A Chicago influencer is using her platform to help shed light on the difficulties Ukrainians trying to flee the war-torn country are facing amid the Russian invasion.
“The entire country is going through this, nobody’s safe,” said Olga Tsoi.
Tsoi was born and raised in Ukraine, but has called Chicago home for over a decade. She returned to her home country days before New Year’s Eve to visit family and undergo knee surgery. When recovery started taking longer than expected, Tsoi delayed her plans to come back to Chicago.
The 31-year-old and her mother fled their home on Feb. 24, when Russian bombs and missiles rained down over Ukraine.
“This seems so surreal,” said Tsoi, in her interview with Reuters. “This is something out of a history book from ages ago.”
Tsoi says her recovering knee still isn’t at 100 percent, but she didn’t give fleeing a second thought, using a crutch to help ease the stress from the journey.
“It’s crazy how your body’s in a constant state of fear and a constant state of fight or flight mode,” said Tsoi.
Tsoi and her mother spent the night in a bomb shelter in a Kyiv school’s basement.
Thanks to support from Tsoi’s sister in Turkey, they were able to secure seats on a bus headed for Lviv, a Ukrainian city 40 miles away from the Polish border.
Eighteen hours, several blockades and military checkpoints later, they arrived in Lviv, where a second bus arrived to take them to the border.
After a day of waiting and worrying about whether they’d be accepted into Poland, Tsoi and her mother entered Krakow, Poland, late Sunday night.
“It’s just us out of who we know, our family and people that we know here,” said Tsoi. “We’re the only ones who were able to make it out.”
With well over 40,000 followers on Instagram, Tsoi started documenting her journey, sharing what she and other Ukrainians trying to survive the Russian invasion were experiencing.
“I couldn’t take my shoes off because my feet were so swollen,” said Tsoi. “This ... was hard for us, I can’t imagine somebody traveling with children.”
Tsoi’s father, grandmother, and the rest of her family live in southern Ukraine, where they’re taking shelter in a cellar.
“And just being here, it’s like. It’s surreal that people are just casually walking around here,” said Tsoi. “You know, I kind of feel guilty that I’m sitting here drinking coffee. You know what I mean? It’s crazy. How can I be so comfortable when I know the entire country is just, man. I know that my dad is in a cellar trying to spend the night and I’m here in a hotel. It’s just, it’s really tough.”
Tsoi says she plans on catching a flight to Chicago, where she hopes to seek asylum for her mother.
“We don’t even know if we can get her into the United States to stay with me,” said Tsoi. “And if that’s not an option, where’s she going to go? I can’t leave her in a different country, I have to bring her back to my house, to my home. So, there’s no other option. Then, once I start thinking about that, what about everybody else? What about my dad and everybody else? My loved ones and the rest of my family? I don’t know.”
