REDUCED

TO RUBBLE
Photographer
Sasha Maslov ’s
grandmother once
lived in this build-
ing in the Saltivka
neighborhood of
Kharkiv.

50
 When
WAR
Hits
HOME
The Sister City Partnership
started sending aid
to Cincinnati’s friends in
Kharkiv as soon as Russia
invaded Ukraine. Now they wait,
worry, and work to
maintain as much
connection as possible.

By John Stowell
Photographs by Sasha Maslov

51
 Polina Tymoshenko has almost
grown accustomed to the roar
coming out of the north.
Sometimes it sounds like a hun-
gry stomach, she says, or a distant
growling rumble like an approaching
storm. But too often it’s like tonight.
A cacophony of bone-jarring le-
thality roused Tymoshenko out of a
fitful slumber. She, her husband, and
six refugees she’d recently taken in
bolted to their safe room as blinding
flashes of white flame cancelled out
the star-filled sky. They huddled be-
52
hind two thick protective walls, un-
able to do anything but wait and pray.
Fortune would either be with them,
or they’d die in their night clothes.
This is life in Kharkiv, Ukraine,
Cincinnati’s sister city. I hear about
the situation first-hand in a Zoom
call in late May with Tymoshenko
and Volodymyr Bulba, just hours af-
ter the latest shelling. “All our lives
here in Kharkiv can be divided before
and after February 24,” says Bulba, a
college professor with a resonant but
soothing voice. “That date is when a
new life began.”
February 24 will forever be
Ukraine’s Day of Infamy, when Rus-
sian soldiers poured over the border
in a brutal attempt to subjugate their
neighbor and wipe out its emerging
democracy. “Oh, yes,” says Tymosh-
enko. “That day everything fell apart.
PHOTOGRAPHS (BULBA) BY OLGA FEDCHENKO / COURTESY POLINA TYMOSHENKO / (BASEBALL) BY BOB HERRING
We lost our spiritual and our physi-
cal balance. Nothing is the same.”
It’s been 20 years since Tymosh-
enko and Bulba walked the streets of
Cincinnati. They visited our neigh-
borhoods and suburbs, spent hours
in our schools, admired our archi-
tecture, and enjoyed ice cream on
Fountain Square. They were among
several groups of Kharkivites who
have visited the Queen City over the
years since the sister city relation-
ship was formed in 1989, and they
remember the trip fondly, vividly
recalling that their visit came as the
United States was dealing with the
aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. They
were here for only three weeks, but
the friends here they made remain
friends—and they’re now part of
The Cause.
Bob Herring had felt the ten-
FRIENDS IN NEED

opposite page, bottom

far left

sion in the weeks leading up to the

invasion. The former principal of
Nativity School in Pleasant Ridge
has been to Kharkiv five times and
currently serves as president of the
Cincinnati-Kharkiv Sister Cities
Partnership. He has friends there, or
he did. Some have fled, while some that keeps her focused.
doggedly remain and help keep the Tymoshenko puts her 20 years
city running. Some, he acknowledges of experience as a social worker
with a shudder, he can’t say. into practice every day in Kharkiv.
“I’m still in touch with my friend She darts from one bombed-out
Tamara,” says Susan Neaman, the neighborhood to another delivering
organization’s vice president. She medical supplies, helping homeless
speaks with a hesitant cadence that families resettle or evacuate, and
reflects her concern. “She’s still in dispensing a sort of psychological
Kharkiv, and what she says I have triage to hundreds of anguished resi-
great trouble with.” dents. She says she’ll carry stories of
Tamara, who is in her 70s, sounds individual tragedies forever. Adding
like all our grandmothers. Everything to her burden is constant concern for
is fine. Don’t worry about me. The her son, who enlisted in the Ukrai-
shops are open. We have food and water nian Army immediately after the
and electricity. We are safe. Neaman invasion.
suspects Tamara, whom she hosted O n t h e C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 0 8
when Tamara visited Cincinnati, is
shielding her from the truth. HELP KHARKIV REBUILD
“We don’t know if our conversa- If you would like to contribute to the relief
tions are being monitored, but I do
know Tamara lives in a tiny Soviet-
style apartment building in Kharkiv,
and I mean tiny,” says Neaman. The
Russians have either targeted civil-
ian housing or simply fire off mis-
siles randomly that have hit and
destroyed hundreds of apartments.
Neaman wonders if one of those
apartment buildings is Tamara’s.
“It’s like you are watching a hor-
ror movie,” Tymoshenko says on our
Zoom call. “It’s impossible to imag-
ine that all these horrors are hap-
pening to your city.” She has a jolly
laugh and answers my questions at
length through a translator. There’s
no question she would be the life of
any party, but war has hardened her
resolve and exposed a defiant trait

