These days, 81-year-old Arlington resident Chrystia Sonevytsky watches the news from Ukraine, and she remembers.

“I sit by the television all the time and I watch it and I cry and I get angry,” she says.

The bombed-out buildings, the city streets buried in rubble, people crammed in cellars and underground rail stations for safety from shelling, great tidal waves of refugees trying to make it over the Polish border — have her reliving her experiences as a young girl in World War II. Her mother would send her to bed in her clothes so she’d be ready when air raid sirens went off. The family would dash to shelter underground and wait until the all-clear. Once, Sonevytsky recalls, they stayed underground for three weeks.

“I remember bombs falling, and I remember those sirens,” she says. “That is one memory that’s stuck with me through all these years, probably from the time I was four years old.”

Seeing those scenes repeated now in Ukraine, she says, “is so painful and so difficult and so searing, because you just didn’t expect in the year 2022 something like that to happen again.”

During World War II, Sonevytsky’s parents fled their native Ukraine as Russian troops advanced during a previous invasion in a long history of Russian incursions into her family’s homeland. Sonevytsky herself was born in Poland, where her family stayed in a displaced persons camp. Then they immigrated first to Canada, and eventually to the United States.

She’s called Arlington home for more than thirty years, longer than anywhere else she’s lived. But she has always felt an important connection to her roots in Ukraine — and that feeling led her to advocate for a sister city agreement between Arlington and Ivano-Frankivsk, a small city in southwestern Ukraine.

“It’s a cultural hub and hotspot. There’s a lot of art and music there,” says Sophia Tailor, a Ukrainian-American Arlington resident and the co-president of the county’s volunteer group that now runs the partnership between the two communities. “It’s just a really, really beautiful town.”

That partnership, which came to fruition after years of advocacy by Sonevytsky, has mostly focused on cultural and professional exchanges. But the unprovoked Russian attack on Ukraine last month changed all that. Now, the Arlington Sister City Association and the volunteer group that runs the Ivano-Frankivsk relationship are focused on a new mission: helping send humanitarian aid to their partner city and educating Arlington residents about their community’s ties to a place now in a war zone.

A decade-long partnership 

Sonevytsky’s interest in sister cities — a program originally dreamed up by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s as a way of promoting peace, prosperity, and understanding around the globe — started in the early 1990s, around when Ukraine became independent following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I decided that I would look for a city that would be similar in size to Arlington and would have certain characteristics, which we could say, ‘Yes, these are similar,’” she recalls. “And maybe this would be a good beginning for a relationship.”

Sonevytsky didn’t have to look far to find a place that felt somewhat comparable to Arlington. Her mother spent her teenage years in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city of 240,000 in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. Historically referred to as Stanislav, the city was renamed in the 1960s after the famous Ukrainian writer and poet Ivan Franko. (Sonevytsky says she’s been finding solace lately in the prologue to Franko’s 1905 epic poem Moses, which imagines Ukraine’s people rising out of misery to become one of the free nations of the world.)

Ivano-Frankivsk’s size, the city’s geography, and its diversity — the city is near both the Polish and Romanian borders, and has at points in history been part of Poland — all seemed like a good fit to Sonevytsky.

She took her idea to the County Board and to the Arlington Sister City Association, the mostly-volunteer organization that oversees Arlington’s sister city relationships (the county has several other active partnerships). It took a few years to gain traction, but Sonevytsky persevered.

“I kept trying because I’m a stubborn person,” she says.

She also got to know the then-mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk and other city leaders, who were enthusiastic about the idea from the beginning. The two governments signed an agreement in 2011.

Since then, people from both communities have benefited from the special relationship between the two cities. A few years ago, firefighters from Ivano-Frankivsk came to Arlington to swap knowledge with the county’s fire department. A group of Arlington middle schoolers visited Ukraine, and Ukrainian students have come to the U.S., too.

Members of the Arlington County Board and the mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk have also traded visits. In one case, Ivano-Frankivsk’s mayor brought a gift: an ironwork tree of life sculpture, now housed at the Arlington Central Library.

 

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Arlingtonian Liza Hodskins serves with Tailor in the sister city volunteer group. She has visited Ivano-Frankivsk three times, alongside past County Board chairs (Hodskins used to work for the county), and has warm memories of the city and its people.

“They were all excited because they were learning about democracy, and they had a wonderful future ahead of them, they thought, and they did for a while,” she says.

Now, Hodskins and her husband are watching their Ukrainian friends they met in Ivano-Frankivsk post on Facebook about the war unfolding around them. One couple they met — who in peacetime run a blacksmith craft festival in the city — are sheltering two families from elsewhere in Ukraine in their small apartment.

