Olena Ber woke up at 6 a.m. June 2 to a message from her brother’s commanding officer that made her stomach drop.
“Give me a call as soon as possible,” the message read.
“I knew something happened,” said Ber, who grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, and now lives in St. John.
Her brother Oleg Savchenko joined the Ukraine army in 2014 when Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. He rose through the ranks and became a sergeant, Ber said.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Savchenko was sent to the front lines, Ber said. On June 1, Savchenko was with a four-man unit in a red-zone area along the front lines when a missile hit a nearby building and he was crushed by debris.
He died instantly. Savchenko, 36, left behind four children, his wife, his mother and two sisters, Ber said.
“I was screaming,” Ber, 34, said when the commanding officer told her the news. But she had to collect herself quickly because she had to tell their mom and Savchenko’s wife, who live in Ukraine.
When their mother picked up the phone, she told Ber she was happy to hear from her. Ber asked her to take a seat, and their mother immediately asked what happened.
“When I told her, she was screaming from the top of her lungs. She was crying and she said, ‘That is not true.’ Of course, nobody wanted to believe it,” Ber said.
Ber said she flew to Kyiv a few days later, and she stayed for a month to organize the funeral and be with family.
During the funeral, Savchenko’s youngest daughter, who was 4 years old, looked at the closed coffin and asked her family: “My daddy is sleeping there. He’s just tired. He’s coming back, right?”
“Nobody took it well,” Ber said, wiping tears from her eyes.
Savchenko helped raise her, Ber said, and he taught her to be a good person, to be generous and to have a big heart.
“He always told me, ‘That’s how it has to be. If you have it, if you can give it, just give it,’” Ber said.
Throughout the war, Savchenko and Ber would talk on the phone and send each other messages. He would always ask about her and always asked her to tell her something good that was happening in her life.
“He was like, ‘I just want to make sure you have a good life and I’m going to be happy to hear something is good with you’,” Ber said. “You feel guilty about it because you live here.”
‘The way it goes is not the way we hoped.’
The last three years have been mentally exhausting and draining, Ber said. The first thing she does every morning is look at her phone and check for messages from her mother, she said.
“Okay, mom’s still alive. That’s how the morning start,” Ber said.
To help her throughout the war, Ber said she’s been leaning on the Ukrainian community and participating in various events, like making pierogi, at St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Munster.
Volodymyr Kushnir, the pastor of the church, said Ukrainians are very concerned about the war — especially after the political shift in the U.S.
“The way it goes is not the way we hoped,” Kushnir said. “We just need a little bit more support from the U.S. and the president to finish it.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian officials this week to begin conversations about ending the war in Ukraine, but no officials from Ukraine were invited to the meeting. After the meeting, President Donald Trump claimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a dictator and that Ukraine started the war.
Ukraine, which doesn’t have the military power that Russia does, did not start the war, Ber said. It wasn’t right to start peace deal conversations without Ukraine at the table, she said.
The Trump administration’s actions and statements about the war in Ukraine have been heartbreaking, Ber said.
“He needs to bite his tongue. He never filter what he say, Trump. He needs to filter his language,” Ber said.
The war’s origins
Dina Spechler, a political science professor with Indiana University Bloomington, rebuked the idea that Ukraine started the war. Trump likely said that because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes Ukraine started the war, but that doesn’t make it true, Spechler said.
Putin has always viewed Ukraine as having “natural ties” to Russia, Spechler said, which to an extent is true because they have linguistic and cultural similarities. Putin has also wanted Russia to regain dominant influence over the former Soviet Union states, she said.
When Putin became President in 2000, he wanted Ukraine to maintain a leadership that was loyal to Moscow and not the West, Spechler said. Ukrainian leadership has shifted from leaders who are pro-Russia and leaders who are pro-West, she said.
In 2004, during the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko was elected Ukraine’s third president and he wanted Ukraine to align more with the West, Spechler said.
At a conference in Munich in 2007, Putin gave a speech about the threat of NATO expansion and called it “a hostile action,” Spechler said.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is a treaty signed in Washington D.C. in 1949 by 12 founding members with the aim of creating mutual assistance to counter any action taken by the Soviet Union to take control of Eastern Europe.
By 2008, NATO, which was ultimately agreed to by 32 countries, held a summit during which the U.S., under President George Bush, and Poland pushed for Ukrainian membership in NATO, Spechler said, which not all NATO countries were excited about.
NATO members compromised by stating that Ukraine and Georgia could one day be welcomed in NATO and to start developing an action plan to help the countries prepare, Spechler said. To this day, neither country has joined NATO.
But, that NATO action “crossed a red line” in Putin’s eyes, Spechler said.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and encouraged and aided Russian separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Eastern portions of Ukraine, to gain autonomy from Ukraine, Spechler said.
Leading up to 2022, Spechler said there wasn’t an event that took place for Russia to start a war in Ukraine. Putin was increasingly worried about Ukraine joining NATO and the eastern expansion of NATO, she said.
“We know that there had been a very gradual, but very substantial, build up for months of Russian troops on the Ukraine border,” Spechler said. “The deciding factor may have been some perception or assessment of the readiness of those troops to go in.”
As Putin calculated the start of the war in 2022, Spechler said he likely took into account that the West didn’t intervene militarily in 2014. Putin anticipated Russian soldiers would be welcomed and wouldn’t meet a strong resistance, she said.
“The lead troops in the Russian invasion in 2022 were in dress uniforms. They thought they would have a parade, they would enter Kyiv and the population would support them and the Ukraine military would be easily overwhelmed and that would be that,” Spechler said.
Putin didn’t properly calculate that Ukraine had a stronger army compared to 2014 and that the West would support Ukraine through military funding, Spechler said.
“It was a colossal miscalculation on Putin’s part,” Spechler said.
U.S. aligns with Putin
Working with Trump, Putin will likely get the upper hand in any peace negotiations, Spechler said. Putin likely won’t achieve what he hoped for when he invaded Ukraine three years ago, which is total Russian control over Ukraine, but he’ll walk away from the table with some wins, she said.
Putin has recently stated that his main goal now is guarantees from Ukraine and NATO that Ukraine will never join NATO, Spechler said.
“I can’t see Zelenskyy signing on to such a deal, but I can see Trump exerting a lot of pressure on Zelenskyy,” Spechler said.
Trump doesn’t view the Russia-Ukraine war as an American problem, Spechler said.
Under Trump, military aid to Ukraine will likely end altogether, Spechler said. Trump has also stated he would roll back sanctions against Russia, which could lead to European countries rolling back their sanctions because they are less effective without U.S. sanctions, she said.
While Russia has been economically impacted by the war, Ukraine has been devastated as cities and towns have been largely destroyed, Spechler said. Critical infrastructure like the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have been threatened or damaged. Without military aid to Ukraine, it’s hard to tell how much longer Ukraine an sustain the war effort, she said.
If ending the war meant Ukraine gave up some of its territory, Ber said she could accept that. Oksana Kushnir, the pastor’s wife, said Ukraine can’t give up territory after three years of fighting.
“The simplest way (to end the war) is to ask Putin to leave Ukraine land. After all these years, we can’t just give up,” Oksana Kushnir said.
akukulka@post-trib.com