Bordering Wars

Regis alumni and faculty are responding to the war in Ukraine

Story by Sara Knuth

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, tension across Europe was palpable — but soon, that turned to action. Regis alumni and faculty are among those taking action — braving conflict and putting themselves at risk to help those whose lives have been upended by war.

Farnaz Alimehri, a 2015 graduate, transported Ukrainians to safety, helped a refugee family settle in Vienna, Austria and has carried supplies across multiple borders.

Alumnus Jonathan Cochran put his project management skills to work, mobilizing resources in Bulgaria to help bring Ukranian refugees to the country.

Assistant Prof. Josh Kreimeyer has traveled to Ukraine, Poland, Austria and Hungary, offering training to mental health professionals working with Ukrainians. Each observed Ukrainian resilience in the face of war. Alimehri, Cochran and Kreimeyer shared their stories.

Farnaz Alimehri |Austria

After the war started in Ukraine, Farnaz Alimehri hopped into a rental van loaded with supplies and drove nearly nine hours from Vienna, Austria to the Ukrainian border. Alimehri, who graduated from Regis in 2015 with a degree in politics and minors in Spanish and French, and earned a degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University in 2017, is an associate training officer in the Safeguards Department at the International Atomic Energy Agency, an autonomous organization within the United Nations that works worldwide to promote the safe and peaceful use of nuclear technologies. Her job is to train nuclear inspectors, many of whom have been in the news recently for their work in Ukraine verifying that nuclear material and technology is accounted for and used properly, Alimehri said. They also conduct similar inspections in Iran.

Based in Vienna, Alimehri is roughly 800 miles from the Ukrainian border. As the world watched the Russian invasion unfold, a colleague enlisted volunteers to pick people up from the border. He had two requirements of recruits: that they could speak multiple languages and drive. Alimehri, who speaks English, Farsi, French, Spanish and basic German, could do both.

“He had this idea to rent vans and get people away from the border as quickly as possible, the idea being that when refugee centers are rapidly set up like this, they’re very disorganized. They’re targets for human trafficking, and we didn’t know how and when the violence might spread,” she said. “We were just thinking, ‘We have to act quickly.’”

When they arrived, Alimehri and her colleagues dropped donations off at a refugee center in Przemysl, Poland, and began walking around, offering people rides back to Austria.

“When I went, we were pretty lucky that we found people fairly quickly — people who wanted to go to different European countries to see their family members or their friends and people who just wanted to leave the refugee center,” Alimehri said.

The first night, the team took 12 people back to Vienna. Alimehri drove a mother and her twin daughters and another mother and her daughter. Alimehri helped the mother with twin daughters find an apartment in Vienna.

As the war evolved, so did the response led by Alimehri and her colleagues. The team continued driving refugees from the border, then helped other Non-Governmental Organizations. Their group took on an official name: the Vienna Mission for Ukraine. Soon, the organization started working for Insulin for Life, helping transport insulin to the country. They also conducted several supply and rescue missions for orphanages in Ukraine. The organization continues to offer support to a network of refugees in Vienna.

The mission continues to evolve, from helping reunite families to providing supplies to people in need. The family Alimehri helped settle in Vienna has begun to adjust to life in a strange country, enrolling the children in school. Every day, though, they communicate with family members back in Ukraine to ensure they are OK. Men under the age of 60 were not permitted to leave the country, so they remained in Ukraine. One of the mothers Alimehri drove to Austria eventually returned to Kyiv. Alimehri said they refused to be known as refugees and wanted to stay in their home country.

Alimehri was struck by similarities between herself and the mother of twins she helped.

“I’m not a mother, but we like the same things, we have similar interests, we dress very similarly. She’s not different from me in a lot of ways, but something bad just happened to her country,” Alimehri said. “It’s very sobering to think ‘Oh, wow, this could happen to anyone.’”

When Assistant Prof. Josh Kreimeyer returned to Ukraine last summer, he was struck by images of war in otherwise idyllic Ukrainian villages. Sandbags and trenches lined the city streets.

Courtesy: Josh Kreimeyer.

Jonathan Cochran | Bulgaria

Before he moved to Bulgaria, Jonathan Cochran served as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. So, when the war started in Ukraine, the situation felt familiar.

“I’ve been in the military and war environment many times before,” Cochran said. “I didn’t care to get back into it again, but events happen, and life drags us into this stuff.”

Cochran, who graduated from Regis in 2020 with a master’s degree in Project Management, works as the vice president of Project Management Institute (PMI) of Bulgaria, which is based in the country’s capital, Sofia. When the war started, Cochran and his colleagues at PMI knew they needed to find a way to help.

“We said, ‘Let’s do something’ because people are coming out of Ukraine, and they’re just trying to survive and they need help,” Cochran said.

