SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine, once with some 4 million residents. It is also only 19 miles from Russia. When the missiles and drones started raining down on the city in 2022, a college student named Svetlana was taking care of her ailing grandmother. A young mother, Anastasiia, was living with her son and husband who sold cellular telephones.

My family has gotten to know their families as we have helped to financially support them throughout the war. At first, Svetlana and Anastasiia were optimistic that the war would end.

But now, they have fallen into resignation and despair. And now the United States is beginning to turn its back on the desperate country, President Donald Trump criticizing Ukraine’s president as an ungrateful “dictator” in a high-stakes drama that seems to shift every day.

“Our son was upset,” Anastasiia wrote recently. “But unfortunately, over the past few years, we have stopped hoping for anything.”

As for Svetlana: “No words. Only emotions.”

As the war began, there was a way to give directly to Ukrainian families without the middle man taking a slice of the proceeds. World-wide, anybody can briefly rent somebody’s residence through Internet apps such as Airbnb.

So the Philp family picked Kharkiv as our community to help Ukrainians, since they live so near the front and are so vulnerable to attacks that can arrive literally within minutes. Anastasiia and Svetlana were among the residents looking to rent their Kharkiv flats. The way these apps work, the price and availability of any given rental is on display, allowing the user to select the location and the length of stay.

The Philps, after some trial runs with other Kharkiv landlords, ended up adopting Svetlana and Anastasiaa. The family so far has rented from them a combined 62 times. To be clear, we pay the rents but have never actually made it to Kharkiv. It’s simply a way of helping them financially. I don’t even know their full names. But the pain they have shared is at times crushing to read. It is as authentic, and anonymous, as a relationship can simultaneously be. Our last “stay” ended March 1.

Grateful every time, they have shared month after month what has happened in their lives. Their stories have common threads, first brimming with gratitude and hope and slowly descending into fear and resignation. They find themselves as smaller and smaller pawns on a quickly-shifting international stage as the United States now condemns Ukrainian leadership as our country now votes in the United Nations with the likes of Russia and North Korea in defense of the aggression at the United Nations.

Why one left and another stayed

By the time the family first rented a flat from Anastasiia near the Kharkiv River, she was safely in Germany. “My husband insisted on my evacuation with our son,” she wrote. “My husband and family are still in a suburb of Kharkiv. Now he helps people fix their phones because the most important thing for people now is to have an opportunity to call their loved ones.”

Svetlana, meanwhile, stayed with family as she rented her flat in the Naukova region. “I have parents and a 91-year-old grandmother here,” Svetlana wrote in 2022. “She (has suffered) a stroke and it is difficult to take her out. I cannot leave my grandmother, because she never left me in difficult times and always protected me.”

Svetlana has used the rental income to buy food. Anastasiia’s income has helped sustain her Kharkiv relatives and to better insulate her husband’s home, as energy and heating became scarce. The Russians have sent wave after wave in the region to try to claim more land, frequently losing more than a thousand troops in a day.

Anastasiia’s mother barely escaped with her life last year when a bomb hit her workplace 30 minutes after she left. “It is terrifying to think how close these dangers are,” Anastasiia wrote.

Despair, numbness, and a loss of hope

Meanwhile, Airbnb has stopped waiving its customary service charges for Ukraine rentals, a pretty shameless way to profit off a humanitarian crisis. It now charges, for example, $27.60 for a weekly stay in Svetlana’s flat.

It speaks to how the West has been tiring of the war. Meanwhile, the messages from Svetlana and Anastasiia have been reading like an unfolding tragic novel desperate for a bright ending. After three years of war as the background music in their family’s lives, their communications have taken on a shorter, darker tone.

Last January, a Russian aerial attack hit the apartment across from Svetlana’s flat. “I feel like a target in a shooting range,” she wrote.

Svetlana’s grandmother, Tatyana, has also died.

Anastasiia, meanwhile, has resigned herself to a life essentially in exile. “We have stopped hoping for anything. Our past life ended with the beginning of the war and the full realization of the hopelessness of this situation.”

Does Trump’s “America First” mean Ukraine won’t last?

We are all watching the world change rapidly under a new president as Trump turns his back on European alliances built over 80 years of diplomacy. Some days he seemingly sides with some of the vilest dictators on the planet and halted diplomatic assistance to Ukraine. In recent days, he has seemingly changed his mind.

Yet no matter how many times Trump says that Ukraine started this war, this is not the truth. A recent poll found only 4% of us support the Russian invasion. This is where Trump’s attempt to put some substance behind this “America First” slogan is falling apart.

We had until now an enviable position as the one global superpower regarded with some benevolence. Trump’s new concept of “America First” seeks to artificially shrink a complicated, interconnected world. I am reminded of this sometimes late at night on that last glance at emails on the phone. Sometimes I will hear from Svetlana, the sun rising in Kharkiv, looking for someone to share in the utter terror of the latest Russian attack from the skies.

Abandoning her and an entire country, where there is a world-changing test of democracy and aggression under way, would be against what so many Americans and Europeans have fought for. That would be how to put America last.

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