A Waiter. A Cab Driver. An Engineer: The U.S. Fighters Bound for Ukraine – By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura (The New York Times) / March 10, 2022
NEW YORK — Last week, Yuriy Blazhkevych, a taxi driver who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, stood in his garage, scrolling through images of Ukraine on his phone that showed buildings with blasted-out windows, tanks rolling over cars and people fleeing for their lives.
Then there were the photos of dead children.
“I was crying,” he said in his home less than 24 hours before boarding a flight to Warsaw, Poland. “Every five minutes, there was something new. Then I told myself, ‘Either I watch the war on Facebook and write in comments and cry, or I go and help.’”
Blazhkevych, 63, moved to New York City from the city of Lviv in western Ukraine shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He started wearing bluejeans — long banned where he had come from — and listening to bona fide Pink Floyd albums, not the bootleg ones. Thirty-odd years later, he has three children, including an 11-year-old, plus a wife and a former spouse with whom he remains close. Life has been good to him.
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