Kyiv, Ukraine – Lyubov, a young Ukrainian woman living in North Carolina, says she was not surprised by the killing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed to death on a light-rail train in the same state on August 22.
“No matter how horrible it sounds, [the stabbing] was yet another confirmation of my concerns,” said Lyubov, a 22-year-old who lives with her American husband, referring to an uptick in violence.
Government-collected data shows that domestic violence-related homicides of women in North Carolina rose by almost 15 percent last year in comparison with 2023, while the general crime rate fell by 2.3 percent.
Luybov also noted the silence from Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, even after the killing became a front-line issue and a subject of fierce debates between Republicans and Democrats over race and crime.
“I think that on the Ukrainian side, Zelenskyy is busy with something else, and these are the matters, problems of America,” said Lyubov, who requested Al Jazeera withhold her last name because she has family in Ukraine and fears reprisals for speaking about the authorities.
“Let the American side sort it out, deploy more police, [exert] some control, all of that is on the shoulders of the American state,” she said.
The unprovoked and apparently random killing of Zarutska, who fled to the North Carolina city of Charlotte in 2022 to escape the Russian-Ukrainian war, became a rallying cry for the Republicans and their arguments about the alleged leniency of Democratic officials towards minorities.
United States President Donald Trump said Zarutska’s “blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail”.
He was referring to the suspected killer, a Black man named Decarlos Brown Jr, who had a history of mental illness and previous arrests and spent more than five years in jail for robbery.
After Zarutska’s death, Brown was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, a federal crime that makes him eligible for the death penalty, and with causing death on a mass transportation vehicle.
Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would seek the death penalty for Brown and that he would “never again see the light of day as a free man”.
For Trump, Zarutska’s killing became a political manna in his push to deploy troops to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles to crack down on urban crime, even though city authorities object to the deployment, citing falling crime rates in the constituencies.
Ukrainian officials seem to have chosen to stay out of the fray and the debates, as they consider the incident a domestic affair.
But political scientist Vyacheslav Likhachev told Al Jazeera that Ukraine has “no tradition to keep the bipartisan parity and not to get into domestic American party showdowns”.
Zelenskyy may have to make a public comment to appease Trump and the MAGA crowd, he predicted.
“I’m not ruling out that when the scope of the information war reaches [the Ukrainian government], they will say something pleasant to the Republican heart,” he said. “And that’ll be in vain, in my point of view, because the xenophobic part of Republicans are hard to charm just like that, and the Democrats will remember and hold the grudge.”
Zelenskyy seems to be repeating his tactic of sitting out a political tornado in Washington.
In 2019, Trump froze military aid to Kyiv after Zelenskyy refused to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden, former US President Joe Biden’s son, who served on the board of directors of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Zelenskyy claimed he had not been pressured by Trump and sat out the scandal that triggered his first impeachment, as his press service and appointees dodged requests for comments from media outlets.
Footage of Brown’s assault circulated online, causing shock and outrage both in the US and Ukraine.
But what amazed and dumbfounded many Ukrainians is the amount of misinformation about the murder – and immediate attempts to use the false facts to bolster certain causes.
Laura Loomer, a pro-Trump activist, has exploited the death of a young Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina [File: Dustin Chambers/Reuters]
Laura Loomer, a popular MAGA commentator, falsely claimed that no Black people on the train helped Zarutska, who fell from her chair after the stabbing and bled to death.
In making that claim, Loomer ignored the fact that at least two Black people were seen in the video rushing towards Zarutska.
“The GOP (Republican Party) needs to make anti-white racism a top midterm issue,” Loomer posted on X.
“She lies through her teeth without blinking,” Sofia Burlyuk, a 21-year-old university student in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera. “And none of her supporters wants to spend three minutes to watch the video and say, ‘Hey, you actually were wrong.’”
Kseniya Mikhalchuk, a 33-year-old pharmacy clerk, told Al Jazeera she believes the killing symbolises Washington’s inaction towards Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the southeastern Donbas region.
“This is exactly what the United States have been doing to Ukraine for 11 years – everyone silently watches as we bleed to death,” said Mikhalchuk.
The incident also had a litmus-test effect, entrenching the belief of many Ukrainians that, despite its economic and political might, the US is an “unsafe” nation with rampant gun crime and inadequate healthcare.
“The United States is a very unsafe country,” Leonid Lemeshev, a 62-year-old beekeeper outside Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a harsh labour camp – healthcare is unaffordable, there are drug addicts and homeless people on every corner, and the president is not quite sane,” he said.
