It’s depressing and embarrassing to watch what’s happening to Ukraine.

In the few short months since Donald Trump has been president, the U.S. has looked more like a Russian collaborator than a defender of Ukraine’s independence and its democracy.

It would be hard enough to read newspaper articles about Ukraine’s plight if the conflict was just one more distant place in the world where armed conflict is killing thousands of innocents and laying cities to waste. But it has become more personal for me, thanks to a program called ENGin and, through it, my introduction to Sasha, a 32-year-old anthropologist and language scholar in Ukraine.

ENGin is a nonprofit that helps Ukrainians improve their English language skills by pairing them with volunteers in the U.S. and abroad. According to the program’s website, there are 29,000 students and 26,000 volunteers in this five-year-old program. For the last 11 months, I have been meeting with Sasha for an hour a week on Zoom. Every Tuesday morning, I open a link on my laptop and up pops Sasha, sitting in front of his computer in a small city outside Odesa, some 4,500 miles to the east of me.

Unless an overnight rocket attack has caused the power grid to fail, he is never late.

Sasha signed up for ENGin in order to sharpen his English and advance his academic career. He received a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and at the time we first met was hoping to defend his dissertation at a university in Germany. Those plans have since been scuttled, at least for now. The war has affected him directly in more painful ways. His older brother was killed in combat early in the war. His brother’s widow and his niece are both refugees living in Germany.

The small city where Sasha lives on the Black Sea is not a frequent target of Russian attacks. A plastics factory built there in the Soviet era has already been put out of commission. There were attacks earlier on port facilities in town, and drones and rockets frequently fly overhead on their way to targets farther inland. Even though his town is not typically a strategic target, the beach is mined and rocket attacks do occur. During one of our February calls, Sasha told me that a missile attack there had damaged a building and killed at least one person — a father who was decapitated by a missile fragment while walking with his daughter. Another person lost a leg in the same attack, also from a missile fragment.

A number of buildings were left windowless as winter temperatures sank to near freezing. Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electric grid mean that the apartment Sasha shares with his father can be without heat. Power outages are common. They sometimes use a partially enclosed balcony to refrigerate food.

This is the reality of war.

Sasha has talked from time to time about a sense of isolation and abandonment in Ukraine, which gained its independence only in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he has never complained about his situation, and certainly not about a lack of support from the United States. I learned soon after we began talking that he didn’t want to dwell on the difficulties he and other Ukrainians faced. He just wasn’t going there. Mostly he likes to talk about the books he had been reading or movies he’s watched. He likes American and British literature classics, but also some of the Russian greats such as Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” He’s better read than I am.

There is also the flower and vegetable garden that he tends with his father at a dacha outside of town. It’s a 20-minute bus ride from his apartment (they don’t own a car). They don’t have a house there. It’s not that kind of dacha. It’s one of many garden plots doled out by the Russians years ago. One day, he took his Zoom call there, and for an hour, he showed me around the garden beds and then took me on a walk through mostly empty lanes to a river estuary some distance away, where he swims in good weather. It was in some ways an eerie experience to realize that I was getting a real-time tour of a Ukrainian garden via smartphone in the middle of a war.

For our call next week, I pulled together a short slideshow to introduce Sasha to Portland. I showed him some photos, including a panorama taken from the top of the Portland Observatory, and a map of the city. As I ran through the material I had collected, however, it all seemed trivial. We live in completely different worlds. The genuine interest he showed in my life seemed only to emphasize the gulf between our peace and economic prosperity and the hardships and depravations in Ukraine.

When I told him this, Sasha said, “There is nothing wrong with having a normal life.”

No, there is nothing wrong with having a normal life. But it does seem wrong to take it for granted. Ukraine is a nation full of people like Sasha who would love to have a normal life. Here in the U.S., there isn’t much that we can do to alter the course of the war. But we can connect with people one-on-one. That will make a difference long after the shooting has stopped. The experience is very much a two-way street.

I have been repaid many times over for my hour a week. I’ve made a new friend where I never expected to, and I’ve had a chance to see what resilience and strength really look like. I’ve even started taking language lessons of my own, in Ukrainian. It’s not going all that well so far, but I have faith that things will turn around.