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M 5 3
WHEN WAR HITS HOME
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 53
call, Tymoshenko sits to the side of a
Ukrainian flag mounted on the wall. There
are bold Cyrillic letters imprinted across
the flag’s lower half that read, she says, “We
are from Kharkiv. We are processing the in-
vaders into fertilizer.”
SISTER CITY PARTNERSHIPS WERE ES-
tablished during the Cold War when Presi-
dent Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a cit-
izen-to-citizen exchange program to form
economic, cultural, and personal bonds
among the world’s peoples. It took 32 years
and the leadership of then-Mayor Charlie
“AFTER RUSSIA INVADED, MY FRIENDS IN CINCINNATI
CONTACTED US AND ASKED WHAT THEY COULD DO,” SAYS
VOLODYMYR BULBA. “I REALIZED WE WEREN’T ALONE.”
Luken for Cincinnati to score its first part-
nership, twinning with Liuzou, China, and
Gifu, Japan. Kharkiv joined a year later in
1989; back then it was a city in the old So-
viet Union, and it was known as Kharkov.
Today, Cincinnati has nine sister cities:
Liuzou, Gifu, Kharkiv, Nancy (France), New
Taipei City (Taiwan), Harare (Zimbabwe),
Mysore (India), Amman (Jordan), and per-
haps our most famous partner, Munich.
Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city
but shares similar traits with Cincinnati.
It’s home to a large public university and
Freedom Square, a gigantic downtown pla-
za that would dwarf Fountain Square. We
buy our fresh produce at Findlay Market
while Kharkivites shop at Tsentralniy Mar-
ket. There are several major hospitals and
an impressive music hall. We have Wash-
ington Park; Kharkiv citizens stroll the
leafy gardens of Shevchenko Park. North
of the city, Maxim Gorky Central Park
1 0 8 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M A U G U S T 2 0 2 2
might remind you of mash-up of Mt. Airy
Forest and Coney Island. Like Cincinnati,
two rivers flow through Kharkiv (the Lopan
and the Udy), although they’re more like
the Licking than the mighty Ohio.
“There was an energy there, especially
among the young people,” Neaman says
of her four trips to Kharkiv. “There was a
sense of pride and mission that was pal-
pable. They were very optimistic about the
future.” Left unsaid, but written all over her
face, is that memory now sullied by bombs
and bullets.
Nearly every block of our sister city and
its surrounding villages has been punished
by artillery, rockets, mortar barrages, and
bombs dropped from the sky. Freedom
Square is a cratered moonscape, while their
music hall, opera house, museums, and gov-
ernment building lie in ruins. Apartment
buildings, their facades peeled away, expose
the ruin of thousands of lives. The air raid
siren has become almost background noise
since the invasion began. Even after the
Ukrainian Army pushed the Russians back
to their border in May, the invaders con-
tinued to pour death into the city. Shelling
picked up again in June.
It’s easy to see why Kharkiv is still in
danger. The city lies just 25 miles south of
the Russian border, about as close as the
Monroe Outlets are from downtown Cin-
cinnati. When the war began, Kharkiv ab-
sorbed an artillery shellacking as Russian
soldiers drove across the frontier. Ukrai-
nian defenders dug in at the top of the high-
way loop that circles the city and halted the
Russian advance.
“Think of it this way,” says Herring.
“If you lived in Fairfield, Hamilton, West
Chester, or Loveland, you were in occupied
territory. The front line was I-275.” But
no one was spared artillery fire, especially
when the Russians were able to move their
big guns forward as the infantry advanced.
Even Kharkiv’s southern suburbs, like
Merefa, where Tymoshenko lives, were
shelled. If the war were here, that would put
Florence and CVG airport under the guns.
Herring thinks back a few years to hap-
pier times when a group of fresh-faced
young men from Kharkiv wanted to start a
baseball team. “They did this on their own,”
he says. “They wanted to play the great
American pastime in a country where there
were only soccer fields and no balls, bats, or
gloves.” The men appealed to Cincinnati for
