×

Freedom for all

Ukrainian, Georgian immigrants shocked by Russian invasion

A group of Ukraine supporters recently met at the USA Luge office in Lake Placid to talk about Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. From left are Joseph Tsiklauri and his son Bachana Tsiklauri, formerly from the Republic of Georgia; Yuliia Tyshevych, from Odesa, Ukraine; Almy Bartis, Bachana’s girlfriend who grew up in Schaghticoke, New York; former USA Luge coach Klimenty Gatker, originally from Russia and Ukraine; and Pavel Novoselsky, who grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine. Tyshevych, Gatker and Novoselsky live in Lake Placid. Bartis, Joseph and Bachana live in Saranac Lake. They were invited to share their stories by USA Luge Marketing Manager Dmitry Feld, who grew up in Kyiv and moved to the United States in the late 1970s. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

LAKE PLACID — USA Luge Marketing Manager Dmitry Feld is the kind of guy who brings people together. He smiles a lot, gives back to the community all the time and ends a lot of his emails with “big hug.”

He also likes to feed people, whether it’s barbecue at the annual I Love BBQ and Music Festival, which he co-organizes for the Shipman Youth Center, or candy from the Philadelphia area, where USA Luge CEO Jim Leahy lived full time before taking the job here in 2013.

Feld walked into the USA Luge conference room on Church Street Monday evening, March 7, to see if any of the six people he invited had eaten the Zitner’s Butter Krak dark chocolate covered eggs he put in the middle of the table.

“Nobody’s eating the candies,” he said. “What’s the problem? Come on. Everybody have a candy.”

The problem was Russia.

USA Luge Marketing Manager Dmitry Feld poses at the entrance of his office building on Church Street, Lake Placid, Monday, Feb. 28, shortly after the Ukrainian flag was posted next to the American one to show support for his home country. Feld was born in Russia and grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. He moved to the U.S. in 1979. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

Feld grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine and defected from the Soviet Union in 1979 to move to the United States. He has many friends in Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia, both sovereign countries recently invaded by the Russian army. And he has many Russian friends. Feld has even convinced some of his friends from Ukraine to move to the U.S. over the years.

Of the six people at the table, three were from Ukraine, two were from Georgia and one with roots in Poland grew up in New York’s capital region. Their ages range from 23 to 75. They were invited to speak with the Lake Placid News about their reaction to Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, 11 days earlier.

Pavel Novoselsky

Pavel Novoselsky, 63, grew up with Feld in downtown Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

“We share one kitchen when we were kids,” he said.

Novoselsky defected to the U.S. in 1989, moving to Lake Placid right away.

“When I decided, he helped me,” he said about Feld. “That’s why I’m in Lake Placid.”

The biggest reason he left Ukraine was he hated communism and socialism.

“Because you couldn’t do anything there without the government telling you what to do and how to do it. And I’m against it,” he said. “I like freedom. I want to do what I want to do. It’s many reasons. I can go on and on and on.”

As a former resident of the Soviet Union, Novoselsky said he knows about Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his work with the KGB, so it wasn’t a surprise that Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“Try to understand me correctly, I’m not support Putin. I’m 100% against him” he said. “He is evil, OK? He should be killed, whoever can do that. At least it will bring freedom to Russian people.”

Of the many people he blames is President Joe Biden.

“Why? Because it’s all about oil,” he said. “All Europe is trying to help, eastern Europe at least western Europe. Where is this guy? He is in Delaware. He is monitoring what is happening. You want to punish Putin, let’s start producing our own oil like we did under Trump.”

(A day after this interview, Biden signed an executive order banning the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas and coal to the U.S.)

The U.S. needs to do more, he said, and show Putin some strength.

“Trump showed him in Syria what American is,” Novoselsky said. “When he bombed Syria, when he killed Russian troops there. Putin understood that. He understands strength. He doesn’t understand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s what we need to do here now.”

Klimenty Gatker

Klimenty Gatker, 75, is a retired USA Luge coach. He was born near Moscow; his father was in the Soviet military. The family moved to a military base in Ukraine when he was six months old, and he was there for 17 years.

Gatker studied at the State University of Aerospace Instrumentation in St. Petersburg, Russia, from 1966 to 1970. He became an engineer, moving to Kiev, where his mother lived.

“At the same time, I studied the luge sport in the Soviet Union,” he said. “In 10 years, I was working a half year as an engineer and half year as a coach.”

