'We were pulled to Ukraine': Families with Ottawa ties return home to Kyiv
Seeing family, supporting economy among reasons for returning
For a family from Ukraine, a summer at their cottage near Cornwall, Ont., was "idyllic."
Robert and Iryna Grant spent their time nesting after welcoming their daughter Olivia at the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa in March — five weeks early, something Robert Grant attributes to the stress of their arrival.
The family had always planned to have their daughter in Ottawa, but their plan to leave Ukraine's capital Kyiv was sped up when talk of war became serious in February.
They caught the second-last Air France flight out of the country.
Robert Grant has dual Canadian-American citizenship and grew up in the United States before moving to Ukraine in the 1990s — the cottage in Summerstown, Ont., has been in his family for 160 years.
His family could visit him there, but none of Iryna's family could make the trip from Ukraine.
The cottage wasn't home and, by fall, the homesickness was overwhelming. Speaking to CBC Radio's All In A Day, Robert said he did his risk assessment, spoke to Ukrainian government officials he knew and friends who already decided to go back.
There had been no attacks in Kyiv for about three months at the time, he said.
"We were pulled to Ukraine. I've lived there 28 years. My wife lived her entire life there. So we just decided it was the right thing to do for us," Grant said.
Missile strike 50 metres from apartment
Their first week back was "fantastic" and Iryna's brother threw a welcome back party — they'd been told to expect a much smaller social circle if they returned, but life seemed fairly normal.
Iryna, a vascular surgeon, got a job at a private clinic in the city. But the normalcy didn't last.
The weekend the Crimean bridge was attacked, the family was visiting Iryna's parents 125 kilometres outside Kyiv. They returned to their apartment, but Robert had a cold, so he slept in the guest room.
"I woke up about 8 o'clock in the morning. I heard my wife playing with our daughter in our bedroom, which faces the park … and at about 8:24 I heard a whooshing sound and a first enormous explosion," he told All In A Day host Alan Neal.
A missile had hit an intersection 250 metres from their apartment.
Iryna grabbed Olivia and the family rushed to the guest bath, which was marble-lined and protected by the metre-thick walls of their century-old apartment building.
A second missile hit 50 metres from their building, leaving a deep crater in the playground across from their apartment.
"We were actually playing with our daughter when the missile exploded because we wanted her to not get traumatized. So we're going 'boom, boom.' You know what you do for a little kid to make it seem like a game."
They'd agreed on this tactic to calm Olivia beforehand and Grant said falling into it was automatic.
"The funny thing is the worst fear was the 30 seconds after the second impact, because as I thought in my mind there was a first impact 250 metres away, then there was 50 metres away," Grant said.
The courtyard of their apartment was being used as a headquarters for the Territorial Defence Force, which he assumed was the target — but there was no third missile.
The family eventually left the bathroom to find their doors blown in, all their windows shattered and missile shrapnel in the walls and the bed where they had been seconds before the blast.
Robert said he had thought it was more likely to get into a car crash driving in eastern Ontario than to be near a missile strike.
"I was proven wrong within the first 10 days," he said.
The family has now acquired U.K. visas and will be staying there — closer to family than Ottawa — for the foreseeable future.
Ukrainian people are 'just amazing'
While Grant called his own reasoning wrong, he's not the only one to reach a similar conclusion.
Chris Glover grew up in Ottawa's New Edinburgh neighbourhood and moved to Ukraine in 2008 to work in the oil business. He used a similar line of thinking when he returned home to Kyiv.
His family was staying at an AirBnB in Croatia when the family dog was hit by a car.
"I kind of felt that being next to a highway as a refugee is probably more dangerous than being in our apartment in Kyiv for now," Glover said.
Glover, his wife and his two children, ages eight and nearly two, returned in June.
"It's important that people are in the country and paying taxes and keeping businesses alive," Glover said.
"There won't be a country left to come back to if all the businesses are shut up and all the men who can't leave the country can't find work."
Since their return, Glover said people have been especially kind to each other, smiling at grocery stores and waving people through in traffic.
"This is when you want to be in Ukraine, when people are just amazing."
He gave the example of children gathered in a bomb shelter belting out the song Stefania, which won the Eurovision song contest this year.
Been at war for 'years now'
That doesn't mean it's all been easy. Glover lives near the Grants and was supposed to be in the park when the missile hit.
"We were running a bit late that morning and I was still just shaving when the first missile went off," he said.
He said perspective is everything when it comes to determining risk.
"This war didn't start for us in February. We've been in a country at war for 10 years now."
He said as long as they're out of Russian artillery range, which he estimates is between 40 and 50 kilometres, he feels relatively safe.
The family would consider leaving if the government — which he says has earned their complete trust — asked them to for logistical reasons, or if the situation became more volatile.
"If the situation becomes uncomfortable — I think it will become uncomfortable before it becomes unsafe — we'll probably leave."
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