Anastasiia Horova spent the last two weeks of her freshman year at D’Youville University talking herself into going home to Ukraine for the summer.
Back at school for the semester that started Jan. 17, two students described holiday fun, bittersweet goodbyes and trying to focus on future goals with a war at the back of their minds.
She hadn’t seen her father in more than a year – since two days after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, when her parents sent her to stay with her older sister in Germany. She had seen her mom just once since then, on a visit to Germany for the winter holidays. She dearly missed her home, her parents and her dog, Fanta.
By mid-May, she had her plans for a visit mapped out. Fly from Buffalo to Boston, then to Reykjavik Airport in Iceland. Spend 18 hours awaiting a flight to Budapest, then a nine-hour layover there before her flight to Berlin. From there, it would be just a couple hours by train to her sister Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had just bought a new car and agreed to drive the old car 20 hours to their hometown of Kryvyi Rih in Southeast Ukraine, to bring Anastasiia to their parents, before donating that car to the Ukrainian military.
But the war blocked the last leg of her journey.
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