This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by our political reporters providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
On Tuesday evening, as Father Jason Charron turned toward the pews at Holy Trinity Catholic Church for his sermon, he paused — seeming to consider one last time what he was about to say.
“As you listen to the media reports and you hear the direction that the United States is going,” he said, “to be very frank, it's like every one of the KGB's wish-list items is what we hear from the mouth of our president.”
Charron and Father John Charest, who leads a Ukrainian Orthodox church down the street, have held a prayer service every Tuesday since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In the early days of the war, the pews could be filled. Lately, only about 10 or 20 people show up regularly, but Tuesday’s service was significant: The third anniversary of the invasion was less than a week away.
And earlier that day President Donald Trump repeated Kremlin propaganda — that the war was Ukraine’s fault.
“You should have never started it, you could have made a deal,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday.
Charron ended his sermon with a plea to call elected officials in Washington, even though he admitted he’d been foolhardy to think that anyone but God could save the country.
God, he said, “will be present to lead his people — the long-suffering, Christ-fearing nation of Ukraine — through the crucible of this present crucifixion.”
After the service, Charron was asked why he thought that Trump seemed so aligned with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, traditionally one of American voters’ most despised enemies.
Uncomfortable seconds passed in which Charron, a man whose job it is to speak, sat silent.
‘We'll see when he becomes president’
Months before, many Pittsburgh Ukrainian-Americans held out hope that Trump’s election would help end the war in Ukraine’s favor. Their support often reflected the circumstances that brought them to the United States.
Just before Christmas, Maria Odzga was upbeat about Trump as she joined other worshippers in a longtime tradition: making and selling pierogies out of the basement of St. Mary’s Ukrainian Orthodox in McKees Rocks.
Odzga was taken in at St. Mary’s as a 3-year-old Ukrainian refugee with her parents after World War II. Many refugees like her slept and showered at the church. Eventually, Odzga’s father saved enough money to stay in a one-room home and later buy a house. Odzga supported Trump partly because she believed more recent immigrants had it too easy.
“Now these people are getting whatever they want: phones, education, nice hotels,” she said. “We lived in one room. You think it's fair to the American people?”
As for Ukraine, she said, “Give Trump a chance. We'll see when he becomes president.”
St. Peter & St. Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in Carnegie, celebrates Christmas according to the Julian calendar, so it wasn’t until January that Father Charest threw a spoonful of katya on the ceiling in the church’s basement — a reminder of a time when Ukrainian farmers needed a little superstition to help with their crops, as wheatberry is one of the dessert’s main ingredients.
Nalalia Onufrey, who left Ukraine three decades ago, said she felt lucky to be in a place that celebrated religious diversity. In the Soviet Union, Orthodox Christmas was a private affair.
“Every year it was hush-hush,” Onufrey said. “But there was not one year without Christmas.”
Onufrey had hope for Trump because his first administration supported Ukraine by sending weapons and opposing a gas pipeline that would’ve profited Russia. She said it was foolish to trust Putin now.
“Disregard what he says and just watch what he does, and that will show you what he is,” Onufrey said.
Stephen Haluszczak, a third-generation Ukrainian-Pittsburgher runs the Ukrainian Cultural and Humanitarian Institute, which seeks to cultivate Ukrainian cultural exchanges. Recently, he’s been working with a Ukrainian artist to provide therapy for children traumatized by the war.
The Russians, he said late last year, were “terrorizing the country, not only death and destruction — infrastructure, hospitals, children, residential buildings — but the psychological terror. I speak to friends every day in Kiev, the capital, that there has not been a moment of silence from air raids in days and days. And this has been like this for almost three years.”
Haluszczak said he wasn’t surprised that some Ukrainian-Americans supported Trump. Many shared Trump’s “traditional values,” he said, and some believed Trump’s message that Putin never would have invaded at all if Trump had been in office.
That boast was only reinforced by Trump’s promises to take revenge on political enemies.
“Many people call it bullying, but it takes a bully to stand up to a bully,” Haluszczak said. “Many people believed that [Kamala] Harris would not have been as strong.”
‘Russia will be rewarded’
That was December. On Wednesday of this week, Haluszczak ticked off a long list of Trump actions and statements, which he said had alarmed Pittsburgh’s Ukrainian community, including his claim that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was not Ukraine’s legitimate leader.
“The messaging that’s been made by the White House is not accurate,” he said. “The comments that President Zelenskyy is a dictator is blatantly false.”
Asked if he thought Ukrainian-Americans felt disappointed and betrayed by Trump’s handling of the situation, Haluszczak said, "I belive that's an accurate statement."
Trump has spoken warmly of Putin before, and concerns about his relationship to Russia date back to the 2016 election. But Haluszczak said many Ukrainian-Americans had hoped for the best while “subordinating the fear from previous statements about Putin.”
Carnegie Mellon University public policy professor Sarah Mendelson has spent decades researching Russia and Ukraine, and she offered little grounds for optimism.
During Trump’s first term, Mendelson said, Trump’s hostility toward longstanding alliances was sidelined by career diplomats and advisors. But Mendelson predicted Trump would cut off aid for Ukraine, and warned that any peace deal signed by Putin would merely give Russia time to regroup — and invade again.
“I understand on some level Trump's message of basically, ‘War is bad, a lot of people are getting killed, we need peace,’” she said. “But the person who could end the war tomorrow or today is Vladimir Putin.
“I think the most plausible situation is that [Trump] does cut off assistance,” she said. And unless Europe steps up, “Russia will be rewarded. And autocrats everywhere will be emboldened.”
