Mexicans and Muslims aren’t the only ones in Chicago who’ve been shaken by President Donald Trump’s words and actions.
All the talk recently of ties between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Russia is provoking deep anxiety in the big Ukrainian community in Chicago and the suburbs.
The situation presents a golden opportunity for local elected officials to appeal to a sizeable voting bloc — and to hit Trump on yet another issue.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Congressman Mike Quigley, D-Ill., visited Ukraine last month to meet with the eastern European country’s president, Petro Poroshenko.
And this Sunday, Durbin and Quigley are hosting a forum in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood to brief the local community on their trip.
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Quigley says worries about Russia’s increasingly nationalistic and militaristic tactics extend far beyond Ukraine to many other former Soviet republics, including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Georgia.
“Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union,” Quigley says. “This is extraordinarily concerning for all the folks here who are first or second generation Americans from these countries.”
During a trip to Georgia last summer, Quigley says, Russian expansionism was occurring in plain view.
“We watched through binoculars as the Russian troops literally moved border fences,” the congressman from the North Side says.
The Ukrainians, who won their independence in 1991, are especially concerned after Russia invaded Crimea and ethnic clashes erupted in the Donbas region.
Quigley had last visited Kyiv, the Ukrainian capitol, in the spring of 2014, during the Maidan uprising, which prompted the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukoych.
During the last trip in February, Quigley says he and Durbin told Poroshenko that American legislators, Republicans as well as Democrats, favor continuing sanctions against Russia.
“It seems striking that President Trump, for reasons still unknown, remains unwilling to stand up to Russian aggression, at home or abroad,” Quigley wrote in an article published recently in Politico. “The new administration won’t rule out lifting Russian sanctions that were imposed in reaction to the invasion of Crimea and U.S. election interference.”
The Ukrainian community has a long history in Chicago.
St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, at Cortez and Oakley, celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. A few blocks south, the copper onion domes of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral have loomed majestically over the quiet neighborhood just north and west of downtown since 1915.
The forum Sunday with Durbin and Quigley will take place at 1:30 p.m. at the Ukrainian Cultural Center, 2247 W. Chicago Ave.
Like many established ethnic groups in the city, some Ukrainians have gradually moved on to the bungalow belt and the northwest suburbs.
But in the old neighborhood, the taste of Kyiv remains strong despite gentrification. Baby blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags wave from the balconies of brick apartment buildings, and “United We Stand With Ukraine” signs are displayed in the windows of homes.
“We try to do what we can do help our homeland,” says Father Mykola Buryadnyk, who moved here from Ukraine in 2002 and is the pastor at St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Catholic Church on Cumberland Avenue.
Estimates of the Chicago area’s Ukrainian population range from 100,000 to as many as 250,000, says Pavlo Bandriwsky, vice president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America’s Illinois division.
Some are Republicans, and some are Democrats, Bandriwsky says.
“One thing that unites us is concern for our homeland,” he says. “We need to have leadership in this country that is not naïve when it comes to Russia.”
All politics may be local.
But when your constituents include many with roots and relatives far across the oceans, it’s probably best to stay on the right side of issues affecting the old country also.
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