DeKalb pastor raising funds to help Kyiv sister church; NIU grad speaks with her family in Ukraine

Karina Maksimova spoke by Skype with members of her family, huddled in a basement back home in Ukraine, as they relayed how they’d woken about 5 a.m. Thursday to bombs and missiles going off.

A U.S. citizen born in Ukraine, Maksimova’s uncle on her mother’s side and cousins still live in the western portion of Ukraine. She also has some cousins on the country’s east side, which on Thursday was barraged by military bombardment as Russian troops entered the country through Belarus.

News of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine was devastating to her family, she said.

“Me and my family have been crying all morning,” Maksimova said. “I’m all cried out. I actually took today off from work. I’ve been sick to my stomach. Most people are saying it’s a conflict. It’s not a conflict. It’s a war.”

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, an attack that included air and missile strikes on Ukrainian military facilities before troops and tanks rolled across the borders from the north, east and south.

Maksimova, 32 – a Northern Illinois University graduate who now lives in Algonquin and works in Elgin – immigrated to Sacramento, California, with her parents and siblings from Vinnitsya, a 340,000 populous nestled along a river in the west-central part of Ukraine, when she was 2. Her father’s family stayed in California while her mother’s side moved to Chicago when she was 5.

A graduate of Huntley High School, Maksimova grew with a fervent Ukrainian-centric life and speaks Ukrainian, Russian and English, she said. She called the invasion unprovoked and said she wrote letters to congress and President Joe Biden Thursday urging America to send military aid to help Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin deflected global condemnation and new sanctions – and referred to his country’s nuclear arsenal as he threatened any foreign country trying to interfere with “consequences you have never seen.”

Biden announced new sanctions Thursday targeting Russian banks, oligarchs and high-tech sectors. The U.S. and its allies will block assets of four large Russian banks, impose export controls and sanction oligarchs. Biden also said the U.S. will be deploying additional forces to Germany to bolster NATO after the invasion of Ukraine, which is not a member of the defense organization.

Maksimova recounted her video conversation with her family and said they were hoping for help that would have more immediate results.

“I wish America could do more for Ukraine right now,” she said. “We understand why nobody wants to get involved but we just pray that somebody does step up.”

Maksimova said her family, which is Christian, came to the U.S. three decades ago to escape religious persecution. Her family that remains in Ukraine can’t leave easily, including her cousin who lives in eastern Ukraine where the Russian occupation is heaviest, and her almost 80-year-old uncle.

“Some of them have been driving, but it’s gridlocked. Everyone’s trying to get to Poland,” she said. “But the older people, where are they going to go? They’re staying put.”

She likened Ukraine’s relationship to Russia with the U.S. and England.

“We respect the Russian language, we love the Russian culture too, it’s kind of like a cousin to us,” Maksimova said. “But it’s not us. The language that people speak in Kyiv is Russian but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Meanwhile, Pastor Phil Perez, of the DeKalb Church of Christ, spent the morning trying to figure out how to help some of his religious counterparts in Ukraine.

Perez visited Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, in December 2019, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. His congregation is part of the larger Chicago Church of Christ network which sends missionaries and develops partnerships with churches in the eastern European country.

Perez said he’s trying to raise money to send to Kyiv so that their sister church with a congregation of about 2,000 people can find safe shelter for their families. He said a hotel in Moldova, also of the former Soviet Union which borders Ukraine to the south east, has agreed to hold rooms for church congregants if they can make their way out of the country.

“Right now, our church is figuring out how to raise $50,000 to give 265 people a chance to flee if they need to flee and then feed them for a month,” Perez said. “But nothing’s organized yet. You can’t just throw money there when the country’s in chaos. I was told today they gave us a deal on the hotel rooms but the bus ride to get there is now $3,000. That’s not great.”

For years, the Chicago Church of Christ network has donated money to its sister congregation in Kyiv and other Baltic eastern European churches in Estonia, Latvia and Moldova, Perez said. In 2021, Perez’s own congregation raised $14,000 to donate. The Chicago-area network raised $750,000 in total last year, he said. The money goes primarily to fund staff in the European churches, he said.

“There’s so much need over there that it hardly seems to cover as much as you want,” Perez said.

In 2019, Perez preached at a smaller church on the outskirts north of Kyiv in English, with a translator to relay the message to the congregation in Russian. His son spent a year in Kyiv on a mission trip before he arrived. Perez was welcomed into Ukrainian homes nightly for meals and to spend time learning the culture, he said.

Perez recalled visiting the Holodomor museum, which memorializes those 3.5 million Ukrainians who died during a man-made famine almost a century ago from 1932 to 1933 under Soviet-occupied Ukraine and Joseph Stalin’s administration.

“It just reminds you that Russia has been doing this to Ukraine for a long time,” Perez said.

•The Associated Press contributed to this story.