MOSES LAKE — One of only two refugees resettled in Grant County last year, 21-year-old Ukrainian-born Vitalii Kuzhel already thinks he’d like to spend the rest of his life in Moses Lake.

Kuzhel was born and raised in a western Ukrainian village — a term used broadly in Ukraine to describe a rural town like those of Grant County — called Velykyi Oleksyn.

Surrounded by a mix of sparse woods, farmland and small lakes, the village is just a stone’s throw away from Rivne, a 700-year-old city where dramatic, domed Eastern Orthodox cathedrals stick out among clunky brutalist and mildly-frilled Stalinist architecture built during Soviet occupation.

There, Kuzhel attended school, spending his evenings doing assorted construction work and his nights playing table games like UNO with his family. On days off, he’d play volleyball or tennis with friends or fish in nearby lakes, catching small carp for fun. Enjoying the work he did with his brother laying electrical wires in homes during construction, he dreamed of becoming an electrician.

“I had a lot of friends, I had my family, who are still in Ukraine,” Kuzhel said in an interview.

But Kuzhel’s opportunities in Ukraine were severely limited, he said, not because of his abilities, but because of his faith as a Pentecostal Christian.

By the end of the 1920s, Pentecostalism had taken root in Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union, sharing a niche with Baptists and other Protestant denominations which were at least partially ignored as the Soviets dismantled the Russian Orthodox Church.

But no religious movement would be allowed to survive under Stalin’s rule, and Protestantism was eventually driven underground.

Some modicum of religious freedom was reestablished during World War II, when an Orthodox Church — riddled with Soviet operatives and with myriad religious restriction — was revived to stir patriotic support in the fight against Nazi Germany.

Protestantism also enjoyed a resurgence, in that they were officially allowed to exist by the early 1940s, but persecution did not cease.

Under various regimes over the coming decades, Pentecostals and Baptists were derided as anti-communist, many of their children forcibly removed from their homes and their clergymen sentenced to hard labor. Insidious myths were spread by state propaganda about dark, immoral and bizarre practices supposedly practiced among Pentecostals, including ritual infanticide.

Religious persecution has certainly relaxed since the fall of the Soviet Union, but the specter of prejudice remains.

“A lot of people are against Christians,” said Mike Lovyn, a fellow Ukrainian refugee that was resettled when he was still a child, translating for Kuzhel, who is still learning English.

“If you’re a Christian, they don’t like you, like, ‘you’re a Christian, so I don’t want to hire you,’” Lovyn said, interpreting for Kuzhel. “Someone does something bad, breaks something, and they’re like, ‘oh, it was him, it was the Christian.’”

World Relief, a faith-based humanitarian organization and refugee resettlement agency that has helped Kuzhel, doesn’t provide information on individual refugees. However, though World Relief could not confirm it, it is likely that Kuzhel’s resettlement was supported by a 30-year-old provision called the Lautenberg Amendment.

That amendment has made it significantly easier for Christians and Jews from the former Soviet Union to qualify as refugees, making Ukraine the third-largest source of refugees to America in 2019.

Unlike refugees from many other countries or religious groups, refugees applying for resettlement under the Lautenberg Amendment do not have to prove the same level of oppression.

For instance, a Syrian applying to be resettled in America as a refugee would have to show that they had been personally persecuted due to their religion, politics, race, or other protected statuses. Christians and Jews in the former Soviet Union, however, are automatically considered eligible to apply for refugee status under the Lautenberg Amendment.

The process is also faster. The average refugee application process can take from eighteen months to two years, possibly longer depending on the country of origin, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. For Kuzhel, it took only about three months after his first interview with immigration officials before he got on a plane to America.

While the Trump administration has largely cracked down on refugee resettlement, Ukraine was the only country that had a substantial increase in the number of refugee arrivals since 2016, according to a 2019 analysis of State Department data done by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

The Tri-Cities branch of World Relief has been resettling refugees in the region since 1989, said Office Director Ken Primus, and Grant County Commissioners in December approved the resettlement of further refugees in 2020.

The county’s decision came after a 2019 executive order from the Trump administration, which requires states and counties to proactively allow resettlement. Commissioners faced harsh backlash due to the vote, Commissioner Cindy Carter said in an interview, though a federal judge made the point moot in January, blocking local governments from turning refugees away.

Despite the vocal backlash, the number of refugees resettled in Grant County each year is vanishingly small: out of the 30,000 refugees resettled in America in 2019, only 117 were placed in central Washington. Of those, only two were relocated in Grant County.

In practice, refugees are only placed in Grant County when they have family already in the area, Primus said. While refugees can become Legal Permanent Residents after a year, a citizen after five years and have every legal right to move, World Relief Tri-Cities provides housing support in Kennewick, where they contract with specific landlords.

Kuzhel now lives in Moses Lake with his grandparents, who were the ones who had initially filed paperwork to start his refugee application, as well as an aunt, uncle and a number of cousins.

He misses the family he left behind, including his parents, two brothers and four sisters, and one day hopes that they will join him in the states. But Kuzhel, still a relatively new arrival, has already begun making a life for himself.

Only seven months after arriving, he has found a temporary job at McDonald’s, and has saved up enough to buy a new car. In the mornings, he attends English as a Second Language classes at Big Bend. One day soon he hopes to take a different kind of class there, the ones needed to fulfill his goal of becoming an electrician.

Much like he did back in Ukraine, Kuzhel spends his free time fishing at Lake Lenore or playing volleyball with friends he’s made through the local Source of Life Church, where many Evangelical Ukrainian immigrants go to worship. During the winter, he could often be found skating at the local ice rink.

He showers the region with praise, saying he enjoys the calm in Moses Lake, the lack of traffic, the neighborly residents, the many green parks amid the Columbia Basin desert.

He’s also had the chance to explore much of the state along the Interstate 90 corridor, skiing near Spokane or checking out Seattle. He goes wide-eyed when he talks about the beauty of Snoqualmie Pass, though he still hasn’t had the chance to see the icicle-covered rock walls in the winter.

But though he’s gotten a chance to stretch his legs and see the state, when asked where he’d like to live when he has his feet under him, he replies as though the answer is obvious.

“I want to stay here,” Kuzhel said. “I like it.”

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.