Gatker was the 1971 Soviet Union national championship silver medalist in luge and began coaching for the Soviet luge team the same year. After a couple of big successes in coaching, he quit engineering and started to work as a luge coach full time in 1980.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing, there was a big anti-revolution movement in Russia In August 1991 — a coup attempt against Soviet President and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

“One of me friends called me at 6:30 in the morning on the 19th of August and said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ So I turned on the TV and the tanks were going on the Red Square,” Gatker said. “It was a coup. And this morning, I said we are going. First thing, I called Dmitry and said, ‘I am ready to go.’ It was understandable for my two kids.”

Feld knew Gatker from the luge team and had been trying to get him to move to the U.S. for years. With the go-ahead in 1991, Feld organized his family’s trip. Gatker was to be a coach for the Unified Team at the 1992 Albertville Olympic Winter Games, composed of six of the 15 former Soviet republics: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and Uzbekistan. But he didn’t go to Albertville; he went to JFK International Airport.

On Feb. 4, 1992, the Unified Team flew to France.

“And my team, my family, flew to New York City,” Gatker said.

In 1995, Gatker got his green card. At first he learned the plumbing trade and then he got hired as a junior team coach for USA Luge in 1998. He became a U.S. citizen in 2001 and was the USA Luge national team coach from 2005 to 2014. He’s now retired.

“First of all, right away, I want to tell you that what’s happening now with Ukraine, it is not with Ukraine,” Gatker said. “It is with all world. It is a very dangerous situation. … It is evil and good people. It is a fight for existence of this civilization.”

Gatker said he fears the worst for the world, particularly because Putin has threatened to use his nuclear arsenal.

“He’s not going to stop, Putin. If he gonna lose, he’ll never gonna tell anybody,” Gatker said. “So he’s going to push button 120% possibility. He’s going to push nuclear button.”

Still, Gatker said he was shocked when Putin’s military invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“For me it was just impossible,” he said. “Of course everybody sees that Putin is moving troops around Ukraine. I think 99% of Russia were thinking he was just scaring the Ukrainian president and everybody around the world. And he went in.”

Gatker said Putin’s playbook is similar to Adolf Hitler’s when Germany began occupying and invading other European countries in the late 1930s.

“There is a lot of things in history that human beings repeating, repeating, repeating and not learning, not learning and not learning,” he said.

Gatker likened Putin to a “crazy monkey” with a grenade.

“And where the monkey throws his grenade or rocket with a nuclear bomb inside, nobody knows,” he said.

Joseph Tsiklauri

Joseph Tsiklauri, 49, grew up in the Republic of Georgia and moved to the U.S. in 1999. A citizen of the U.S., he moved to Saranac Lake in 2001 and now works as a truck driver for High Peaks Distribution. He left because of the unrest in Georgia during the 1990s, hoping to establish roots in a peaceful place so his family could move to America. He has four children.

“There was too much going on in Georgia, the conflict with Russia,” he said.

Tsiklauri lived in Mtskheta, about 10 minutes north of the Georgian capital of Tblisi.

“I wasn’t surprised. When I saw what was going on, I knew what had happened,” Tsiklauri said of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Because then in the 1990s, it starts, post Soviet countries controlling manipulations. … And day after day, they start using those hooks to bring back those countries.”

In 1991, a lot of his friends died, 17- and 18-year-olds.

“It wasn’t the Georgian army, it was the militia,” he said. “And we don’t have too much experience of how to use the guns and strategy or those things. We just tried to protect our towns, country.”

On April 9, 1991, Georgia’s Supreme Council declared independence from the Soviet Union. Then civil war broke out, and separatist movements began in the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In 2008, Russia invaded Abkhazia and South Ossetia and still has troops there today.

“They used all the power, from the sky and bombing and everything,” Tsiklauri said. “That’s why now Ukrainian president like screaming about that. Just control the sky. … They come in and drop the bombs, destroy your infrastructure, destroy the lives.”

Tsiklauri said he knew what would happen in Ukraine, because he saw it in Georgia first.

“And you know who understands? Polish people really understand. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania people understand,” he said. “Those eastern Europeans have some idea what we’re talking about because we and the Ukrainians, we are the people who really fight those soldiers and tanks and everything. We’ve got the experience. Our blood was there. Our guys was dead. Our kids was dead. That’s why Georgians and Ukrainians understand each other.”

