In Ukraine under attack, American hopes for daughter's visa

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When her daughter was diagnosed with cancer, Tetiana Shatokhina didn't hesitate to make the trip back to Ukraine to help her recover from surgery and care for her 14-year-old grandson.

But the 75-year-old disabled American citizen found herself trapped alongside her family in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, targeted by nightly shelling and bombs after Russia invaded a little more than a week ago.

Their underground shelter wasn't big enough for all three of them, so Shatokhina, her daughter Olena Iarova, and Iarova's son stayed above ground despite the risk. Two lay beneath a table; Shatokhina, nearby, on the floor. They took turns sleeping and keep the lights off, and voices low, in the hopes the Russian military would think the home was abandoned and pass them by.

“Every time we go to bed, we don't even sleep,” Shatokhina said in whispers in Russian over the phone before the family left the city and headed West toward Poland, hoping to make it across the border.

The family is one of many stranded in Ukraine since the Russian invasion, including American citizens caring for family members who are Ukrainian citizens. The closure of the U.S. embassy in Kyiv postponed many visa interviews and limited the services the country can provide to people seeking to leave Ukraine. Families have been contacting Congress and immigration lawyers in the U.S. pleading for help.

There’s no known estimate of how many Americans remain in Ukraine after weeks of warnings urging them to leave before the invasion.

The State Department has been “just completely unhelpful,” said U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican whose office worked for several days to push forward the visa application of a Ukrainian woman whose husband lives in Malliotakis'...