existence is now being threatened by a megalomaniac of Hitlerian proportions.

Born in 1986, just a few years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Uliana had experienced what it was like to live in a totalitarian state. “When I was about five I remember pictures of Lenin in all my school books,” she says. “Russian propaganda would force people to learn Russian and to read books with Lenin in them. My parents, for example, couldn’t get married in the church because they could be arrested during Soviet days. People couldn’t even practice their religion.” As soon as the rusted Iron Curtain crumbled away, things changed dramatically. “I was able to throw all those books away,” she says. “The ones with Lenin in them.”

For a number of years, Uliana lived in the United States. She did graduate work in photojournalism at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design and called DC home for about four years, then moved out to Santa Cruz, California with the man she would ultimately marry. The pair both worked, and still do, as photographers and photo editors for National Geographic Books.

“I was excited about America and the American lifestyle,” Uliana tells me.

But that all changed abruptly in 2018. “I realized I could not stay here for another minute,” says Uliana. “I had to go back. I felt I needed to reconnect with my roots. We got married in Ukraine and bought an apartment in Lviv.”

When she considers what drove her to make the decision to return to Ukraine, Uliana pauses for a long moment. “How would I describe it?” she asks. “I felt that I did not have the power of my ancestors because I removed myself from that power.”

That was all confirmed during a visit to her native land. “I went to the Carpathian Mountains, a beautiful area in the western Ukraine,” she says. “And I stood in the river with a beautiful forest and mountains all around me, and birds flying overhead, and it started to rain a little bit and I just felt the whole forest was singing songs to me. I felt it in my DNA, I remembered something, memories I had forgotten, and after that I realized I needed to nourish those roots. That was my power. I had a full vision that I had to go back to Ukraine.”

It was fortunate that she did move back when she did, for during these past three years both her grandmother and father passed away. “I was able to be with them,” she says. “But a lot of other things happened when I was there. I learned a lot about Ukraine, and I really connected with the spirit of Ukraine. Ukraine is a very powerful land with powerful people. They were always free, they always would get their power back, always get their freedom back. So I got in touch with that. If I had to describe it, I would say it’s in the genes.”

Uliana connected readily with the ancient deities of Ukraine. “In our mythology we have many female goddesses,” she says. “We have Mokosh (a goddess of fertility, harvest and mercy). “And then there is Slava. She is the goddess of victory, and she is always portrayed with a sword. She gives courage and will and power to the warriors who protect our land. She gives people strength to not be slaves, to not have a broken spirit, but to rise up and fight. And that’s what the world can see right now. Ukrainians have that spirit; they will not give up. They have the courage and power to stand up and fight. That’s in the genes. It is part of you from your mother’s womb. It gives all Ukrainians the energy and the power. They will not be defeated.”

When Moscow was just a one-horse town, Kyiv was already a veritable metropolis. Ukraine possessed a distinctive culture and language of her own. For well over three centuries now, Russia has committed intolerable acts of genocide against Ukrainians, in one form or other. Cultural genocide began in the early 1700s under Peter 1 who decreed a ban on any printing in the Ukrainian language, and the seizure and burning of sacred texts used in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. It escalated with his successors, and then, in 1764, Catherine II ordered the Russification of Ukraine. It’s an ancient ploy used repeatedly throughout history to destroy indigenous cultures. The Romans did it, the English did it, and God knows Americans did it to all the indigenous tribes across the land that became known as the United States. The objective of course is always displacement. But more than that, it is the eradication of a culture—it is cultural genocide.

Of course there have also been repeated attempts by Russia to literally kill all Ukrainians. In 1932, Stalin was responsible for the mass starvation of between four and seven million Ukrainians. They were dropping like flies. It was called Holodomor, which means Death by Hunger. Many other Ukrainians were slain under Stalin as his purges ensued for the next ten years. And now Putin seems bound and determined to eradicate the Ukrainian people.

Like many others around the world, Uliana initially thought little about Putin’s words. “I wasn’t worried about it,” she says. “I underestimated how sick and psychotic that person is. I don’t think many people anticipated a full-scale invasion and the murder of thousands of people. You think it could happen, but you could not visualize that it would happen on your doorstep."