Bachana Tsiklauri

Tsiklauri’s oldest son, 27-year-old Bachana moved to Saranac Lake to live with his father in 2010 when he was 16 years old. He remembers when Russia attacked Georgia in 2008.

“One day,” he said, “there were lines and lines of Russian tanks going toward Tblisi. … My family got so scared that they didn’t want to leave the house because they were afraid of that place getting robbed. They sent myself and my siblings to the Georgian Christian Orthodox church, and that’s where we spent a couple of days.”

Bachana graduated from Saranac Lake High School, attended North Country Community College and earned a four-year degree at SUNY Plattsburgh. He lives in Saranac Lake and works for a nonprofit doing financing and accounting. Like his father, he has many strong feelings about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“When the Russian troops gathered around Ukraine, I knew that would happen because that’s what happened in 2008 in Georgia, and I was living there. I went through the war. So it was the same scenario written by the same guy,” Bachana said. “When it happened on the 24th, it was highly emotional because it brought all the memories back.”

What drives him crazy, he said, and breaks his heart is the lack of concern from western Europe and America.

“A lot of people are trying to ignore what’s going on in Ukraine,” he said. “Ukraine needs unconditional support today. I ask everybody to be loud about it and speak up. … The bottom line here is that it has to be stopped before it becomes a bigger problem.”

Almy Bartis

Almy Bartis, 23, is an American. She grew up in Schaghticoke, outside of Albany. She lives in Saranac Lake and is Bachana’s girlfriend. Her great-grandfather came to the U.S. from eastern Poland in the early 1900s.

“I’m not Ukrainian, but I have been to Ukraine, and since my heritage is based in eastern Europe, I feel strongly connected to the culture over there,” she said.

Like many, Bartis said she was praying that Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine.

“Because my ties to eastern Europe are limited, there wasn’t as much of a shock value at first because we live very cushy lives in America where turmoil doesn’t necessarily happen on our domestic grounds,” she said.

Bartis hears a lot of people complain about the war in a way that is only affecting them personally, like high gas prices.

“Not enough people really understand the gravity of the situation, and I know I didn’t at first,” she said. “But being surrounded by people who have direct ties to eastern Europe and direct ties to countries that have experienced war, it just changes your perspective. And I wish everyone could have their perspective changed a little bit on the matter because it’s a lot bigger than just the price of gas. These are people’s liberties and their freedoms that are being infringed upon.”

Yuliia Tyshevych

Yuliia Tyshevych, 25, grew up and lived in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved to Lake Placid in 2016 as a J1 cultural exchange student.

“I was supposed to be here only for three months,” she said. “My main goal was just to improve my English and go back to Ukraine and then I won a grant to go to China to study for a year.”

After working three months at The Haus on Main Street, Lake Placid, first as a housekeeper, she changed her mind and decided to stay in America.

“It was a really hard decision for me because my entire family is back home in Ukraine,” she said. “But the main reason I decided to stay was Ukraine was in war at that point for two years. The economy was not doing good, and my family was struggling financially.”

Tyshevych was making a lot more money in Lake Placid and could send money back to Ukraine to help her family.

“The situation in Ukraine was getting worse and worse,” she said. “So I decided to stay until I can get my citizenship because here at least I’m safe. And I can help my family over there more if I stayed here.”

Now Tyshevych is the general manager at The Haus. She has a green card and can apply for U.S. citizenship in a few months, “but only if Ukraine allows me second citizenship”

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Tyshevych said she didn’t believe it until she called her sister in Odesa.

“I was like, ‘Everyone in America is going crazy. What is going on there?'” she said. “And she was like, ‘I don’t know. I just woke up and I heard explosions. … On the news they’re saying that Putin is doing a special military operation in Ukraine.'”

Tyshevych said she’s angry the world isn’t doing enough to help Ukraine. Sanctions aren’t enough, she said; only boots on the ground fighting Russia will help put an end to this.

After the invasion, she thought about going home to fight. But her friends talked her into staying in Lake Placid.

“So I organized a fundraiser and I’ve been taking donations from Lake Placid locals and from my friends who know me around the state, actually from different countries, too,” she said. “And they’ve been sending me money through Venmo, PayPal, cash and stuff, because a lot of people don’t trust the organizations.”

She’s been transferring money every day to her sister, who distributes the funds to a volunteer organization that helps residents and soldiers directly.

Tyshevych is fighting for her country the only way she can for now, one donation at a time.

Starting at $1.44/week.

Subscribe Today