Half in Raleigh and half in Moscow, a Russian family is split by war they don’t support
For the past four years, Tatiana Saenko has labored to bring her family to Raleigh from Moscow — a bureaucratic tangle made suddenly perilous by the war in Ukraine.
Among the most pressing of the family’s problems, her son Anthony turns 18 on Wednesday, meaning he will be conscripted into the Russian Army. He has already received paperwork on where to report in April.
“There is no way he could go and serve,” said Saenko from her daughter’s home in Raleigh. “We are ethnic Ukrainians. He is crushed. Wouldn’t you be?”
The three-week-old war has turned the world’s eye on Ukrainians struggling to escape the battleground, a group now topping 3 million.
But Saenko’s story shows Russians in the same dangerous bind, trapped by a war they don’t support.
‘Let me sit next to my son’
She came to the United States on a green card and lives with her oldest daughter, who married a man from North Carolina. She has published four books, three of them romance novels, and works as a language instructor by day.
Meanwhile, her two younger children, her husband and mother-in-law remain in Russia despite getting legal approval to immigrate in 2019. President Trump’s immigration policies stalled the process, and so did COVID-19, she said, but now her family’s case is being handled in Poland, which none of them can reach.
“Let me sit next to my son,” she said. “I don’t want anything else.”
The war has heightened a distaste for President Vladimir Putin’s Russia that fueled Saenko’s desire to leave.
She grew up in the Soviet Union and was a teenager when it collapsed, and she remembers empty grocery store shelves and bare kitchen cupboards.
“People like this lifestyle, like being free, like travel,” she said. “Now they want us to go back to being isolated, being hated by everyone.”
‘The front line goes through every kitchen’
She described watching hard-won freedoms gradually erode under Putin, to the point that a woman was arrested in Moscow for holding up a sign that simply said “Two words,” the Independent of London reported.
“Most people in Russia are crushed, scared,” she said. “We’ve been dealing with crises for so long, we’re used to that. But this is different. This war has split our country, and the front line goes through every kitchen.”
Saenko’s mother-in-law lives with the family in Moscow, but she comes from Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city where constant news footage shows rubble and mass graves.
She says, “I need to go back,” said Saenko, noting her mother-in-law still has a house in Ukraine. “She says, ‘My window might be broken.’ “
Early in March, a Durham-dance studio owned by a Ukrainian family held a special master class to benefit Ruslan Golovashchenko, a ballroom-dance champion who got stranded here when war broke out.
He had come on vacation for a friend’s birthday, certain that Russians would never fight Ukrainians — their “brothers.”
In Raleigh, Saenko spoke of that same certainty. Putin, she said, “just broke everything.”
Unsuccessful intervention
Meanwhile, she said, U.S. Rep. David Price’s office has intervened unsuccessfully in her case.
She knows her troubles are small compared to the people in Ukraine. She can still communicate with her family. Her son is a student and will likely get a temporary deferral on his military service.
But six months have passed since she last saw them, and the turbulent world brings them no guarantees.
“We counted days when we could be together,” she said. “Now we have no idea. We have no idea.”
This story was originally published March 15, 2022 at 10:48 AM.