“They don’t have a basement. They’ve been hiding in their floor level bathroom when they’ve been hearing sirens,” Hodskins says.

The city is far enough west to have been spared the worst so far, though Russian forces bombed its airport, which includes a base for some of the Ukrainian air force. Over the weekend, Russian missiles also struck an arms depot in the region surrounding the city, Reuters reported.

But Ivano-Frankivsk residents are doing everything they can to contribute to the war effort. One community leader previously involved with the Arlington sister city relationship helped found Let Ukraine Win, a humanitarian aid organization created in the first week of Russia’s invasion to support the Ukrainian military and civilians with food, clothing and medical supplies. The organization operates under the auspices of Ivano-Frankivsk’s Chamber of Commerce.

The former Ivano-Frankivsk mayor and his wife, meanwhile, have also been raising money and collecting supplies for the Ukrainian military since 2014, even donating one of their cars to the army, Hodskins says.

‘The best way I can personally help right now’

Sister city relationships are designed more for times of peace than of war, according to Christy Walika, the executive director at Arlington Sister City Association. But the war in Ukraine has forced the group to refocus their efforts on figuring out how to support Ivano-Frankivsk — and to help locals do the same.

“We’re usually not in that space, but we’ve had to do that to help our sister city,” Walika says. “So it’s just different than our typical mission.”

The county government is pitching in, too. The County Board passed a resolution standing in solidarity with Ivano-Frankivsk, and Arlington Board chair Katie Cristol says  her government connected Ivano-Frankivsk’s mayor to the State Department for help sourcing weapons and supplies.

Tailor and Walika are planning a fundraiser to support humanitarian aid efforts in Ukraine, and they’re using the Arlington Sister City Association’s Facebook page to post about other fundraising efforts and opportunities to donate supplies.

Some members of the volunteer group have heard from their Ukrainian counterparts, who’ve directed them to specific charities to support. The county published the Association’s recommended charities in a press release. (An updated list is below.)

“The people who are on the ground there, who live there, are working really, really tirelessly right now for the war effort,” Tailor says.

The Arlington group’s work has been a welcome outlet for members of the sister city group who are Ukrainian-American themselves. Tailor, who was born in Lviv and came to the United States as a young child, says news of the Russian invasion came as a horrible shock. But once her initial sense of paralysis passed, she threw herself into the group’s work.

“I feel that it’s the best way that I can personally help right now without physically going to Europe,” she says.

It also brings a conflict thousands of miles away closer to home. Walika, who does not have family ties in Ukraine, says listening in on meetings puts “a personal face on this conflict,” since most of the members are Ukrainian-American. She hopes other Arlingtonians will also feel a more personal connection to the war through the sister city ties — and be motivated to find ways to help.

“At this point, we’re just trying to be a conduit to Arlington and bridge the gap between what’s happening over there and get Arlingtonians in the community involved,” she says.

That’s what Chrystia Sonevytsky hopes for, too, as she watches the terrible events unfold in her family’s homeland.

“I think it would be wonderful if Arlingtonians, not only of Ukrainian descent, but Arlingtonians would become aware of the facts, because most people would not even know that there is a sister city,” she says.

Here’s how to help:

The Arlington Sister City Association recommends that concerned locals should consider donating to the following charities: Razom Organization and Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, Inc., both humanitarian aid organizations; Nova Ukraina, which is sending medical supplies to the Ukrainian military and collecting food and other supplies for civilians; The International Rescue Committee, one of the main organizations helping resettle Ukrainian refugees; and World Central Kitchen, D.C. Chef Jose Andres’ disaster relief organization, currently working in Poland and other border nations to feed Ukrainian refugees.

The Arlington Sister City Association will host a fundraiser for Let Ukraine Win, a humanitarian organization founded and based in Ivano-Frankivsk that supports Ukrainian military and Ukrainian civilians with food, clothing, medical supplies and other needs. The event is Sunday, March 27 at 3 pm at Northside Social, and it will include Ukrainian food, drink, and music. More information about the event and other local fundraisers are available at the group’s Facebook page.

Starting Wednesday, March 23, the Northern Virginia Regional Commission is setting up drop-off locations to donate gently used clothing and new blankets, socks, hats, and gloves for refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. A list of locations is here.

The Ukrainian Embassy recommends visiting this website for more ways to support the people of Ukraine.

The photo accompanying this story has been corrected. It originally included an image of a student exchange program with another one of Arlington’s sister cities.