She remembers when she and her husband fled Ukraine. “Matthew convinced me to leave, and I wanted to stay,” says Uliana. “We left on Wednesday night and arrived in London at one in the morning. When we woke up the next morning, we heard the news.”

And as she watched what was happening in Ukraine, something woke in Ulliana. “It was very acute,” she says. “It was not just pain from what was happening, it was this deep rage, a scream on the inside, about what they’ve been doing and what they continue to do. Not just Putin. It’s not just him. He’s just a new figure who’s trying to pretty much destroy Ukraine and take its culture. It’s Russian imperialism. It’s so deep, so horrific, it’s hard to describe. What they’re trying to do is kill enough Ukrainians so they can make our land available for their people. Just what they did in Crimea with the Tatars who they have already displaced from their land twice. I don’t have the words to describe my feelings. You cannot be relaxed or feel safe when you have a neighbor whose goal is to destroy you.”

In her heart, Uliana knows Ukrainians will not give up the fight. Their spirit is embodied in their leader—the heroic President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy. And she sees it in her friends and family who remain in Ukraine to fight the good fight. “They are true warriors,” she says.

She mentions a friend of hers who is both arborist and environmentalist. He is working day and night, turning massive iron train rails into Czech hedgehogs, anti-tank obstacle defenses first used in World War II against the Nazis.

“I have cousins who organized to make healthy snacks for the Army,” she says. “I send a lot of money. Everybody’s involved, everybody's doing something.”

When she talked with a friend of hers from Lviv not long ago, Uliana asked, “How are you? What are you doing?” Her friend, a thirty-year old woman, responded, “I’m making molotov cocktails.” She remembers the grandmother who brought down a Soviet drone with a jar of pickled tomatoes.

“That’s what you have to do,” says Uliana. “Ukrainians have so much will they literally will stand in front of tanks and stop their cars in front of tanks to sacrifice everything because they have a cause. If you don’t do anything, you die. So all of my family and friends are put in situations where they either defend themselves or they die. It’s a horrible position to be in. You know, I do not want to kill, but if somebody comes in my home with a gun and tries to kill me, I have to kill them. Ukrainians do not have a choice. And now they are bringing in warriors from Chechnya and Syria who are just coming to kill. Just kill. It’s so sickening.”

Putin of course is the leader, but he has tremendous support in Russia. “It’s not just Putin,” according to Uliana. “People should know that. It’s a lot of people. It’s his regime and the people who support him. You have this regime that decides to slaughter and destroy Ukraine. Putin’s language is fear and power, and that appeals to some Russians.”

And then she mentions 2014, when Russia trampled Crimea and the world simply watched. “When you tell a psychopath, ‘I’m scared of you’,” Uliana says. “The psychopath says ‘I can get away with anything.’”

There is a longing at such times for the leadership of a woman like Madeline Albright. She who as a child witnessed what Nazis had done to her native Czechoslovokia, she who had lost three of her own grandparents in Hitler’s concentration camps. She would have understood why it is so important for democracies to act now and decisively against Putin. In fact, the day after Putin invaded Ukraine Albright encouraged the West to unify and to flatten the Stalin wannabe. As secretary of state, back in 1999, Albright convinced Clinton to intervene militarily against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian psychopathic leader, who was intent on murdering all of Kosovo's ethnic-Albanians. At her urging, NATO bombed Serb-led Yugoslavia for 78 days, and effectively crushed Milosevic.

The same day Madeline Albright died last month, I spoke with Frank Pichel, who remembers Kosovo as if it were only yesterday. At the time he was teaching art out in Colorado. “I was fascinated by the fact that there was a war in Europe and I hadn’t seen any amazing imagery from that war,” he remembers. “I was listening to the radio and hearing about it. But I wasn’t seeing it. So I went over there basically for spring break.”

Armed with a medium format camera, he flew to Macedonia, rented a car, and then crossed the border into Kosovo. This was just a week after the war ended and no one seemed yet to be in control of the country. He encountered a number of refugees along the way and he was forever altered.

