Archived link

Brett Drozd was a straight-A student who’d never been to his family’s homeland. Then the invasion happened.

...

Drozd was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.

At thirty, Drozd was a straight-A university student working on the prerequisites required to enter a doctor of pharmacy program. He was less than a year from starting when news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Watching columns of tanks roll toward Kyiv was a distraction too hard to ignore. “It became obvious very quickly that this isn’t good for me,” he recalled while navigating the highway, “to try to churn through the motions back at home when my mind and my heart were with Ukraine.” He needed to do something.

...