Canadian couple stranded in Ukraine gets fast-tracked citizenship ceremony

Alona Boniak and Stanislav Grytsenko recently left Quebec City to visit their hometown in Ukraine for the first time in five years. One day after their arrival, the war broke out.

And they had yet to take the oath to officially become Canadian citizens.

"We are citizens, we did the final exam, but all that was missing was the ceremony," Boniak said, cramped in a train car with six other passengers, including her husband. "[The wait] was longer due to COVID."

The couple is on a train heading to Lviv, 1,000 kilometeres from Dnipro, where their families lived, their long-awaited reunion, completely turned upside down by the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory.

With Ukraine preventing men of conscription age from leaving the country, Grytsenko, 37, could be forced to stay.

When Joël Lightbound, a federal member of Parliament for the Louis-Hébert riding, learned about the couple's situation, he and his team alerted the Ministry of Immigration.

"We managed to move up a citizenship ceremony, private, remote," said the MP, whose riding consists of the southern part of Quebec City.

"They will now have access to all consular services to return home," he said, adding that the ministry is working to get their official documents.

Boniak hopes that the papers will allow her husband to leave Ukraine despite the conscription.

Destination: Poland

Their story, first reported by Le Soleil, also helps explain the frantic movement underway in Ukraine.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the war has displaced 368,000 people so far.

"We have to go west, to Poland. This is where the border is safer," she said. "We'll go to Lviv, first. And then, we don't yet know how we'll travel the other kilometres to get to the border."

From Dnipro they have to travel by train for about 14 hours. In Lviv, they will still be some 80 kilometres from the border with Poland.

"We hope that when we get to Lviv, we will know if the Canadian consulate in Poland can find a way to give us the papers at the border," she said.

She knows that they aren't the only ones heading there, passing through Lviv.

"There are eight of us in a four-passenger car normally," she says. "My husband is the only man, there are four children."

Although many Ukrainians are waiting near the border, she's determined to return to Quebec.

"I cannot leave my husband," she said.