Cochran said they began calling local organizations, enlisting bus companies and taxis to help drive and take people away from the border. Additionally, they worked with IT companies to help ensure lines of communication remained open so that people could secure help. Additionally, the group has started a medical and rehabilitation center for people from Ukraine. Cochran said they are in the process of setting up a prosthetics clinic for people who lost extremities.

“Here in Bulgaria, people have opened up their homes, and the people from Ukraine are staying as guests in their homes,” he said, adding that many people in Bulgaria have multiple homes, which they opened up to Ukrainians.

Throughout the war, Cochran has communicated with Ukrainians, sending coded messages to learn about their locations and help them get to safety. In March, Cochran communicated with a family with a newborn baby. “Millions were in a similar situation,” he said.

“It’s almost like we’re running military operations here just to help people,” he said. “They don’t know who to believe, who to trust. So, we’re having to be creative on how to get people networked.”

For Cochran and his colleagues, coordinating the logistics of getting people to safety aligned with the organization’s mission and their skills. PMI Bulgaria worked with chapters in other nearby countries to assist with the effort.

“Normally, we’re in an education role and membership training role. We assist with doing projects for businesses and education centers,” Cochran said. “But when this humanitarian crisis came forward, our chapter and chapters in other countries in Europe said, ‘Let’s get together because we have the skills to organize and run a humanitarian crisis project.’”

Josh Kreimeyer | United States, Ukraine, Poland, Austria & Hungary

Regis Counseling and Family Therapy Assistant Prof. Josh Kreimeyer was in Ukraine in February one week before Russians invaded. In partnership with the United Nations International Office of Migration, Kreimeyer was working with Ukrainian military families, conducting retreats for veterans and soldiers, many of whom had already been fighting on the front in anticipation of the invasion.

When the invasion happened, Kreimeyer said, “it was surreal.”

Kreimeyer had spent the past few years conducting training with military families and psychologists working with service members. Few people were as prepared as Kreimeyer to assist Ukrainians needing mental health resources. But when he saw the scale of the invasion, Kreimeyer found it difficult to leave the country.

“I had a lot of deep emotions when I came back and realized what was happening there,” Kreimeyer said. “I was glad to be safely at home, but I felt very tormented around the idea that I couldn't be there. I actually pulled up an application for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.”

A veteran of the U.S. Army, Kreimeyer knew he needed to find a way to help. That’s when participants of his past training began to call. The people that were in those trainings reached out and said, ‘We are so glad you did that training with us right before this because now we know what you were talking about,’” Kreimeyer said. “That helped me quite a bit. That helped me realize: ‘OK, I’m here and there are things I can still do.’”

In May, Kreimeyer decided he needed to go back. Over the summer, he assembled a team of Colorado mental health professionals with connections to Ukraine. That group traveled to Europe, making stops in Ukraine, Poland and Hungary to offer compassion fatigue training to professionals providing aid, including doctors, psychologists and church leaders. Many of them were also refugees.

Kreimeyer said the team traveled to Poland because many refugees ended up in the country. When the team traveled to Ukraine, they were faced with uncertainty.

“To be frank, we didn't know exactly how crossing the border even would be into Ukraine,” Kreimeyer said. “We really were just like, ‘we know we need to be here, and we'll figure it out.’”

Once the team made it over the border, Kreimeyer was stunned by the changes war brought to the Ukraine he had come to know.

“These quiet, peaceful, idyllic little Ukrainian villages that I had been in — every single one of them had sandbags, fighting positions or fox holes, trenches dug at the edge of each town,” Kreimeyer said. Later, the team downloaded an app that alerted them to incoming missiles. “It went off all the time.”

Still, each time the app rang out, Ukrainians went about their day, which Kreimeyer saw as a harrowing act of defiance.

In August, Kreimeyer, his daughter, Regis junior and political science major Greta Kreimeyer and Regis student Jennifer Nash, a marriage and family therapy master’s degree candidates, traveled to Austria to host a retreat for refugees and professionals who work with refugees.

Kreimeyer plans to leave Regis in December — but his work with Ukraine and with Regis students will continue. He hopes to offer clinical training students who are interested in working with Ukrainians.

This past summer, Kreimeyer saw first-hand the strength of Ukrainian resilience.

“The Ukrainian people are peaceful people who are very enamored with their land,” Kreimeyer said. “But they're also willing to fight. They know what they're fighting for, and it’s the land. It's in their blood.”

Street art in Ukraine captures the spirit of resistance to the war. Josh Kreimeyer said the artwork is common in Ukraine. The image to the left depicts two incidents, one in which Ukrainian farmers pulled tanks off the battlefield and another in which military forces sank a high-tech Russian warship. The center image represents Ukrainian requests for other countries to protect their skies from Russian aircraft. The image on the right depicts a young girl resisting the invasion.

Courtesy: Josh Kreimeyer.