You're reading: War Grinds On: US expatriate digs in at war front to shore up Dzerzhynsk’s defenses

DZERZHYNSK, Ukraine -- Teresa Fillmon, an American from Tallahassee, Florida, may be the only Westerner living in Dzerzhynsk, a Ukrainian-controlled coal mining city just west of Russian-controlled Horlivka in Donetsk Oblast.

“I’m the only American here by a fairly large radius,” she laughs.

Fillmon has been involved in charity projects in Ukraine for 17 years. After Russia’s war against Ukraine began last year, she partially re-oriented her work towards helping the army in the contested eastern Donbas, where fighting began soon after Russia’s takeover of Crimea in February 2014. She is now one of the most prominent pro-Ukrainian volunteers and activists in the city with a pre-war population of 35,000 people.

Lately, she has been in charge of painting lampposts along the city’s main streets yellow and blue – the colors of Ukraine.

“This is Ukraine,” she said in an interview with the Kyiv Post. “I should be pro-Ukrainian. Why would I be anything else?”

Another link that Dzerzhynsk has with America is Novhorodske, a district that used to be a German colony called New York.

Wearing a black T-shirt with Ukrainian army insignia, Fillmon resembles a sheriff from the Wild West. Fillmon, who heads a U.S.-based charity His Kids, Too! (known as Bozhi Dity in Ukrainian), founded a community center in Dzerzhynsk in 2011.

The community center’s compound stands tall above nearby houses. The walls are adorned with children’s pictures, with one of them showing drops of blood on a Ukrainian flag with the word “why?” written on it.

Fillmon, a devout Protestant Christian, first came to Ukraine in 1998 on a mission. “I found it fascinating,” she said. “I loved everything about it.”

She adopted a child from Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast and another one from Donetsk. Her husband and three biological children live in the U.S., where the couple have a cleaning service, an adoption agency and a catering business.

Filmon’s charity in Dzerzhynsk helps orphans, widows, the poor, the physically impaired, elderly people, single moms, homeless people and internally displaced persons. She provides food, clothes and wheelchairs.

Children come to the Derzhynsk community center every day to eat, play and take art and Bible classes. Before the war it was serving about 5,300 orphans.

But the conflict has disrupted Fillmon’s routine. She lost two friends – one soldier and one civilian.

“To me, it’s surreal,” she said. “It’s like you expect to wake up from a nightmare and everything will return to where it was.”

Fillmon’s community center had to adapt to the new realities, and she started helping the Ukrainian army.

“Once I was driving my car and saw a military truck ahead of me,” she said. “I followed it because I wanted to help the army. When the soldiers found that an American woman wanted to help the army, they were astonished.”

Her center provides clothing, food and bedding to soldiers and allows them to take showers. She also does laundry for the military and cooks for wounded soldiers treated at the local hospital.

But while Fillmon is doing her best to help soldiers, she feels that U.S. authorities are not doing enough to stop Russian aggression.

She sees the U.S. government’s position on the war as too soft. America is trying to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin but he is “laughing in their faces,” she says.

“Why is (U.S. Secretary of State John) Kerry talking to Putin in Sochi on how to fix things in Ukraine?” she wonders. “Why is Russia getting to choose?”

The only solution is for Putin to “get out of Ukraine” and take his soldiers with him, she says.

Fillmon is a proponent of giving weapons to Ukraine and thinks the 1994 Budapest memorandum, which guaranteed the country’s territorial integrity in exchange for it giving up nuclear weapons, obliges the U.S. to arm Ukraine. “If you take weapons away, give back what you took away,” she said.

Fillmon has been in contact with Bill Nelson, a senator from Florida who lives a 10-minute walk from her Tallahassee house, and called on him to support legislation to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine. He responded positively.

She sees the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a biblical struggle between David and Goliath. “Do we have five good stones?” she wonders. “It only took one to kill Goliath.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].