(NewsNation) — Maksym Kurganskyy didn’t sit idly while his family in Ukraine felt the impacts of the Russian invasion. In March, Kurganskyy traveled to Europe to help his family escape. He chronicled that journey in an essay for People Magazine.
On Feb. 23, the night of the invasion, Kurganskyy penned he was scrolling through social media when he saw the war had begun. He says his father wrote him shortly before 11 p.m. ET saying he heard gunfire and explosions.
“It was it was a little bit difficult, consider the time difference. The problem was mostly because people weren’t really sure what was happening, people eventually did realize that, ‘Hey, this is a war,'” Kurganskyy said on “Morning in America.”
Kurganskyy said his grandfather’s reluctance to leave his neighborhood in Kyiv prompted he and his mother to leave New York and head toward the destruction. All the while, he says, he was battling feelings of denial and acceptance about it all.
“He has a multitude of health issues, and those would not be sustainable if the city was encircled. He’s 80 years old, recently suffered a stroke and survived COVID-19,” Kurganskyy wrote. He says it took a week to convince his grandfather and other relatives to leave the capital city.
Kurganskyy said his childhood friend, Oleksiy Melnyk, was transporting wounded soldiers out of Kyiv and offered to take his grandfather, father, uncle and other relatives out of the country on March 6.
By the time he made it to the airport for Warsaw he wrote he was “at peace knowing that I’d done my part to get my grandfather out.”
After landing, Kurganskyy and his mother took a train to Krakow to reunite with family.
He wrote, “The people who got off the bus could hardly be described as happy. I could tell that they had seen horrific things on their way across the border. It was an emotional moment of reunification.”
Kurganskyy said his journey came end on March 12. He said, “it seemed like the most turbulent week of my life had come to end.”
He adds that the best thing he can do to help Ukraine right now is to “tell other people’s stories and help others understand that what’s happening in Europe now will define the future of Europe.”
