ELLENSBURG, Wash. — An Ellensburg man said he is stuck in Poland after fleeing Ukraine with his new wife and stepdaughter. Greg Armstrong traveled to Kyiv earlier this month to get married.
"I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I would be in this situation, but I know I'm where I need to be, with my family," said Armstrong.
Armstrong arrived in Ukraine in early February before United States citizens were warned to leave the country. Armstrong said tensions escalated over the duration of his stay until the night of his wedding when the Ukrainian president acknowledged the threat of a Russian invasion.
"That was enough to convince my wife to flee with me," explained Armstrong. "So just days after our wedding, we packed our things, left her apartment, and headed by train across to Poland."
Armstrong and his family left most of their belongings behind in their rush to leave the country.
"I mean, we fled, we had, you know... four suitcases, everything's left behind in the apartment," he said. "It was not like, we're OK, this is gonna take a few months, and you're living your life as you normally are."
He said his wife received calls from her family in Donbas and Kyiv at 4:30 a.m. Thursday describing "bombs and shakings and fires and horrors of war." Armstrong said he received a picture from a friend of smoke rising from the venue where he and his wife held their wedding reception just days before.
Armstrong and his family were able to travel to Warsaw days before the invasion. He could fly home as a U.S. citizen, but that would mean leaving his family behind. Armstrong is now waiting to hear from the embassy regarding how long it will take for him to get back to the United States.
Armstrong said he's now attempting to work out how long it will take to finalize his wife and stepdaughter's immigration paperwork, which has been in the works since the fall of 2021. However, the process has been complicated and possibly prolonged by the closure of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine and the number of people seeking entry to the United States after the invasion.
Armstrong said he's had a difficult time attempting to get through to the State Department and even tried contacting his representatives for help.
"I was very frustrated to even just try to figure out how to get a simple message to them... About, ‘Hey, could you maybe look into this as a State Department? Are they prepared? Are they working on this? Have I fallen through the cracks? Did my email get lost?’ I just don't know," he said.