help, and it came.
The Sister City Partnership contacted
the Reds, Knothole Baseball, and the Cin-
cinnati Recreation Commission to obtain
equipment and then began considering a
program that would bring these men to
Cincinnati to watch and play baseball at all
levels—professional, college, high school,
and Knothole. Unfortunately, Herring la-
ments, the trip fell through when the U.S.
government denied the men visas, worry-
ing they might not return to their homes.
Still, they were able to organize a game in
Gorky Park, and the mayor of Kharkiv came
to watch.
“The Sister City Summer Classic is still
my dream when this is over,” says Herring.
“A team from Kharkiv comes here one year,
and a team from Cincinnati goes to Kharkiv
the next.”
He and I look at the photos of the smil-
ing boys in American baseball gear and
wonder: They are all of military age. What
horrors have they experienced? What’s
happened to their homes and families? Are
they even alive?
It is kids who are central to the heart of
Herring’s passion for Kharkiv. In the ear-
ly 1990s, a delegation from Kharkiv that
included the vice principal from Kharkiv
School No. 3 visited Cincinnati and spent
three days at Nativity, where Herring had
created a global education program. “Yuri
Golb was the vice principal from Kharkiv,
and he visited every classroom during
those three days,” Herring recalls. “We de-
veloped a real friendship and began talking
about an exchange program.”
Herring wasn’t involved in the Sister
Cities program at the time, but he was
hooked after the visit and soon found
himself in Kharkiv, staying in the home
of School No. 3 teacher Iryna Bakumen-
ko, who went on to become president of
Kharkiv’s sister city program. Iryna has
fled to England, and Herring wonders if
the exchange program will ever be revived.
The outbreak of hostilities also ended,
at least temporarily, a potential exchange
program among Cincinnati’s and Kharkiv’s
suburbs. Herring says he hopes Denys
Tkackov will eventually be able to come to
Cincinnati to continue his government-
to-government outreach with some of our
suburbs. He was scheduled to visit in early
March to study how some of our jurisdic-
tions share costs and responsibilities such
as fire protection. Tkackov and his family
have now fled to France.
IT WAS 4 A.M. ON INVASION THURSDAY
when Bulba awakened to a loud buzzing
noise as a nearby explosion rattled his
house. Rockets likely launched from near-
by Belgorod, Russia, were flying overhead,
and the black sky was alight. His children
and others who live nearby ran to his home,
which has a basement. “Everyone brought
their pillows,” Bulba remembers, “and the
little ones all thought it was a big game. The
women were crying, of course, but the kids,
at least the young ones, were excited.”
He would see that same juxtaposition of
fear and excitement days later as he passed
out medical supplies and words of encour-
agement to women and children huddled
underground in Kharkiv’s subway tunnels.
Those supplies have a direct connection to
Cincinnati. “I get very emotional when I
talk about it,” Bulba says softly. The lighting
is muted on our Zoom call, but he’s clearly
fighting back tears. “Literally, just a few
hours after the tragedy began, my friends
in Cincinnati contacted us and asked what
they could do to help. I realized they cared
and we weren’t alone.”
Bulba is a man with connections and,
like Tymoshenko, a whirlwind of action.
Within days of the war starting, he helped
create the School of Courage, a volunteer
organization dedicated to helping thou-
sands of displaced Kharkivites with the
delivery of products essential to life. Ty-
moshenko, a former student of his, is one
of many courageous drivers. Food, bottled
water, medicines, and personal hygiene
products were at the top of Bulba’s wish
list, and when he forwarded those needs to
his Cincinnati connections, Herring, Nea-
man, and the rest of the Sister City Partner-
ship got to work.
A three-week-long web-based and
word-of-mouth fund-raiser in late March
and early April netted $100,000, all of it
from individual donations. The Cincin-