“That changed my life,” says Frank. “It really changed my outlook on life and what I thought about people. I met these beautiful people in this horrific situation that they needed to get out of, so I started helping them. What happened to me was profound. I was punk rock, and I hated the world and thought people are awful. Then I get over there, and it’s just unbelievable, the beauty of the human spirit. You would say these insane things to people that were strangers. Things like, ‘You’re my brother and I’ll die for you.’ So it was very inspirational.”

A number of the folks he met over there remain friends to this day. One’s a cop out in Iowa. Another is a makeup artist  in TV in New York City. “They’re just happy beautiful Americans now,” Frank says.

He tells me how much Americans were loved by those who were freed from their oppressors. “The US really saved them,” says Frank. “We bombed the s**t out of the Serbs, and people there were so into America, which I wasn’t expecting at all because I see the faults in my country. But they were on the street chanting USA, USA, and a few were patting me on the back, saying, ‘Tell Madeline Albright when you get home that we love her.’”

So it’s no surprise that when Frank started seeing the photos and film footage of what the Russians were doing to Ukraine he decided to make a trip again. “This is the next war in Europe and I just felt compelled to go,” he says. He booked a trip to Poland and rented a car. At first he thought he’d be buying food for the refugees streaming across the border. “But that was totally covered by aid organizations there,” he says.

Ukrainian buses were constantly pulling up to the Polish border, dropping off their passengers and then turning around to get more. Sometimes Polish buses would pick up some of those passengers and take them to train stations or other locations. “But a lot of the people were in flux and didn’t have anywhere to go or they knew where they wanted to go but no one could pick them up,” Frank says. “So I would give them rides and that’s what I did for the seven days. I was there to just transport people from the border to another location.”

He traveled between four different Polish towns along the Ukrainian border, picking up weary folks in desperate need of a ride. “Ukraine is a huge country and some people make this four-day journey from the east to Lviv and then they get a bus,” says Frank. “They’ve already been on this adventure where they haven’t bathed or slept in a room with fewer than a hundred people for four days and then they get trapped in a bus for eighteen hours on the border and then they get across and they unload the bus and there I stood with a sign in Ukrainian that said, ‘I’ll give you a ride, I can take three people, I can take your pets, and I don’t speak anything but English.’ I used Google Translate to make the sign.”

Frank took a number of riders to the Warsaw train station, a popular point for departures westward through Europe. One family in particular had experienced some of the worst luck. “They were Georgian and they had been kicked out of Georgia by Putin in 2008 when he invaded the eastern part of that country,” Frank says. “So they had emigrated to Ukraine and they had gotten knocked out again. I think they weren’t well off in Ukraine.” The family consisted of a special needs teenager, a middle aged father who had trouble with his vision, and a three-year-old child.

“They were trying to get to France where they had a relative,” says Frank. “They had a total of about twenty dollars to get them there.” Frank took them to the station but it was all but impossible to communicate with them because of the language barrier. But digital technology saved the day.

It just so happened that Frank’s ex-wife, under contract with the CDC, was working in Georgia at the time. Frank called her on his smart phone and asked if she had any colleagues there fluent in Georgian. Sure enough there was someone available. Frank handed the phone to the father, a man named Alexander, and in no time at all he found out exactly what this twice-displaced person needed.

“It was just so fascinating because I’m using Google maps, he’s talking to somebody in Georgian on What’s App, and almost all of the volunteers were using Google translate,” Frank says. “We could never do this without the technology. There’s no way one person could do this kind of project by themselves, but technology allowed it.”

That same technology further aided in the relief effort. Not long after he arrived in Poland, Frank began to hear that satisfying cha-ching sound from his Venmo account. Turns out a woman, right here in Richmond, a teacher, posted on social media about what Frank was doing. Within the first 24 hours $5000 in donations flowed into the account, and that number would continue to grow. “I joke that I was making these eternal friends,” says Frank. The money helped, and Frank disbursed it freely according to the refugees' needs.

