‘You always have half of your heart back home’: In her youth she fought for freedom in Ukraine. Now she carries on the fight from Canada

When Natalie Jatskevich spoke Ukrainian in public growing up, she was met with sneers of disgust.

That's how it was in Kyiv in the 1970s and 1980s, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, and Russian was the official language. She was there when the Soviet bloc began falling apart in the late 1980s; she held hands with compatriots in human chains, calling for the separation of Ukraine from the then-USSR.

Aug. 24, 1991 brought more than a sigh of relief. It brought elation.

It was the happiest day of my youth," said the 53-year-old, who now lives in Vancouver. We were starving for freedom. The Baltic states were doing it, so we felt we could do it in Ukraine, too."

Ukraine had declared itself an independent nation, and after that day Jatskevich watched its early transition from a Communist regime to a democratic state.

Now, she's sleeplessly watching Russia's invasion of Ukraine from her home in Canada, seeing that hard-won independence come closer and closer to slipping away.

Even though Jatskevich has been in Canada since 2002, she still has close ties with her homeland, where most of her and her husband's family are now facing a full-scale invasion by Russian troops - and possible return of their mother country to the Kremlin's grip.

Jatskevich, who runs an after-school daycare program, has hardly had any sleep in the last few weeks as she watched the growing presence of the Russian military along the Ukrainian border.

As soon as she saw the news that the war was officially declared, she reached out to her parents in Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine and her brother in Kyiv to make sure everyone was safe.

Throughout the wee hours early Thursday, she began to organize members of the local Ukrainian community for a rally in Vancouver the next day, while mobilizing others to start collecting donations for humanitarian aid and supplies for their countrymen, many of them seen on TV and social media packed in traffic to flee from areas under military assaults.

But Jatskevich's fear is even bigger than the lives lost in the conflict.

It is not just for the Ukranian survival at this point. This is a fight for democracy. This is a fight for international order and world safety and security," she said as she was loading up flags and signs for a rally Thursday at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

We, as Canadians, do have to remember we have borders with Russia in the north and Russia does have interests in our northern part."

For her, any inch of expansion for President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime stirs fear that it would turn the clock back to the Ukraine that she grew up in.

Jatskevich said most of the 1.4 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, especially those who have gone through the years of Soviet oppression and still have close ties with the country, would share the same sentiment.

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the Soviet Union, whose central government had absolute control over all the member republics. Ukrainians could use their own language and practise their own culture but Russian was the official language in school and day-to-day life.

Jatskevich attended one of the few Ukrainian-speaking schools and would use her mother tongue at home, but publicly would speak Russian for fear of being called a slyuk," a derogatory term meaning an uneducated peasant.

You're looked down upon if you used Ukrainian because you're inferior and less smart," said Jatskevich, who had a tough time when she went to college, where all classes were in Russian only.

That's the Soviet Union's practices to build a multicultural society. It's only on paper. If you wanted to pursue higher education and advance your career, you would need to be a Russian-speaking Soviet or you're a second-class citizen."

Upon graduation from teachers' college in 1988, Jatskevich was assigned to a grade school in Kyiv. Like others in the Communist system, she was offered free communal accommodation but a meagre wage - everyone back then was paid more or less the same, whether they worked as an engineer, doctor, teacher or bus driver.

There was always a shortage of everything throughout my childhood in Ukraine, food, clothes and even school supplies," recalled Jatskevich, whose parents, both scientists at a research institute, would spend time after work growing vegetables and raising chickens and geese to feed the family.

As the Soviet Union started crumbling in the late 1980s, life only got harder. The government stopped paying wages, or would provide products manufactured on state assembly lines in lieu of money, she said.

And people were not only starving for food, but for liberty. Despite the information blackout by state media, Ukrainians were encouraged by word of political movements in the other Soviet republics challenging Communist rule.

We were watching the news as much as our Soviet TV would show. We wanted to try to do the same in Ukraine," said Jatskevich, who went to graduate school in 1990, the year before Ukraine became independent.

What happened in other places was a huge moral boost for us."

At this point, the young woman stopped fearing repercussions from the state and decided to join peaceful protests for independence, which finally came in August 1991. The impact was immediately felt, she said - the country quickly switched its official language from Russian, schools changed its language of instruction to Ukranian and Communist Party history was dropped from the curriculum.

However, many people also lost their jobs as the fledgling country tried to build a sounder economy than that of the Soviet era, and establish new currency and infrastructure to catch up with the rest of the world in its transition to be a democratic society. All that, while trying to find its place as the frontier between Russia and western Europe. One result: hyperinflation.

People lost their savings and pensions overnight. They were paid in the millions but couldn't buy much. Their money became toilet paper," said Jatskevich. There was the expectation for a brighter future, but the reality was much tougher."

When Jatskevich finished graduate school, she worked as a counsellor and later a researcher before moving to the United States in 2000, where her now-husband, Juri, was pursuing a doctoral degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University. The couple finally settled in Vancouver and started a family.

Like most immigrants, the couple have kept a strong ties with their homeland and would visit Ukraine with their two children often to stay connected.

You always have half of your heart back home because you have left so much behind," said Jatskevich. I'm Ukrainian-Canadian, right? So half of my heart is red and white, and half of my heart is blue and yellow" like the Ukrainian flag.

Even she's thousands of miles away, she has followed events there closely, whether it was the Orange Revolution in 2004 over an allegedly rigged election or the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 that ousted the pro-Russia Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, followed by the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea.

During that Russian incursion, Jatskevich helped collect and ship medical kits to Ukraine and started a campaign here to provide financial support to Ukrainian families who lost their fathers and husbands during the conflicts.

Starting today, we will be on the street every day to inform our community here what's going on in Ukraine and why it matters," she said. Ukraine will resist. Ukrainians will resist. Putin is not welcome there. His allies are not welcome there."

Nicholas Keung is a Toronto-based reporter covering immigration for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @nkeung