Sasha Vasilyuk

Starting this weekend, people in four occupied regions of Ukraine will “vote” on whether to join Russia. For many people, including my aunt and uncle, in Donetsk, what that really means is they will be forcibly absorbed into a country they do not want to be a part of.

This spring was supposed to be my nephew’s last semester of high school in Kyiv. Instead, he is figuring out schools that he can attend near Amsterdam where he is staying with a kind stranger who took him in as my nephew fled his home for the second time in his life. The first time was when he was 9 and he was forced to leave his birth city of Donetsk after Russian-backed separatists started a war for the Don...

It shouldn’t be hard to feel deep sympathy for Ukraine without becoming indiscriminately anti-Russian.
Though half of my family lived in Ukraine, I identified as Russian — even...

NBC Bay Area’s Raj Mathai spoke to journalist and author Sasha Vasiluk, who came to the United States from Russia as a teenager — and still has family in Ukraine and Russia — about the current crisis.

My 70-year-old aunt had planned a quiet week. A bit of ironing, planting petunias in the garden and maybe finally tackling an unwieldy tangle of electrical chargers. Instead, she sits with my uncle, watching the Russian invasion on their laptops.

I’d felt a very familiar sense of dread as Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, massed troops on the border of Ukraine. But as Russia’s invasion began early on Thursday under the pretext of rescuing the eastern region of Donbas from Ukraine’s mil...

It was the fall of 1996 and my first time returning to Moscow after immigrating to San Francisco a year earlier.

The new boy, Ilya, sat at the very back of the eighth-grade classroom, and as I stood near the blackboard telling my old Russian classmates about my strange new life in America, I could feel his presence—a black hole sucking me in from the back of the fluorescently white room.

There's skiing for winter and seafood suppers in seaside towns for summer in the corner of Italy that "doesn't exist".

Personal essay about the war in eastern Ukraine published in literary magazine Reed.

Poland isn't exactly a beach destination. Least of all, in the winter.

Op-Ed: My family and their city have been caught in a war they neither expected nor supported.

Since then, Moscow and St. Petersburg have become pricey, globalized megalopolises with sushi bars, hookah parlors and pizzerias that play to locals' thirst for all things foreign.

If you sneak a peek into the freezer of any Russian-speaking San Franciscan, chances are high that you’ll find — no, not vodka, though that may be there too — a package of pelmeni.

Solas Award Gold Winner for "Doing Good or the Kindness of Strangers"

AT 5 A.M., when the residents of Alameda Point are still asleep, Muhammad Ayoub Kohgadai, 78, finishes his morning prayer and slips into the garden.

COLONIA DEL SACRAMENTO, Uruguay — Straddling the crest of a sand dune, my back to the Atlantic Ocean, I watched a Uruguayan boy net fish in a river lagoon.