Submitted photo Steven DuChene of Liberty, right, his fiancee, Svetlana Vinohradova of Ukraine, and her daughter, Mila, pose in front of a monument in Odessa, Ukraine, during a trip together in 2019.

Svetlana Vinohradova had been in the process of getting a visa to come to the United States since 2019, stalled by one missing piece of paperwork that she finally got in mid-January. She had made arrangements to go to the United States Embassy in Kyiv to interview, the final step in the visa process, when Russia invaded Ukraine, shuttering the embassy — and her chances of getting to the U.S.

With shells falling not far from the city of Konstantinovka in eastern Ukraine, she took her two daughters, ages 10 and 16, and her elderly mother and slowly fled west, traveling weeks to reach the city of Ivano-Frankivsk hundreds of miles away.

On the long, dangerous trip, Vinohradova and her family had to lie down on the floor of a refugee bus to avoid bullets flying through the covered windows.

Now in the relative safety of a temporary refugee shelter more or less out of harm’s way, Vinohradova and her family have been left in limbo.

Her finance, Steve DuChene of Liberty, wants to know why the U.S. State Department has been mum on the next step to secure her visa now that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv essentially is gone.

“I’m just trying to get us all together in the U.S. so we can be a family,” DuChene said.

DuChene met Vinohradova on an Eastern European dating site in 2017. They officially got engaged two years later, and have since been working to secure a K-1 fiancee immigrant visa for Vinohradova and her daughters to come to the United States.

The process already has taken years because Vinohradova shared custody of her oldest daughter with her ex-husband, who lives in Moscow, and she needed documentation proving she had permission to take her daughter to the U.S. The “very poor” bureaucratic infrastructure for custody in Ukraine didn’t help, DuChene said.

In the interval, DuChene, Vinohradova and the girls have taken family vacations together to Egypt, Turkey, and to cities in Ukraine, including Odessa and Kharkiv, DuChene said.

Now, DuChene looks at recent photos of those Ukranian cities, and they are unrecognizable.

“The situation now is such a tragedy, because those people were just trying to get along with their lives and be a normal, democratic country and that’s what they’re paying the price of now,” DuChene said.

Since the war broke out, DuChene and Vinohradova have been in communication two or three times a day, texting with a messaging app. DuChene sent emails to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, which were occasionally answered, but has made little progress in expediting the stalled visa process.

The Embassy website’s visa page reads, “Due to the temporary suspension of all visa services at Embassy Kyiv, the U.S. Department of State has designated Consulate General Frankfurt as the primary processing location for immigrant visas for residents of Ukraine.”

After emailing the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, DuChene was redirected to email a different address, from which he has gotten no reply.

At the advice of a visa coach, DuChene also reached out to his congressman, Tim Ryan, whose office responded — but DuChene is still unsure if the staff there will be able to help.

“I don’t know what to do beyond that,” DuChene said. He, Vinohradova and the girls have been waiting a long time to be a family, he said.

DuChene is disappointed with the lack of communication and “dismayed” by the way the U.S. State Department is handling both valid visa applications like Vinohradova’s and those from refugees coming from Ukraine.

President Joe Biden said in March that the U.S. would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, but with people leaving the war-torn country by the millions, DuChene feels that is not enough.

“They’re just dropping the ball on the floor and not picking it up,” DuChene said.

Meanwhile, Vinohradova’s mother’s village outside of Konstantinovka — an area not far from the Donbas border, which has been in the fray and under Russian-backed separatist control for years — has been reduced largely to rubble. Vinhradova’s father remains in eastern Ukraine, unable to safely get out.

avugrincic@tribtoday.com