- Anzelika Akimova and her daughter, Arina, left Ukraine at the start of the invasion and landed in Los Angeles.
- Akimova found her footing in a boxing gym run by a Russian trainer who became a grounding force.
- Her story is a window into the challenges many Ukrainian refugees have faced — even in the US, where political support was on their side.
A Ukrainian refugee named Anzelika Akimova enters her fighting stance at the Eastern Block Boxing gym in Los Angeles.
In front of a neon logo of a screaming Eurasian brown bear, she's channeling a hypnotic rhythm that's interrupted only by booming drill instructions or the beep of a timer. The gym has the brutalist black-and-white aesthetic of a Russian nightclub.
Akimova, her blue eyes laser-focused, cannons her left-handed jab, and a tattoo of angel wings sprawled across her back contracts and expands. She got the tattoo months after arriving in the US as a nod to both her name, rooted from the word "angel," and her new home, Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles and across California, front yards don Ukrainian flags and cars are adorned with bumper stickers extending solidarity to the population under Russia's assault, which intensified after the country's full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has displaced over 6 million people.
The outpour of American support for Ukrainian refugees has been profound, mainly through a sponsorship program rolled out in April 2022 by President Joe Biden's administration, through which 1.7 million Americans have offered to help resettle Ukrainians.
But beyond the gestures and political efforts, Akimova and many new Ukrainian immigrants hold trauma from the raging war and are now grappling with slow bureaucracy and anxiety around fragile immigration statuses, as well as a heightened cost of living in the US.
Many, like Akimova, are feeling the crushing weight of starting over.
It wasn't until she discovered a Russian-speaking gym that she started to find her footing again.
Akimova never wanted to leave Ukraine
It was only 18 months ago when Akimova, 33, thought her days were numbered, first because of the war and later, in the US, the paralyzing limbo of losing her sense of place.
After Russia's invasion in early 2022, and during her first months in the US, Akimova said, she hated that Americans could keep a positive outlook on life while she stayed up late, sending WhatsApp messages to relatives in Odesa and Kyiv, trying to start her new life after resettling.
She missed the mundane in Odesa, even how the acrid smell of her neighbors frying tinned goby fish would waft through the calm seaside air and into her home, uninvited. She missed the rigor of her daily Karate practice and often thought about her and her 12-year-old daughter, Arina's, karate coach, who once told her the only time it was OK to miss a workout was when you die.
She felt close enough to that, she said.
No matter how excited her daughter was about Disneyland and life in the US, depression ate away at Akimova.
But five months into her time in the US, she met someone who reinvigorated that sense of adrenalized regiment and purpose into her life. Without much to do, and too much time to doomscroll, Akimova followed an algorithmic thread on Instagram that led her to the page of a boxing gym that was set to open in Toluca Lake, near North Hollywood, where she resettled.
That's where she met her boxing trainer, Salman Poddubnov, 35, a man who came from — who escaped — the same country that invaded her homeland.
By January 2023, Akimova joined his gym and felt born again.
"It was like being underwater for a long time, and then coming up for air," she remembered telling her sister, still in Ukraine, over a late-night phone call through which air sirens could be heard in the background.
At the outset of the war, Akimova sought refuge in an underground parking garage
Akimova's sing-songy voice shifts from a bubbly tone to exasperation in seconds as she reflects on her journey from a war that has raged in some form since 2014.
Ten days into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Akimova found herself and her daughter sheltering from warplanes in the underground parking garage of their apartment building in Odesa, she told Insider.
She was sick with a cold, and her fridge was empty. Within 24 hours, grocery stores in her city were out of food, and the pharmacies, which she hadn't had time to pass by in the days before the invasion, were out of medicine.
She worried, too, that her daughter would get pneumonia sleeping on the frigid concrete where cars parked, with just a few blankets to keep her warm.
Her idyllic lifestyle — working as a teacher, later designing floral arrangements, and finally as a makeup artist — faded away, and she decided to create the safest possible life for herself and her daughter.
They trudged 5 miles by foot from a border crossing backed up with cars to the other side of the Moldovan border, where they were met by some of her karate teammates from Ukraine, who helped them get tickets aboard a rickety train to Romania.
The train was repurposed to help resettle migrants at the start of the full-scale invasion. Its roof was riddled with holes.
It was the first time they could fall asleep — on each other's shoulders, with no fear of bombardment — in days.
In Romania, Akimova and her daughter waited for half a day until a Czech relative arrived and invited them to live with them in Prague for a month.
Then, Akimova and her daughter took the leap and decided to try to gain entry into the US and join Akimova's partner, a Ukrainian who lives in Los Angeles.
They flew to Mexico, where they first tried to cross the border at Tijuana, but turned away when they saw the crowds at the crossing. They were later driven by Ukrainian volunteers to the Mexicali-Calexico border, where, after four hours, they were granted humanitarian parole in the US.
The journey was arduous, and the following months weighed heavily on Akimova as she tried to make sense of her new immigration status and navigate with minimal English skills.
After enlisting in ESL classes and registering her daughter in a public school, her day-to-day life in Los Angeles felt more stable.
Still, she ached for her homeland. Her attempts to make tvarog, a pillowy fermented farmer's cheese popular in Ukraine, didn't help.
