The phone calls to family in Ukraine still leave her shaking.

“Every day is saying goodbye and I love you to your family like it will be the last time,” said Anya Welsh, who emigrated to Maryland 21 years ago from Kherson, Ukraine, and whose father and brother still live there, in the midst of war.

“I cannot even describe to you this pain,” she said.

More than three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the thousands of Ukrainians and who live in and around Montgomery County spend every day looking far east, wondering about loved ones in the line of fire.

Thousands of miles away, they do what they can to help their country — as Welsh has done since the moment Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine began in February 2022. The moment she heard the news, she ran out of her Howard County home to stock up on food and medical supplies to send abroad, and drove the packed shopping bags straight to St. Andrews Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Silver Spring.

There she — and several other Ukrainian-Americans who had had the same idea that day — figured out how to get the goods into the war zone.

St. Andrews Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral remains a nexus for organizing humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and a place where Ukrainians in the area come to sustain themselves as the fight continues and the Trump administration’s support for Ukraine waxes and wanes.

“When I first joined it was a bunch of volunteers packing supplies who didn’t know each other,” said Olena Poole. Now her title is “refugee coordinator” of what is now known as the St. Andrews Humanitarian Center. She organizes hundreds of volunteers who, over the years, have figured out how to support fighters and family mired in a conflict no longer making regular headlines.

They aim to get donations to the areas of Ukraine that need in most.

“We are all driven by the urge to help Ukraine,” said Poole, whose relatives all remain in her birth city in Northwest Ukraine, Zhytomyr. “That’s the only thing that’s been driving us.”

But as they try from afar to defend a culture under attack, they also continue to celebrate it. Earlier this month, they gathered for the 22nd year of the Washington Ukrainian Festival, which is sponsored by St. Andrew’s.

Costumes and cabbage

Welsh was one of several volunteers who, for days, had been preparing food for the festival, trays of varenyky — or Polish pierogi filled with salty mashed potato and covered in butter with fried onions — and golubtsi, cylinders of braised cabbage filled with ground beef and cooked in a tomato sauce.

All proceeds from the sale of food, crafts and traditional Ukrainian clothing and ornaments went to support Ukrainians — those living through the war but also refugees in the U.S.

Hundreds of people used to attend the Washington Ukrainian Festival. Now thousands do, their numbers rising most sharply in the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“The dancing, food and embroidery, it all makes a culture that speaks of life, creativity and freedom,” said Volodymyr Steliac, priest of St. Andrews and founder of the festival. “It is something God has given us that no human can take away.”

A little more than a hundred Ukrainian refugees have escaped the war to Montgomery County, Poole estimated, based on the numbers who have sought help from the Humanitarian Center to restart their lives. Many are women and children, Poole added, with relatives fighting for Ukraine back home.

“Ukrainians are very proud people,” said Poole, describing how many refugees with advanced degrees have begun working as waiters and warehouse workers to find ways to help their families back home.

On the first evening of the three-day festival, Anastasia Chala, 16, sat with her friends, Roman and Alina, while the Vyshyvanka dance troupe practiced for their performance the next morning.

Chala is wears a Vyshyvanka — a traditional hand-embroidered shirt with a pattern representing “the DNA of Kiev,” her hometown and Ukraine’s capital city, from where she fled after the war began.

Alina and Roman — both of whom did not want their last names published — also fled Ukraine in the past two years, coming to Montgomery County to stay with relatives or family friends who had emigrated in the early ’90s.

The trio are students at Winston Churchill High School, in Potomac, and active members of its Ukrainian student club.

Sometimes classmates ask them if the war is still happening.

This is the second time that Alina, whose father has been drafted into the Ukrainian military, has had to uproot her life. She first left her home in Luhansk, a Ukrainian city on the border of Russia, after it was partially invaded and occupied by Russian-backed forces in 2014.

Images of devastation in Ukraine look like movies to people here, she said. “Like they aren’t real, but they are happening for me,” Alina said.

‘Ukraine fatigue’

Over a plate of hot vareynyky, Welsh flipped through recent photos of Kherson from her father. It’s a “ghost town,” of houses scorched into hollowed-out shells and lost pets roaming through the ruins.

Last summer, Russia’s bombing of the Kakhovka Dam turned Welsh’s former grade school into an island. Her family in Ukraine tells her they fear the sky as Russians have targeted civilians in drone attacks the invaders have dubbed a ’human safari.’

Welsh factors a seven-hour time difference into her daily call to check that her family has survived the night. “I have to wait ‘till sunrise,” Welsh said. “Every single morning.”

Manning a table for a local Ukrainian nonprofit, Kiev-native Oleksandra Popova said her classmates at James Madison University, where she studies political science, have tuned Ukraine out. It’s known as “Ukraine fatigue,” she said.

“Sometimes I just wish I could start screaming,” said Popova, who spends hours each day following an air raid app that shows strikes on Ukraine in real time.

“You won’t understand how much it hurts until it’s happening to you.”

‘I always thought I was Russian’

Katrina Hall, 20, and Eliza Voronin, 19, have been coming to Ukrainian festivals in Baltimore and Silver Spring since they were kids, when they performed with a Ukrainian dance troupe. This year, dressed in Vyshyvankas and hair ribbons, the friends helped Hall’s Ukrainian-born mother, Tanya Hall, promote her realty business.

Hall said she voted for Trump in 2020 after he promised to end the war in Ukraine. She’s frustrated, she said, that he now seems “paralyzed” on the issue.

Her daughter Katrina Hall said the Russian invasion has changed the way she thinks about her identity.

“I always thought I was Russian,” she said.

Katrina was raised primarily speaking Russian by Tanya, who grew up in the ’80s in Donestsk, along the Ukrainian border with Russia. Then, all of Eastern Europe remained under Soviet control. The Ukrainian language was discouraged, and many lost their native tongue.

It was only after Russia’s full-scale invasion that mother and daughter began to speak Ukrainian in the house.

Like many Ukrainian Americans who grew up in the Soviet Union, Welsh — following the start of the war — sometimes felt the local Ukrainian community held her Soviet upbringing against her.

In 2022, at the first festival following the start of the invasion “Russian was like a swear word,” said Alina.

Alina doesn’t relate to that resentment.

“I don’t care if you speak Russian. Russians too are dying in this war,” she said. “I care that you want this war to end.”

Baltimore’s Ukrainian Festival will be returning for its 48th year to St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church on Eastern Avenue on Sept. 27 and 28.