My mother is Ukrainian. Her father emigrated to Canada between WWI and II because the Canadian Government promised free land in the prairies to anyone who would settle there and farm that land.

My father was born in Ukraine. He was an apprentice barber at 14 years old when war broke out in Europe in 1939. By 1945 he and his family had made their way through war torn Europe to Austria where he worked in a Displaced Persons camp run by the Allied Forces (America, Britain, Canada, etc.) In that camp, as a teenager he made soap out of the fat produced from animals that were slaughtered for their meat. The Allied forces realized that with lots of people living in that camp, hygiene was of utmost importance so that diseases didn't spread. So, he made soap from animal fat and that soap was available to everyone living in that camp. He and his family then applied to immigrate to Canada, and they were accepted. Our family name back in Ukraine was spelled Kelebaj, but it was pronounced Kele bai. When my dad's family got off the boat in Halifax, there was an immigration worker who was documenting all of the immigrants and asked how to spell our last name. They pronounced it for him (because many letters in Ukrainian don't have an English counter part), and he wrote Kelebay, and it's been spelled that way ever since.

Ukraine is a country divided. The eastern part of Ukraine has a lot of Russian immigrants who moved there after WWII. Those Ukrainians feel that Ukraine should remain part of the Russian sphere of influence. The western part of Ukraine consider themselves part of Europe and for the most part, hate Russia and Russians with a passion. In fact, at the start of WWII, there was a Ukrainian resistance movement that was fighting BOTH the Germans and the Russians.

Western Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia. They lived for many years as a Soviet State and they saw the corruption that came with communism, and the resulting economic chaos the ensued. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, thanks mostly to Mr. Gorbachev, Ukraine became an independant country, but the hatred of Russians and Communism remains a strong motivating factor in western Ukraine. In eastern Ukraine, people long for the old days and the old ways when the USSR was a superpower. So, it's a divided country, and even though I would like to see it remain together, most western Ukrainians would prefer the country split apart; west and east/Crimea, rather than western Ukraine return to communism and Russian rule.