The fate of Ukraine, for many reasons, has been very much on the minds of Oregonians and much of the world — its right to exist as its own nation, free of the Russian onslaught that has now moved past its third year; the resultant teetering of its cultural and artistic traditions; and especially in the United States, the question of whether the current administration is gleefully throwing to the wolves a country trying desperately and steadfastly to defend itself.

Ukrainian Americans and their supporters in Oregon have been making themselves and their cause visible: On Feb. 24, the third anniversary of the Russian invasion, many of them gathered in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland for an afternoon of music, meeting, speechmaking and displaying of the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. A few days later, on March 1, people gathered again beside the Salmon Street Springs Fountain in Waterfront Park, where the giant statue of a dragon named the Dread of Dufur has also taken up residence of late.

The Pioneer Courthouse Square gathering, in downtown Portland’s unofficial “living room,” brought together several musicians with Ukrainian ties, from classical baritone Anton Belov to first generation Ukrainian-American vocalist Darka Dusty of the group Darka Dusty and the Borshch Beatniks to violinist Roma Ivanko and guitarist Zhanna Skvortsova, along with a good-sized crowd of supporters, several wearing traditional flowered Ukrainian costumes. A fast-hitting rainstorm soaked the musicians and the crowd but didn’t dampen the enthusiasm or stop the show.

“People are doing the most amazing acts of valor during this war,” Yulia Brockdorf, board president and co-founder of the nonprofit group DAWN, said during a phone conversation on Wednesday. The Portland-based group defines itself as “dedicated to preserving Ukraine’s cultural heritage, providing essential medical aid, promoting mental health, and protecting the environment.”

DAWN sponsored both the Pioneer Courthouse Square and Salmon Street Fountain gatherings, for which Inna Kovtun, the group’s director of health equity and culture, took the lead in arranging for musicians and other participants.

The events drew both Ukrainian Americans and others supporting the Ukrainian cause — a support that is strong even though Portland is more than 5,600 miles from Kyiv. “It’s not just someplace far away,” as Brockdorf puts it. “It’s actual human experience.” Roughly 23,000 Oregon residents are Ukrainian or of Ukrainian descent — enough to fill a city the size of Roseburg — and several thousand Ukrainians have resettled in Oregon since the beginning of the Russian invasion in early 2022.

Brockdorf said that DAWN was formed in 2022 in response to the beginning of the current war, which followed by eight years Vladimir Putin’s invasion and annexing of the Crimean Peninsula, which had been part of Ukraine. A psychotherapist who was born in Ternopil and spent her childhood in Ukraine’s Luhank region, Brockdorf was getting ready to fly to Ukraine on Friday for her first visit of 2025.

She visits Ukraine three or four times a year, for two or three weeks at a time. “I travel personally to the front line, where I deliver medical supplies and also provide psychotherapy to people” who are under extreme stress, she said. She and others “are right where the action happens. We literally deliver under fire.”

DAWN raised more than $300,000 in 2024 to support Ukraine medically and in other ways, Brockdorf said, and the effect of the money raised might have been three times that. The fund-raising continues. “We started DAWN because of the need that arose with the attack on Ukraine,” she said. Here and in Ukraine, she and DAWN are involved in educating people about Ukrainian tradition: “Cultural diplomacy and also cultural mental health work really make a difference.”

Historically, Ukraine and Russia have been linked for centuries, but almost never as equals: Since at least the days of Peter the Great, Brockdorf said, Russia has been trying to erase Ukrainian and other Eastern Europe cultures and replace them with its own. The effort doubled down during the Soviet years, when Russia, in Brockdorf’s words, “penetrated itself into so many cultures. Russia has been involved in this imperialistic takedown since the beginning of time.”

During the 1920s and ’30s, she said, Ukraine “was moving very quickly toward the West,” and that “was very inconvenient to the Russian elite, to Stalin.” In 1932 and ’33, she said, 6-11 million people in Ukraine starved to death because of Russian suppression, and during World War II Russia sent a high percentage of Ukrainian soldiers to the front lines in Germany, resulting in a huge loss of people and a weakening of Ukrainian culture.

At Pioneer Courthouse Square and the Salmon Street Fountain, evidence of Ukrainian customs and culture was abundant.

