Emigres in Bay Area consumed by news about their homeland's contested election

DATELINE: BERKELEY

Olga Kornyushyna hasn't been sleeping much for the past few days.

"My friends in Kiev were protesting on the streets 24 hours a day, so I was on the phone and Internet 24 hours a day supporting them," said the 32-year-old biochemist who emigrated from Ukraine eight years ago. "Pretty much everything I've been doing has been connected to the Ukraine in one way or another."

She's not alone. Bay Area Ukrainians are consumed with events in their homeland as people there struggle with the aftermath of the highly contested presidential election. As they look homeward, they are jubilant, fearful and hesitantly hopeful that change has finally arrived.

On Wednesday, Ukraine's Parliament approved a resolution of no confidence in the new government of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who claims to be the winner of the Nov. 21 election against opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.

Yushchenko, along with many international and independent groups, has called the election invalid, claiming numerous instances of voter fraud. A new election is likely after the Supreme Court rules on the fraud accusations, though details remain to be worked out.

Meanwhile, masses of people have taken to the streets to protest, creating a national standoff between those who want to continue in the vein of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma's Russian-backed government and those who support Yushchenko's pro-Western stance and calls for reform.

In the Bay Area, Ukrainians cast their ballots at the Consulate General of Ukraine in San Francisco. The vote was overwhelmingly in support of Yushchenko. Yushchenko won 99 percent of the votes with 2,000 tallied, while Yanukovich received only 23 votes.

"Ukrainians who reside in the U.S. and care enough to vote are going to be advocates of reform," said Mary Dakin, associate director at Stanford University's center for Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. "To them, Yanukovich represents the old, corrupt, Soviet-dominated past."

In Ukraine, the vote was more evenly split, but due to claims of voter fraud, it's unclear how many people actually voted for each candidate.

Bay Area Ukrainians said they support Yushchenko because he wants Ukraine to establish connections with the European Union and the United States and to come out from under the yoke of Russia.

"Although Ukraine has been independent of Russia for more than 12 years, people feel that nothing has changed," said Lessia Jarboe, 56, program assistant at Stanford University's center for Russian, East European and Eurasian studies.

"Economically, there's a lot of hardship, and people have to go abroad to earn a good living.

"Also, the Soviets made us believe that non-Russian nations were lower-class citizens by imposing their language and culture on us," she said. "Now we feel like we are free at last."

Michael Car, 83, who lives in Burlingame and came to the United States from Ukraine in 1961, said he knew the election would be rigged.

"The government was controlled, and the precincts tried to eliminate any opposition candidates," he said.

There are about 20,000 people of Ukrainian ancestry in the Bay Area, according to the 2000 Census. A number of them arrived as young students in the 1950s and 1960s, but most are recent immigrants looking for more opportunities, said Yuriy Oliynyk, president of the Ukrainian Heritage Club of Northern California.

The election has served to invigorate a community that had little hope that Ukraine's people would stand up against the increasingly Russian-controlled government, according to Dakin.

"They're jubilant seeing the population rally around this," she said. "It seems to be drawing the community closer together -- they're holding rallies, lobbying their congressional representatives and writing to the president, saying, 'Please be involved.'"

Jarboe, who emigrated from Ukraine 15 years ago, worked the polls at the Consulate General of Ukraine in San Francisco on Nov. 21. She said she was proud to see Ukrainian citizens living in the United States arrive from as far away as Seattle and Salt Lake City to vote.

"We gave people coffee and hot drinks and it was peaceful and happy," she said. "In Ukraine, too, they are peaceful, trying to share some ideas about how to make this happen without bloodshed."

Kornyushyna said the election brought a lot of alienated Ukrainians closer to their country, and to each other.

"I made friends with a lot of new Ukrainians who I didn't know were here before," she said. "We even organized a place where people could go and have coffee afterward to get to know each other."

About 70 members of the community gathered in front of the San Francisco consulate on two days after the vote to protest the elections, and demonstrations continue in the area. Oliynyk said his group is planning to hold one in front of the governor's office in Sacramento Dec. 18.

Svetlana Kaff, 30, a San Francisco immigration lawyer who came to the city from Ukraine in 1991 and ran for the Board of Supervisors last month, expressed fear about the country's volatile situation.

"My friends and I talk about it pretty much every day," she said. "We mostly talk about how it's scary that there may be a war between Eastern and Western Ukraine. I still have relatives there."

For now, Bay Area Ukrainians continue to voice their support for their friends and family at home by making phone calls, sending e-mails and money, and wearing orange, the color of Yushchenko's campaign.

"Lessia is wearing orange every single day," said Dakin of her coworker. "She even tore up a shirt that was orange and made scarves out of it."