Vika Lyka

This post is dedicated to Vika Lyka. She is in the closing of this film. Looking like a Hollywood star in her Paramedics Vest she would wear on Maidan. I filmed on March 28th of 2014. The Revolution ended two weeks ago but Russia occupied Crimea and people were afraid the Russians can take over the capital of Ukraine as there was no president at the time. Yanukovych feed the country and new presidential elections were only being scheduled. So, people were staying on Maidan to secure their free elections and were getting ready for Russia to attack. Even though everyone hoped there will be no war, war was in the air. So, that is how we filmed Vika. Her husband Roman Woronowych, an American of Ukrainian descent, joined us. For this post I asked Roman to write few words about his amazing wife, and this is what he wrote: "One night in early December 2013 Viktoriia Voronovych, disgusted with the increasingly autocratic regime of President Yanukovych and in full support of the fledgling protests on the Khreschatyk and Maidan Nezalezhnosti, left her nearby home and joined the protestors. By the next day, she was participating in the takeover of Kyiv City Hall and attending to the injured. By that evening she was a member of one of several medic brigades that were part of the increasingly organized protest movement. For the next three months she and scores of others like her became the mainstays of an enormous protest movement battling anti-democratic forces and a thoroughly corrupt government. She was on the Maidan through the bitter cold winter nights caring for protestors' pains and ills and on the bloody killing streets attending to their wounds when government forces slaughtered the Heavenly Hundred on February 20. When the takeover of Crimea and attacks on Donestsk and Luhansk ensued, she painfully realized that the Ukrainian volunteers fighting the Russian aggression in the Donbas region, many whom she knew from the Maidan, lacked the most basic and necessary supplies. To support them, she formed the International Alliance for Fraternal Assistance (IAFA). One of the IAFA's first projects was to coordinate the evacuation of dozens of Ukrainian soldiers to U.S. hospitals for critical medical treatment. Viktoriia's team worked with Ukrainian diaspora counterparts, first, to quickly obtain visas and then medical treatment in the U.S." Vika holds the guest medal of bravery in Ukraine as well the highest medal of service given by the Head of the Ukrainian Orthodox church. She lost many friends during Maiden and during the war. Two weeks ago Vika lost her best friend and her co-founder of IAFA initiative Yuri Mosin to the post traumatic syndrome. When I think of inner strength, I think of Vika.