Never in my life did I think I would one day be riding hell for leather across the United States, a country paralyzed by a pandemic, in a bid to catch the last plane back home to Ukraine.
But that’s actually what happened. Just three days ago, on March 28, I was one of 359 Ukrainian nationals evacuated on a special flight from New York to Kyiv organized by the Ukrainian Embassy.
This was the last plane to take off for home — an exception made to the total ban on air travel that the Ukrainian government had introduced a day before. Now, not a single aircraft from the U.S. will touch ground in Ukraine until at least April 24 — and possibly longer.
This means that thousands of Ukrainians will remain trapped across the ocean during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Me? I was among the lucky ones. I somehow managed to immediately see the message from the embassy and quickly book the $500 emergency flight with Ukraine International Airlines (UIA). I wanted to get back home before it was too late.
I was in the United States when the global lockdown was only being introduced. Reading the news, I saw the crisis reach many countries.
Fortune truly favors fools like me: I arrived in Chicago on March 12, just hours before President Donald J. Trump halted all regular air connections between the U.S. and Europe.
Even just two weeks ago, this crisis didn’t seem like something that would cause absolute, long-lasting global paralysis. I never could have imagined that the U.S. would become the world’s worst-affected nation.
Staying in the city of Columbia, Missouri, my first destination in the U.S., I was ready to start a six-month stint as a defense reporter trainee in Washington, D.C.
But the pandemic had another plan.
Columbia is a beautiful place, the pearl of the Midwest. It grew even calmer and more pleasant with the majority of residents preferring to stay indoors. The local University of Missouri, including its famous journalism school, stopped all classes and sent students home. Within days, its enormous campus was closed for all activities.
The situation was deteriorating daily, if not hourly.
A man in a medical mask stands in the hall at the Boryspil international airport, on March 24, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Cycling through the eerily empty streets of Columbia, I saw Taco Bells and Burger Kings switch to drive-through service only, and Starbucks and barbershops closed down until further notice. Only several small restaurants serving no more than 10 persons still offered food to-go during reduced hours.
Watching TV with my Airbnb housemate, an Indian journalist, we saw federal government and state authorities all across America issuing more and more quarantine restrictions, announcing new skyrocketing numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and allocating astronomic amounts of funds to save small businesses from collapse.
I went to local supermarkets and saw free sanitizer at cash desks and checkers cleaning conveyer belts with antiseptic after every single buyer.
And when Missouri’s Boone County, which now has 60 confirmed cases and one reported death from COVID-19, declared a stay-at-home order on March 24, it became clear that I should try to get back home too, before America halts all intercity transportation. That was a distinct possibility that was actually being discussed in the news at that point.
My rush to catch the last flight to Kyiv showed me many weird things — Chicago O’Hare Airport, America’s second-busiest hub, was almost completely empty. Its vast halls of closed gift stores and coffee shops were populated by a handful of security officers and airport personnel rather than passengers.
For many of my friends, frequent visitors to the U.S., seeing my pictures of the ghost airport was quite a shock. In the past, there was “no place to sit” there.
After breathlessly taking in the magnificent aerial view of the Big Apple, I arrived at LaGuardia, lonely and silent, with only two passengers (including myself) waiting at the baggage claim carousel.
I was extremely worried about whether I could make it to JFK Airport in less than an hour and check-in for the Ukrainian plane on time.
Poor naive me: My own personal bus shuttle — there was no one else on board — took me all across Queens in something like 15 minutes. There was no traffic and no people. I had no idea how the world’s greatest city could become so eerily empty.
Medical staff dressed in protective gear prepare to test Ukrainians arrived from abroad for the coronavirus at a drive-through testing center at Kyiv Boryspil International Airport on March 25, 2020. (Boryspil press service)
At JFK that day, the whole of Terminal 8 belonged exclusively to 359 Ukrainian nationals.
Finally, we were welcomed on board by UIA flight attendants wearing snow-white, lightweight versions of biohazard protection suits. After nine hours in the Boeing packed to the gills with passengers changing their face masks every four hours and looking cautiously at their coughing seatmates, the worldwide quest was finished.
When the aircraft touched down at Kyiv Boryspil International Airport, I witnessed the longest and the loudest storm of passenger applause for pilots in my air travel history.
Yes, 359 of us made it home, but 10 times more remained stuck in the U.S. indefinitely, crying for help on the Ukrainian Embassy’s Facebook page.
Right inside the aircraft, a State Border Service officer scanned each passenger’s forehead with an electronic body thermometer, and all of us signed a paper obliging us to self-isolate for at least 14 days.
Then we were free to go. No express tests for coronavirus, no supervised isolation, no actual control to ensure people properly self-quarantine.
The next day, it became clear: I was lucky. I had arrived back home on the eve of the government’s decision to finally start putting newcomers in formal, mandatory quarantine.
On March 29 and 30, this sparked outrage as Ukrainian passengers evacuated to Kyiv from Vietnam and Indonesia on charter flights at their own expense were forced to stay locked in special hotels for 14 days — and to pay for their own meals and, sometimes, lodgings.
At this point, I simply gave up trying to understand what our leadership was doing. Was it okay that nearly 80,000 Ukrainians had returned to the country by all means of transportation possible when the coronavirus lockdown was just beginning and faced no strict quarantine measures?
The government admitted them all without, in fact, any enforcement of self-isolation. Only now, when it is way too late, the authorities present the forced isolation of several hundred travelers as a silver bullet against the spread of the disease from abroad.
Knowing how easily one can spread the virus without feeling any symptoms, I decided to take the 14 days of self-isolation seriously. So I locked myself up in my apartment in Kyiv, stocked up on food and water, renewed my Netflix subscription, and unwrapped my new PlayStation 4.
Ukrainian servicemen unloading cargo from a military plane at Boryspil International Airport (Kyiv) on March 29, 2020 delivering another batch of medical supplies from Xiamen needed to combat the spread of coronavirus. (Kirill Timoshenko)
But how many of my fellow passengers on the last aircraft from New York are doing the same thing right now? Meanwhile, those on the next plane from Vietnam are being forced into senseless captivity at their own expense.
This is a crystal clear demonstration of how incompetent, inconsistent, chaotic and disoriented President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team is in combating the coronavirus.
This is what I was seeing in the news about Ukraine while in the U.S. And this is what I see at home.
They closed the Kyiv metro, used by 1 million people daily, and created huge crowds at bus stops and traffic jams. They closed stores except for essential industries, but did not move a finger to save small businesses and individuals quickly running out of money due to a lack of work.
They closed entry for everyone, but one can still enter Ukraine on foot or via personal vehicle, so massive crowds gathered for days at state border checkpoints on the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Their poorly thought-out, absurd decisions look like a hysterical seesaw, with no plan or ability to see at least a couple of steps ahead.
It remains an open question: What does more harm to Ukraine’s fragile economy — the massive pandemic or the heavy-handed way our leadership tries to cope with it?
Say what you will about the Trump administration, but what I saw in the U.S. was a far more competent, logical and systematic approach. No matter how badly hurt by the coronavirus, America will live through it and then recover its economy by supporting its small businesses and ordinary citizens in difficult times.
Ukraine won’t live through it, because its leadership doesn’t even understand what it’s doing.