nati group wire-transferred the funds to
the Red Cross Kharkiv, which purchased
supplies that the School of Courage helped
to deliver.
That was closely followed by a separate
effort from the Procter & Gamble Alumni
Group that raised nearly $300,000 over
Easter weekend from its expansive mem-
bership. Kathleen Dillon Carroll, a mar-
keting expert and P&G alumna, credits
John and Frances Pepper for jump-starting
the P&G effort by providing $50,000 in
matching funds. Those funds were ear-
marked for the charity Mission to Ukraine
and used to purchase a variety of desper-
ately needed medical and personal sup-
plies, as well as power generators to keep
the hospitals running.
Music students at Walnut Hills High
School hurriedly organized a benefit con-
cert, and Northern Kentucky University
sponsored an event featuring two world-
renowned Ukrainian pianists, both NKU
graduates. Cincinnati Chefs for Ukraine
hosted a massive pierogi party at the OTR
StillHouse.
Bulba holds up a piece of paper printed
with the Cincinnati-Kharkiv sister city
logo. “This is the heart of Ukraine and the
symbol of the helping hand of Cincinnati,”
he says. “Your funds have helped so many
people with medicines. We have been able
also to purchase generators, rescue equip-
ment, and tools to help us clear the rubble
in our streets. We would never have imag-
ined this could happen.”
IT’S BEEN MONTHS SINCE THE RUSSIAN
invasion began, and yet the brutality of war
continues. Cincinnati was all in from the
beginning. The questions now are: What’s
next? Where will home be?
“We have reached out to the Biden ad-
ministration and let them know that Cin-
cinnati would be proud to provide a home
for Ukrainian refugees,” says Mayor Aftab
Pureval. “It’s out of our hands for now, but
we’ve been working with Catholic Charities
to be ready.” The U.S. has committed to ac-
A U G U S T 2 0 2 2 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M 1 0 9
cepting up to 100,000 displaced Ukrainians.
Neaman hopes to be among the first in
line. She’s housed three sets of Kharkivites
in the past and desperately wants to bring
her friend, Viktoria Marinuk, and her
13-year-old daughter, Irina, to Cincinnati
for resettlement. Viktoria, who taught
English to young adults in Kharkiv be-
fore the war, fled to Slovakia, where she
now works with mental health profes-
sionals tending to traumatized Ukrainian
refugees. Getting Viktoria and Irina here
will involve a lot of paperwork, vetting,
and approval by the American Embassy
in Bratislava and a pledge by Neaman to
financially support them once here. It will
likely be a slow process.
Many of Cincinnati’s sister city friends
have, in fact, fled the war zone. Most are
women and children—males between
18 and 60, with some exceptions, can’t
leave—and they’ve relocated to England,
France, Germany, Poland, and other Eu-
ropean nations where they’re trying to re-
build their lives. Some, like Tymoshenko
and Bulba, remain in immediate peril, do-
ing what they can to keep themselves, their
families, and their neighbors alive. Others
have stayed in-country but moved to cen-
tral or western Ukraine, out of the reach of
Russia’s guns.
“Will they come back to Kharkiv? Can
they come back and, if they do, to what?”
Herring asks rhetorically. If they do, he
hopes the Sister City Partnership will be
there to help rebuild. What Kharkiv will
need and when is unknown and, assum-
ing the city remains Ukrainian territory,
the job of rebuilding will require a lot more
than what Cincinnati alone can provide.
Cincinnati’s sister city leadership team
clearly has the contacts in Kharkiv. They
have a love for the city and its people and,
most importantly, their trust. Cincinnati,
says Herring, has strong companies with
skilled people and vital equipment that can
make a difference. Maybe when the dust
clears and the enemy has been expelled,
they can help bring Kharkiv back to life.
“It was a beautiful city, and it’s been
ruined,” Herring laments. “I know it’s not
possible now, but I am dreaming about
what we can do to help them rebuild.”
“It’ll be a while,” Neaman says sadly.
Herring gives a quick nod. He knows.