Every day, Frank would drive his European Kia, about the size of a Honda FIT, to one of the four Polish border towns, and he was constantly amazed by the generosity of people in general, especially the Poles. He invites me to consider what would happen should a similar crisis occur at our southern border. Say people were trying to escape from ruthless drug lords in Central America.

“In America there would be tents and there’d be a FEMA operation,” he says. “But in Poland, people said, ‘Come live at my house indefinitely.’ More than a million people have ended up in Poland, staying with strangers. Imagine that. It’s incredible. It’s like going to the Mexican border and getting immigrants and saying, ‘Come live with me.’ That wouldn’t happen. It’s a different mindset.”

He mentions the outright lies Putin continuously tells about why Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin has often made the erroneous claim that he is fighting neo-Nazis. Nothing could be further from the truth. There might be a handful of nutjobs, many of them planted by Putin himself, but they do not in any way reflect the Ukrainian spirit. “There’s neo-Nazis right here in America,” Frank says. He’s right. Just think of the skinhead-pinhead 2017 Nazi invasion of Charlottesville. Think of the Proud Boys and other lunatic fringe right-wing groups.

Any justification for this unprovoked declaration of war is utterly specious. “The analogy I make is this,” says Frank. “If we decided Russia was having too much influence in Mexico, would America then invade Mexico and kill as many Mexicans as we could. None of Putin’s excuses make any sense at all.”

Of course, the Ukrainians have made it loud and clear that they’re not gonna take it. “They don’t want peace in Ukraine,” Frank says. “They want victory. It’s not about let’s go back to the way things were. It’s more like, let’s ruin Russia. They are very strong. The women and children I transported were all gung-ho. The women were saying, ‘We’re gonna get this done.’”

Weapons and defense systems certainly help defeat the enemy. Of the $10,000 raised for Frank’s effort, roughly half of it still remains. “I’m trying to be a good steward of it,” he says. “And I offered to give it back to people, and they were like. ‘No, no you just put it where you think it’s necessary.’”

To truly help the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom, Frank wants to put it where it will be best used. “I want to give it directly to the Ukrainian Army as a US citizen,” he says.

The West, it seems, is frequently in denial of tyranny, even though it’s always there, and a constant threat to liberty. It took the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor to finally get the US involved in the last global war, took two long years before we committed to this epic fight against tyranny. “The West couldn’t wrap its mind around the violence Putin was willing to do,” Frank Pichel says. “’That can’t happen; he won’t do that.’ But of course it did happen and he would do it.

This saying, wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, has frequented my mind lately: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

What is happening today is a nearly perfect poetic expression of what has happened throughout all of human history, and particularly over the course of modern European history. When Russia began chipping away at the eastern regions of Ukraine—Luhansk and Donetsk—it was impossible, unless you were historically challenged, not to think of Hitler’s goose step waltz into Sudetenland, which was the beginning of the end. And the lame and naive response from Great Britain’s Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain, a coward who actually praised the German annexation of the Sudetenland as a way to ensure “peace for our time.” His spineless response to that invasion contributed in no small way to the massacre of close to 85 million human beings across the globe. You don’t make nice with a rabid pitbull.

Thank God there was a Winston Churchill to take over the helm from PM Milquetoast. And that’s who Uliana Bazar referred to just before our conversation ended.

“You know there’s this quote from Winston Churchill that resonates,” she said. “He said, ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.’ It’s very relevant today. Right now, if Putin’s stopped right now, it can be less losses for everyone. If Putin feels the world is his oyster and he can do what he pleases, he’s not going to be scared of sanctions. His ambition is to build a great Russian empire. And the Middle East and China and all those countries that hate the West, they will join him.”

And then Uliana Bazar mentioned her homeland. “Ukraine is like a shield,” she said. “We are fighting for you. People should realize that all those Ukrainians who right now are fighting and getting killed are fighting for democracy and fighting for freedom and fighting for common values that Europeans and Americans stand for. We are fighting for everybody. I would just hope, out of common sense, that western countries will do more to stop Putin’s madness.”

(To support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and for humanitarian efforts, visit bank.gov.ua.)