5,000 miles away, southwest Illinois man is planning family’s safe escape from Ukraine

Dmytro Golovko was the one to tell his parents that Russia was invading.

He saw the push notifications scrolling on his smartphone before they heard the explosions back home in Kyiv.

“My mom was kind of mad at me for waking them up in the middle of the night — it was 4 a.m. in the Ukraine,” Golovko said in an interview on Thursday. “ … Fifteen minutes later she calls back and she’s like ‘you’re right.’”

Since the first phone notification that Russia was conducting a “special military operation in Ukraine,” Golovko has been organizing safety plans for his family from more than 5,000 miles away in the metro-east.

Golovko, 24, has lived in the U.S. for a decade. He came from Ukraine to participate in hockey camps over the summer, and ultimately began attending a private high school in New Jersey when he was 14. His parents and younger brother stayed in Ukraine, but his brother came over two years after him.

At that time, Golovko was able to return to Ukraine to see his family roughly twice a year. He graduated from high school and then moved to the metro-east to attend McKendree University in Lebanon, where he played for the hockey team.

He went home after his first semester in college — Jan. 7, 2017 to be precise — and hasn’t been back since.

Russia had invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. After his visit in 2017, Golvko’s family wasn’t in a financial position to pay for travel.

“I was concerned about my family, but I knew they were grown adults so they could take care of themselves,” he said about the state of the country before 2022. “At the same time, the war was not actually in our region. We lived in the capital, Kyiv, and it was unlikely that something would have happened.”

The Russian invasion that began on Feb. 24 was different.

After Golvko’s parents heard explosions early that morning, they hid in their basement with their cat and dog.

“At that point, I’m already concerned about next steps,” Golvko said. “If they’re already attacking Kyiv, what’s going to happen in the next 24 hours?”

Golvko and his wife, Kristen, decided to set up a Go Fund Me page immediately because it takes four days for the website to review and release a post. As of Friday, they have raised more than $10,000.

Only Golvko’s mother, Ganna, has been able to leave Ukraine because men ages 18-60 cannot leave the country under martial law, in case there’s a military draft. His father, Sergyi, is in his early 50s.

Golvko said his father had received notice from the Ukrainian government that because of his job at a telecommunications company, he won’t be fighting in the army, but rather working to maintain the country’s cell connection.

Ganna has since made it to Illinois. She’s staying with Golvko’s brother while Golvko and his wife set up a room for her.

It wasn’t finding an easy path to get their mother to the Polish border.

She left a day earlier than planned, which Golvko said ended up being the right decision. By the next day, there were no more outward-bound buses.

After traveling the first seven hours by train, Ganna was supposed to take a bus to the border. The tickets they had purchased online didn’t exist, Golvko said. She ended up riding in a car for two hours with a driver and nine students from India.

Golvko said the driver told them “I’ll drive you to the beginning of the line.”

Nine hours of walking and seven hours of standing in line later, Ganna made into Poland.

Golvko said he tracked his mother’s journey with the Find My iPhone app, but she periodically had to turn her phone off to conserve power.

“As long as she was moving, I didn’t need to contact her, because she was tired,” he said.

Once in Poland, some of Golvko’s brother’s friends picked her up and drove three hours to Krakow, where she would board a flight to Chicago. Volunteers paid for her hotel after her card was declined after the financial system was blocked.

While Golvko’s mom is now safe in the U.S., the rest of his family is still in a state of flux.

His maternal grandparents don’t have a visa to get to the U.S., but they’ve made it to Poland with the family’s pets. They have a place to stay for two weeks, but he doesn’t know where they’ll go after that.

Golvko said he hasn’t received any of the money from his Go Fund Me account, but that it will be earmarked toward helping his grandparents.

“My dad is about a kilometer away from the Polish border, so in any case of the annexation of Kyiv and the government of Ukraine being dissolved, my dad will be able to hopefully make it to the Polish border and cross it,” Golvko said.

Meanwhile, Golvko’s paternal grandmother isn’t able to be moved. She’s in an apartment in western Kyiv, with a medical nanny.

His wife is helping Golovko to hold it together and keep himself “emotionally clear.” He said he appreciates the support of the community, noting that he actually knows the people donating to the Go Fund Me personally. Still, he said, he’s emotionally drained.

“(My old classmates and I) communicated a lot at the beginning of war, and as of right now it’s kind of died down,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think bad about it, but as of right now there’s only two or three active speakers going on. I don’t know.

“I’m concerned. I’m scared — absolutely scared for my dad and grandma.”

This story was originally published March 12, 2022 at 6:00 AM.