FRACKVILLE, Pa. — The Biden administration has pledged more support for Ukraine and the president met with NATO leaders about the Russian sanctions. But in the eyes of Professor Matthew Kenenitz, it won't be enough to stop thousands of innocent civilians from being killed, some of them, the families of his own students.
"There's no way to get people in the United States to understand Ukraine and her people," Kenenitz said. "There's such a pride, there's such a love of country."
Frackville native Matthew Kenenitz spent the past three years teaching English in Ukraine. Family called him back to the states a little more than a month ago, days before the Russian invasion.
He's now meeting with his students from Ukrainian Catholic University online, many of them still in the western city of Lviv.
"They tried to get into Poland. They walked for 30 hours straight," he said, referring to a student and their family. "They walked from Lviv to the Polish border, couldn't get through, and they turned around and walked back to Lviv."
Even in the midst of tragedy, his students are pitching in. Some are training to be soldiers, others providing humanitarian aid and sharing their homes with refugees moving west.
"There are people from Kharkiv that are living in Lviv right now that are going crazy because it's quiet," Kenenitz said. "They're so used to hearing the shelling and the bombing, that they don't know how to settle."
One of his students who did make it into Poland, where President Biden just visited, doesn't know if he'll ever be able to return.
"He said that they're projecting that it's going to take at least five years just to remove the landmines and the shells that haven't exploded, the missiles that haven't exploded, just to start the rebuilding process," Kenenitz said.
The President has pledged another billion dollars in relief money from the U.S. and told reporters he would act if Putin's army uses chemical weapons.
Professor Kenenitz believes the time to act is already here.
"We're not dealing with a person," he said. "We're not dealing with a human being with a soul, we're dealing with pure evil and something needs to be done."
Professor Kenenitz said the Russian forces are no match for the Ukrainians when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, so they've resorted to targeting civilian lives and infrastructure.
Aside from the physical destruction taking place, Kenenitz fears a generation of Ukrainians are now facing mental and emotional scarring that could take longer to repair than the cities themselves.
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