One Ukrainian to Kansas City: We're losing thousands of lives while you worry about gas prices

Volunteer aid efforts continue throughout the metro, but one journalist with experience in Kansas City worries how price hikes in the U.S. might divert attention from the war.
Anna Yakutenko returned to her hometown of Kyiv for the first time this month.

Now 27, Yakutenko was a reporter for the Kyiv Post when she spent several months in Kansas City, training at KCUR in 2018 as part of the Alfred Friendly Fellowship, a University of Missouri program that brings international journalists to U.S. newsrooms.

“It’s good to be back. But it’s weird, to be sure,"' she said in an audio diary she’d been keeping at KCUR’s request. In February, not long after the Russian attacks began, she fled by train with her 69-year-old mother, Olena Malko, and their cat. They spent the next several months in the western Ukrainian town of Lviv.