SEATTLE — At age 18, Lina Ngo escaped Ukraine with her family, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. The family had just two hours to pack. She left Ukraine, but now carries a heavy burden, regularly finding out that her friends and former classmates have been killed in battle.
Lina Ngo sat down with KIRO 7 to grieve six of these friends, now gone. Lina says, “We must continue for those who can’t. Until every prisoner of war returns home: every defender, every civilian, every child. Until Ukrainian territories are free. Until the evil is punished.”
Her family is among the 25,000 Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Washington state since the onset of the war. Lina is now enrolled as a student at Bellevue College.
She is Secretary of the Board and an all-purpose activist with Seattle-based Ukraine Defense Support. Their mission: Shorten the war, protect civilian lives, and defend Ukrainian democracy.
They provide non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military, and within weeks, they will ship their first Humvee ambulance, stuffed with medical equipment, from the Port of Tacoma to the Ukrainian battlefields. To learn more about their efforts to help, visit: https://donorbox.org/medical-equipment-fundraiser