Begrudgingly picking up ingredients from a Russian store, she mixed the warmed milk with vinegar as she always had, watching the whey separate and the cheese curdle. But when she strained the fluffy mixture with cheesecloth and added buttermilk, something was off — either the American buttermilk or the absence of Odesa's water.
It wasn't until she set foot in Poddubnov's gym that she felt at home.
"In my country when I practiced karate, I was really organized: If you have a problem, you should go work out; if you're happy, you should go work out; if you need to solve a problem, you should work out," Akimova told Insider. "It was like medicine for everything. And here, it's the same."
Like many Ukrainians, Akimova has fought for her place in the US
Akimova is one of the more than 270,000 Ukrainians who have arrived in the US since Russia invaded Ukraine.
At least 25,000 of them entered the US through the southern border in 2022, before the US government established the Uniting for Ukraine program in April of that year, according to the nonprofit Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
But the bulk of new Ukrainians — at least 146,000 fleeing the war — have been resettled through the parole program, according to LIRS. The sponsorship program allows Ukrainians to live in the US for two years on a faster track to citizenship.
More than 1.7 million Americans have applied to be sponsors, LIRS told Insider.
Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, the president of LIRS, told Insider that parole status did not necessarily create a clear path to be granted asylum and later permanent residency. So in August, the Department of Homeland Security extended Temporary Protected Status for Ukrainians until April 2025, providing more options for Ukrainians to try to extend their refuge in the US.
In July 2022, Akimova and Arina were granted TPS, which made their place in the US slightly more rooted.
But there are still uniting factors making life in the US difficult for many new Ukrainians like Akimova, regardless of immigration status.
For one, Akimova and Arina arrived at a time when historic 8.3% inflation caused the cost of living in the US to skyrocket, especially compared to the cost of living in Ukraine. And many parolees that arrived are women and children, according to LIRS, creating issues in terms of securing childcare and employment.
On a weekly basis, Akimova has been working against the clock with her immigration lawyer, trying to secure an extension to her and Arina's TPS status.
"In general, we've seen the Ukrainians we serve struggle with the uncertainty of what will happen after parole and whether they will be approved for another status like TPS or asylum," Vignarajah told Insider. "Ukrainians are also experiencing the trauma of losing their homes and being separated from family and loved ones."
Increasingly, Akimova's future here is materializing after a relative shipped Akimova's master's degree to her home in Los Angeles — which allowed her to begin community college classes in English and art in the late summer.
Poddubnov was a target of Russia's government too, in a different way
The gym, too, has been Poddubnov's place of refuge. It's marked with the slogan "no nationality, no skin color, no politics: only boxing."
He cuts a stoic and alert figure in the gym, in one breath shouting instructions, cracking a joke in the next, over a rotating soundtrack of Russian tech house or American gangster rap.
Before their paths aligned at Eastern Block Boxing, Poddubnov fought as an amateur boxer in Russia. He later entered local politics, getting a job as a vice mayor in the industrial Russian city of Volzhsky, a dozen miles from the famed World War II Battle of Stalingrad.
"My life was pretty good," Poddubnov told Insider. "If it wasn't for politics, maybe I'd still be there. In Russia, if you don't agree with something, you will go to jail; you have a choice: jail or USA."
Poddubnov told Insider he was run out as Volzhsky's vice mayor in 2016, after that year's legislative and state elections, as Vladimir Putin's allies took over the region's governorship and brought a corruption case against him and local mayors, clearing house and ensuring that allies took their spots.
The same year, what he felt was a phony corruption case against him was heating up, Poddubnov would kiss his young daughter one last time late at night and take a flight to the US with $3,000 and hopes of reviving his boxing career.
But soon after arriving in the US, he mixed with the wrong crowd, he told Insider, and served close to two years across six federal prisons after he became a driver involved in a 25-person money-laundering ring run by Eastern Europeans across the US, according to court documents.
While in the prison system, Poddubnov trained groups of men and was encouraged by fellow prisoners to open his own gym after his release.
In December of last year, after over a year of freedom and training clients in his backyard, Poddubnov opened Eastern Block Boxing.
The Soviet style is characterized by long-distance jabs and straight right hands, hooks with palms facing down, a pendulum step, and shifty angular footwork. It was popularized by the height of the cold war and shared by former members of the Soviet Union and is still used by Ukrainian and Russian fighters, as well as fighters from other former Soviet countries.
"Beautiful," Poddubnov says to Akimova during their training one balmy summer morning. "This is Soviet Union boxing, keeping your distance."
Each day, they keep space to talk about the realities of the war
Multiple times a week, Akimova tells Poddubnov what is going on with her community in Ukraine, and they lament how close many Russians and Ukrainians were before the war.
On her Instagram, Akimova routinely speaks out against the war, calling Russia a "terrorist state" for its actions. Poddubnov agrees with the political assessment.
"It's very good that we live here, on the other side," Poddubnov told Insider. "Here you see it like a tennis match, and you can understand what is going on. In Russia, people don't see this, they see the 'special military operation.'"
Poddubnov doesn't plan to go back to Russia any time soon, in part because he fears he may be conscripted.
"For what would I go? To kill her family? What did they do to me?" Poddubnov said as Akimova looked down solemnly.
By August, Akimova secured full travel authorization outside the US — and she considered visiting relatives in Odesa and Kyiv for two weeks. Instead, she registered for more community college classes.
Her home is now in Los Angeles and in the boxing gym.
