Montreal student hoping Ukrainian family gets green light to come to Canada

Every day the Puhachov’s from Kharkiv, Ukraine are checking their emails. They are hoping to get the news they have the green light to leave Poland and come to Canada and join their brother Ivan – a Ph.D. student in Montreal.

Ivan has been waiting anxiously to reunite with his family – who fled the ongoing Russian invasion, leaving their father Roman behind. They’re hoping their visas get processed quickly, now that Canada announced a temporary residence pathway for Ukrainians.

“We submitted the application. I insisted they cross the border, and it was not easy. They were standing for ten hours and in the queue without even a proper connection, so it was hard to call them. And it was a hard journey to Warsaw, so now they finally settled there and it’s out of our hands,” explained Ivan Puhachov.

“I want to be with my family at any time in any country. But I also want you to return to Ukraine to help rebuild our city of Kharkiv,” said Anna Puhachov, one of Ivan’s younger sisters.

Anna and Yehor, Ivan’s two younger siblings are in Warsaw, along with his mother and grandmother. The family wants to come to Canada but only for the short term

“We don’t even seek some financial support. We just need the authorization to travel here and stay here temporarily,” stated Ivan. “It’s just a long bureaucratic process, but it does not fit the circumstances we are in. And I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“I’d like to know that my family is safe. And right now, I can see Canada or one of these places where they can feel safe,” explained Roman.

Photo of the Puhachov family.(Photo Credit: Ivan Puhachov)Safety isn’t something 49-year-old Roman isn’t guaranteed since he can’t leave Ukraine under martial law. He’s staying in the small town of Korsun’ about 450 kilometres west of Kharkiv.

“It’s impossible to feel safe anywhere in Ukraine nowadays.”

This is why the rest of the family is hoping to head towards Canada, where last week, the federal government expanded their immigration streams for Ukrainian refugees – allowing them to stay for three years – and the new application taking about two weeks to process.

“We have been assured that this procedure is about as simplified as possible in order to facilitate and make this process as fluid as possible,” explained Eugene Czolij, a lawyer with the Honorary Consul of Ukraine in Montreal and former President of the Ukrainian World Congress.

“So, I can obviously understand that people that have been that made Canada their choice and have been waiting, for now, a couple of weeks and one of the countries that border Ukraine might think that this has been a long period of time before they could avail themselves of this program. But I think that let’s see in the next two days how it plays out.”