These Ukrainian refugee children have a message for the world 2:19
(CNN) --
Even as the bombs began to fall, Yevhenia Khomenko did not want to leave her home in Kyiv, Ukraine.
"She would rather die there," the 94-year-old woman said.
But eventually, she became too much and her daughter convinced her to leave the home she had known all her life.
When Khomenko was a child, she lived through the Great Ukraine Famine, one that killed millions, fueled by Josef Stalin.
Years later, she fled her home during World War II when her country was attacked by Adolf Hitler.
She has now had to flee once again due to an invasion caused by Vladimir Putin.
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The Russian attacks have reminded Khomenko of the bombing, shooting and violence during World War II, he told CNN.
Bombs then, as they are now, were unpredictable, and he remembered running anywhere to escape them.
Khomenko returned to Kyiv after World War II to help rebuild the city's main square, he said.
Now, he worries that the city will never be the same and that, given his age, he will never return.
Raisa Makhnovets, 73, and her mother, Yevhenia Khomenko, 94, at her family's home in Sacramento.
Photo taken by Omar Jimenez
His 73-year-old daughter, Raisa Makhnovets, is also worried about the fate of Kyiv.
Through tears, she told CNN how difficult it was to persuade her mother to leave Kyiv and how her attempts to do so quickly turned into a "horror movie."
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They had no other family in the city and first spent two days in a bomb shelter before attempting to flee the country by train.
The station was overwhelmed by others trying to do the same.
“I just couldn't believe it was actually happening.
The train station was scary," said Makhnovets, speaking in Russian, as many Ukrainians do, and translated by CNN.
"So many people with their kids and stuff, really scary. The first train left without us, then the second. It was really cold waiting there overnight. There were even newborn babies."
Makhnovets said it took about 20 hours to get from Kyiv to Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine, and then leave the country entirely.
Then she and her mother were able to fly to the United States on a visa they had obtained years ago.
They were reunited in Sacramento with five generations of her family, including great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother.
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In Sacramento, Khomenko noted the peace in the California air.
"My soul hurts, for my house, where I lived. But it's quiet here, I don't hear anything. I have a house and I want to go home. I want to be in my own house. But circumstances forced us to come here. Just go wherever necessary so as not to have to watch the war,” he said in Russian.
His feelings are now familiar to those of a lifetime ago, Khomenko said, but in his youth, he didn't really understand war the way he does now.
He later told CNN: "I wish you a good life and may you not have to endure what we have had to endure. I look forward to friendship between us and all peoples."
Yevhenia Khomenko in Kyiv in 1959.
Seeking refuge in the United States
As of the end of March, there are more than 3.5 million Ukrainians who have been forced to abandon the lives they once knew in search of new ones, but only a fraction of them ended up in the United States.
The Biden administration recently pledged to take in up to 100,000 Ukrainians, but so far it has been difficult for them to enter the United States.
The few that have done so have been successful across the Mexican border, in some cases being granted entry through what is known as a humanitarian permit, which allows temporary admission for urgent humanitarian reasons or for a public benefit. significant.
It's "much more complicated and different than you ever imagined," said Julia Bikbova, an immigration and litigation attorney who was born and raised in Ukraine and recently visited the Mexican border.
She told CNN that almost every Ukrainian she spoke to told her, "Your president of hers announced that she is accepting refugees, this is where we are."
From October 2021 through February, there were just over 1,300 Ukrainians along the southern US border, according to Border Patrol data.
Data on Ukrainians who entered the US in the past month will be released in April, the Department of Homeland Security previously told CNN.
While a timeline on Biden's commitment is not yet clear, the current framework for obtaining refugee status may take years.
Many have therefore opted to go through Mexico, where no visa is required for Ukrainians, although they may have to "convince officials in Cancun that they are there on vacation," Bikbova said.
"No one flies from Frankfurt or Warsaw to Tijuana," she added.
Those who do manage to enter the United States, through parole or otherwise, find relatives or people like Vadym Dashkevych: a Ukrainian-born senior pastor at Spring of Life Ukrainian Church in Sacramento.
Dashkevych, and other US volunteers like him, pick up Ukrainian families once they pass through immigration and help them settle in various cities.
For Dashkevych, it's Sacramento.
Senior Pastor Vadym Dashkevych receives a call in Sacramento on his watch from a contact at the Mexican border.
In one week this month, Dashkevych told CNN he helped seven families find at least one temporary home in the area.
But, he emphasized, the "family" can include several children, which can add up to more than 30 people a week.
"The best way to treat them is to bring them into our families and into American families," Dashkevych said.
"They need help not only to be on their own, but also to help, like having a cup of tea at night, talking, asking questions," he said, adding that they have put out a call through their church for people to become host families.
It also works with lawyers and other support services to help these families with their long-term future – starting a new life under calm skies, away from the war that has so suddenly uprooted them.
“As of today, that is not just war, there is more.
They are just killing people.
Normal people.
The schools, the kindergarten, the hospitals and everything," Dashkevych told CNN.
"It's going to be painful. It's going to take years and years to get over it."
CNN's Josh Pennington contributed to this report.
War in Ukraine Russian invasion of Ukraine