“Saturday was sensational, imagewise,” said photographer Joe Cantrell, whose images from both events are reproduced here. “And you should have heard the cars passing, laying on their horns and thumbs-up out all occupied windows in support of the Ukrainians. What a tear-evoking counterpoint to Friday in the Oval Office.”

Cantrell’s reference to “Friday in the Oval Office” was, of course, to the two-pronged ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by U.S. President Donald Trump and his eager sidekick, Vice President J.D. Vance.

Watching what was supposed to be a meeting to help create a plan for peace and to sign a minerals deal that Trump had demanded in exchange for U.S. support in the war was instead like watching a couple of schoolyard bullies with blackjacks pull an unarmed kid into an alley and begin to pommel him for the sheer fun of it. Perhaps not surprisingly, a resounding majority of people who witnessed the mauling wound up admiring Zelenskyy, who through it all stuck up for himself and his nation and did not back down.

In a way the White House debacle was no surprise. Trump had already lied that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war, and that Zelenskyy, not Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was a dictator. Trump presumably was still resentful that Zelenskyy had refused to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son during the 2020 presidential campaign. Trump also had made the extraction of Ukrainian mineral resources for U.S. consumption a demand for continuing to support Ukraine with arms. And of course, neither the U.S. nor any other country came to Ukraine’s aid when Putin sent Russian troops to occupy and annex the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

But the Oval Office blowup has changed things markedly, essentially shutting down the U.S./Ukraine alliance and prompting European leaders to try to pick up the slack. That brings added tension to Trump’s oft-stated distaste for NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has done much to maintain stability in the post-World War II world. Trump’s negativity about NATO and tendency to approach global politics as a matter of power rather than cooperation and compromise has furthered speculation that the U.S. will pull out of NATO, shaking up the global balance of power in the process.

On Monday of this week Trump froze U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, and then “paused” the sharing of intelligence information between the United States and Ukraine. On Tuesday Zelenskyy proposed a partial ceasefire with Russia in an effort to get peace talks moving again.

Early Thursday morning, after intelligence sharing had been shut down, Russian missiles and drones rained down on Zelenskyy’s central Ukrainian home town of Kryvyi Rih. Also on Thursday, Politico reported that four senior members of Trump’s entourage “have held secret discussions with some of Kyiv’s top political opponents to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just as Washington aligns with Moscow in seeking to lever the Ukrainian president out of his job.” And Reuters reported, also on Thursday, that President Trump is considering revoking temporary legal status for about 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the war zone and came to the U.S. “Such a move would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration and potentially put them on a fast-track to deportation,” the Reuters story declared.

It is, for Ukrainians, an old, old story, repeated again and again. Through it all, against the odds, the Ukrainian culture has held on. In this case, Brockdorf declares, it is holding on as the United States appears to be violating its promise to protect Ukraine’s borders — an abandonment that she believes goes both ways: “What is good for Ukraine is good for U.S.”

Or, as the poet and painter Taras Shevchenko, the father of modern Ukrainian literature and a Ukrainian nationalist who was imprisoned on orders of the czar, put it a century and three quarters ago, “calamity again” — a calamity that might yet be overcome. 

Taras Shevchenko’s poem Calamity Again, translated by John Weir, Toronto:

Calamity Again

Dear God, calamity again! …

It was so peaceful, so serene;

We but began to break the chains

That bind our folk in slavery …

When halt! … Again the people’s blood

Is streaming! Like rapacious dogs

Sponsor

About a bone, the royal thugs

Are at each other’s throat again.

— Taras Shevchenko

Novopetrovsk Fortress, c. 1854

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DAWN also offers several community events and workshops, including, at 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 7, an evening of music and poetry celebrating the Ukrainian artist Taras Shevchenko, at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral, 3131 N.E. Glisan St., Portland; and a Ukrainian embroidery class, 3-4:30 p.m. Friday, March 14, at the Beaverton Library Meeting Rooms, 12375 S.W, Fifth St., Beaverton. See the DAWN calendar of events here.

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On Feb. 24, the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Portland-based choir Cappella Romana released on its label Cappella Records Benedict Sheehan’s Ukrainian War Requiem, performed by Axios Men’s Ensemble and Pro Coro Canada from Edmonton. It follows the label’s release last October of A Ukrainian Wedding, an album of Ukrainian wedding songs featuring folklorist and singer Nadia Tarnawsky leading the women of Cappella Romana and guest folklorists from Ukraine.