Matt Thacker was born and raised in Charlotte. He fell in love with Ukrainian culture while studying its history at UNC Charlotte and moved to Kyiv nearly a decade ago. But he has left his adopted home to avoid the Russian invasion. 

What You Need To Know

  • Matt Thacker, a Charlotte native and UNC Charlotte graduate, moved to Ukraine nine years ago

  • Witnessing an explosion at the building behind his apartment forced him to make the hard decision to leave Kyiv

  • It took him days to reach Lviv, a trip that typically takes six hours

Between the bombing of the Kyiv airport early Thursday morning and the explosion that hit the building behind his apartment Friday, he’s living out a nightmare.

“You can hear all the car alarms are going off. The dogs are barking. Women are crying,” he said, referring to the explosion in his neighborhood. “It’s just panic. It smells like sulfur and melting plastic and burning chemicals.”

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Thacker was born and raised in Charlotte, but Ukraine is now where he calls home. He moved to Kyiv nine years ago. But now, fearing for his wife’s safety and his own, he made the hard decision to leave.

“It’s my home, and that’s another sort of conflicting feeling that I have — I feel like I’m running away,” Thacker said. “I feel a little bit like a coward, but I just don’t feel like I have anything to offer.”

A trip west that would typically take five or six hours has taken days.

“It’s not a hopelessness. It’s just a really deep anxiety and fear,” he said.

Afraid of what was coming in the next leg of the trip, he met with heavy traffic, empty grocery store shelves and a total blackout in the city of Ternopil on Friday night.

“We didn’t expect the scale of this. I don’t think anyone did, outside of the intelligence agencies that had this information,” Thacker said.

He made it to Lviv near the Polish border on Saturday, but being surrounded by more air raid sirens at night has made it hard to shake the feeling of panic.

“It’s not really an anxiety that I’ve experienced before,” he said.

Friends in Kyiv told him about the heavy fighting in the streets unfolding Saturday night, reminding him of Ukraine’s salute.

“Slava Ukraini! That means ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ And then, the person who hears that would answer, ‘Heroiam slava!’ So that’s, 'To the heroes, glory!’" he said.

Thacker says whenever everything settles down again, he plans to go back home — to Ukraine. He encourages people in the U.S. and around the world to stay informed, get engaged and call representatives to voice your opinions and concerns.