Ukrainian mother and son flee war, settle in Sudbury, Ont.

To protect her teenage son Tetiana Yurinets made the difficult decision in August 2023 to pack up two bags and leave Ukraine for a country, and city she knew almost nothing about.

After arriving in Toronto, the mother and son decided to settle in Sudbury, Ont., where there was already a community of Ukrainian newcomers, and some networks in place to support them.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) more than six million Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia started its invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

The vast majority have ended up in other parts of Europe, but many, like Yurinets and her 14-year-old son, Volkan Yukselen, have settled in Canada. As of Jan. 27, the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel has approved 958,190 applications.

Yurinets said she made the last-minute decision to leave after she was nearly killed by a rocket attack at her work, in the western city of Lviv.

Earlier she had won two plane tickets from a Canadian organization that allowed donors to give away their Air Miles to Ukrainians looking to flee the country.

"We left Ukraine with the train to Poland," she said.

The decision to leave happened so fast, Yurinets said, that her son didn't have time to say goodbye to his friends.

"I just kind of disappeared one day," Yukselen said. "So I kind of regret that."

At the start of the war Yurinets landed a job as a fixer, working for a Japanese news network. She said it was a good job, and it allowed her to save up some money before she left the country.

But as the war went on, her hours got cut.

"When the war started everybody was following the war in Ukraine," she said.

"But after six months, people started to get used to this and then other countries were also like 'okay, the war in Ukraine is still going.'"

Thanks to her savings, and support from charitable organizations early on, she was able to find a basement apartment in Sudbury's Donovan neighbourhood.