By Justin HAGER

A Ukrainian woman this week is sending gratitude to a group of local Boy Scouts after they were instrumental in helping her escape the Russian invasion of her homeland.

The inspirational story began back in 2017 when a group of Scouts, including local resident Lucian Kugler, then a student at Crescenta Valley High School, attended a Southern California Scouting camp. At the time, the camp had a number of international staff including Irina (who we’re only identifying by her first name due to concerns for her safety and security). Irina is a Russian-born Ukrainian citizen who worked as a school psychologist in Kiev but traveled to the U.S. each summer to work as a camp counselor. The increased value of the U.S. dollar over the Ukrainian Hryvnia made the trek to the U.S. particularly lucrative. Over several summers, Irina and Lucian engaged in a cultural exchange, became friends and maintained contact, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The night that Russia invaded Ukraine, I called to offer my support and asked if she needed help getting out of the country,” explained Kugler, who is now a college student studying international relations. “She was concerned about leaving the country on her own. She would be a young woman who is ethnically Russian, traveling by herself, carrying valuables, in a country in which the civilian population had been armed and the police were no longer responding to calls for help.”

That’s when other Scouts and Scouting leaders began contacting Kugler to ask if he had any information about Irina and offered assistance.

“I received dozens of emails and text messages from Boy Scouts asking about Irina,” he said. “So I played hooky a little from one of my college classes to go to one of the BSA [Boy Scouts of America] meetings, explained the situation and encouraged them to be strong, cautiously optimistic, and supportive of Irina and her fellow countrymen.”

One of his fellow Scout leaders, Mike Timm, had made several connections through Facebook and LinkedIn that offered to help, including a mercenary group that offered to help get her out of the country in exchange for $95,000 USD. After speaking with one of the group’s leaders, Kugler felt confident the offer was either an outright scam or, at the very least, had less than pure motives. More than a week into the Russian invasion, he went back to the drawing board.

The next day, Timm called again. He had made contact with a trucking company offering humanitarian assistance to transport people out of Kiev.

“The driver of one of the trucks arranged to pick up Irina at a specific time and location on the morning of March 3,” said Kugler. “But early in the morning the driver stopped responding. He never arrived and has not been heard from since. I told Irina, ‘You have to get out.’”

The next morning, with smoke in the air and the sounds of explosions just blocks away from her apartment, Irina packed what she could carry on her back, paid a cab driver more than 10 times the normal rate to take her to a train station outside Kiev, and successfully boarded a train headed for Poland. Irina spent the next 36 hours on the overcrowded train, most of it standing, amidst dozens of other tired, hungry and anxious refugees. One bridge her train passed over was destroyed just hours after she passed over it. But after a day and a half of travel, she arrived safely in Warsaw.

While the most dangerous part of her journey may be over, Irina still has a long road ahead of her. She hopes to travel to the United States and seek asylum, but it can take as long as 14 months to just process the initial application for refugee status. So in the meantime, she is trying to find other opportunities that can help her enter the United States legally, and then apply for asylum once she is in the country.

Once again, the Boy Scouts are on the case, seeking out opportunities for J1 and other work-related Visas. They have also found temporary housing for Irina once she arrives in the region.

“We were both so humbled at the response from the Boy Scouts, their families and our community members who offered to help with housing, finances and other support,” said Kugler. “She told me that she wants to come to Southern California and be close enough that she can still visit the troop. I asked her why and she said, ‘You guys are the people that I know, you are my community and family away from home.’”

Kugler also noted that while Irina has the assistance and support of a whole troop of people in the U.S., other Ukrainians are not so lucky and need help.

“There are 44 million people in Ukraine who are just like Irina,” he said. “You don’t need to wait for an excuse or a personal relationship to help them. They are people who live, love, laugh, cry and hurt just like us … There are organizations you can give to like UNICEF that are offering humanitarian aid and government officials who might be more willing to say ‘Yes’ if they know it’s important to a friend.”

As of press time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was closing out its third week. Several thousand Ukrainian and Russian military forces were confirmed dead, with sources ranging between 700 and 2,300 civilians killed.

This is an ongoing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

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