Tymofii Shamota is a Ukrainian refugee in Spokane. Next fall he will attend fashion school in New York City

Tymofii Shamota is a Ukrainian refugee who has spent his whole life on the run from Russia. After living the past year in Spokane, the 18-year-old and his family are moving to New York City so he can attend a prestigious fashion school.

Shamota still is pursuing his dream despite being displaced from his homeland at 7 years old and then again during Russia’s large-scale invasion into Ukraine in 2022.

On the morning of April 12, 2014 , the Shamota family were awoken to the sight of men with masks and guns standing guard at a playground near their apartment.

Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014 and soon after backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, sparking armed conflict that continued.

The Shamotas were living in Sloviansk in the province of Donbas when the city of 100,000 was among the first places to be attacked in that conflict.

While hiding in her home Viktoriia Shamota turned on TV news to get more information about the ongoing attack. The channel asked viewers to write in about the ongoing conflict.

“I said I am from Sloviansk and I stand with Ukraine as does our family. We don’t know why the Russian flag is on top of the town hall. I don’t want these men on the streets” she remembered in an interview last week, speaking in Russian with her son as translator.

Soon after sending this message of support for Ukraine her devices filled with anonymous threats to kill the woman and her family. The Shamotas believe the insurgents received their information from the Russian-speaking television station, which is owned by a Russian oligarch.

“My mom was scared because I was a little child just starting first grade,” Tymofii Shamota said. “A mother gets a message that she will be killed. That her child will be killed.”

The family hid in their apartment for the next 12 days waiting for a moment to escape when masked guards posted nearby their apartment building changed shifts. The family drove three hours northwest to family in Kharkiv.

“We came to the nearest village with Ukrainian flags and I was happy. I sang our songs and cried as we had been saved,” Viktoriia Shamota said.

While the Shamotas feared for their lives when Russian-backed forces overtook their city, many of their neighbors welcomed their invaders. Unlike most of Ukraine, Sloviansk was predominately Russian-speaking and many residents saw themselves as more Russian than Ukrainian.

“For our family, being Ukrainian is not a matter of language. We were born in Ukraine, we lived there, built, dreamed,” Victoriia Shamota said. “It’s cruel that a lot of our neighbors who speak the same language as us began to support Russia. But language is not the same as choice. We choose to respect freedom, the right to be ourselves, the truth.”

Second escape

The family eventually settled in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where Victoriia’s husband, Mykola Shamota, found work as a shoemaker.

The Shamotas were evicted from their first apartment in the city because they came from the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Many believed the family supported Russia because of where they came from and the language they spoke.

“All over Ukraine we were treated really bad because we spoke Russian. We were treated badly because we were “Russian.” But we were not Russian. We are Ukrainian. We just speak Russian,” Tymofii Shamota said.

As a grade-schooler Tymofii remembers being bullied and beaten by other children for his perceived Russianness.

The family lived in a city on the outskirts of Kyiv during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“It smelled of fire and smoke. The sky was smoke and the sky was red,” Mykola remembered of the day in February.

This time the Shamotas hid with another family in the basement of a clinic Viktoriia worked in. They heard tanks pass above and the ongoing battle on the surface rocked the building. As the structure above them shook they feared it would collapse and they all would be buried alive.

Turrets fired on an adjacent building, which started a fire. Through the small basement windows the family watched as firefighters arrived to put out the flames. Instead, they were fired upon by Russian tanks.

Viktoriia Shamota said the experience was “10 times scarier” than what they faced eight years earlier.

“In 2014 we could get to our car and escape somehow. This time we were surrounded and couldn’t get to the car and leave in the most suitable moment. Because there was no such moment,” she said.

Tymofii, who had just turned 15, was sick and ran a fever in their hiding place. Mykola threw rocks at a street lamp outside so the light would not attract Russian troops. They all stayed in the clinic for 11 days until they saw a tip online that the only highway out of town was unprotected.

Without knowing whether this was true, the family fled again. Outside of the city the four -lane highway had been transformed into a one-way away from Kyiv. While slowed to a crawl amid a traffic jam of other refugees, the family realized the back window of the car had been shattered during the conflict. In the freezing February winter Tymofii shook from the cold and from his sickness.

The Shamotas were stuck at the Ukraine-Poland border for a month as Mykola waited for an exemption for military service.

Three years earlier the father fell of the fourth story of a building while working on a construction job. He had been in a coma for two weeks and had never fully recovered from the severe injury.

They stayed in Poland for two years until large-scale protests against Ukrainian refugees made them feel unwelcome in the country. The family found a sponsor in the United States and came to Spokane because of its large Ukrainian population.

Having lived in the city for a year, the family hopes to stay in America permanently. They are currently allowed to stay through the end of 2026 and have applied for permanent asylum status.

“We have no place to return, but it is not only about safety. It is about mentality and the way people live here,” Tymofii said. “We were worried about whether we could stay until we see the reactions of Americans who are not in the government. In Poland a group started to protest and for some reason the rest of the people believed them. But Americans show that we are wanted in here.”

In one of the few times he spoke over a more-than four-hour interview Mykola Shamota said America feels like a place where his family can finally stop running.

“You have freedom of choice here and liberty. When you meet people, I try to smile, and they smile back,” he said in English.

Fashion Institute of Technology

When he was 4, Tymofii would grab random fabrics from around the house and drape them across himself to make different outfits. That was the start of his love of fashion.

From the age of 7 through now, Tymofii and his family have had to escape war. But even in that time he never stopped drawing, making clothes and working to make his dream a reality.

At the beginning of this month, Tymofii was accepted into the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City – one of the most prestigious fashion schools in the United States.

While he does not know how he will pay for the school, the family is planning to move across the country so he can pursue his dream in fashion.

He hopes to one day create his own clothing brand that has his name.

“I’m heading to my dream with people’s help, with my parents’ help and with God’s help. It’s scary to say but I could be dead already, so I will use the opportunity to grow and evolve as a thank you to God for keeping me alive,” he said.