Anacortes nonprofit provides direct funding to Ukrainian groups

Nearly two years since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War following the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, more than 500,000 Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, and countless more have been injured both physically as well as psychologically.

Anacortes attorney Marketa Vorel, a Czech-American whose family immigrated to the U.S. from behind the Iron Curtain, saw her worst nightmares come to life with the Russian infliction of horror upon the Ukrainian populace in 2022.

“I was lucky enough to escape that system when I was 14 with my family,” Vorel recently recalled in an interview with the Anacortes American.

“But for all those years that I lived there, there was always this fear that at any moment, that if Russia decided to assert its power, if the Czechs decided to in any way pull away from the Russian regime, that they would roll back into our lives and ‘liberate’ us at the point of the barrels of their tanks,” she said.

“So, my nightmares, essentially, were made of that,” she added. “Nonetheless, fast forward 40 years, and I’m watching something in Ukraine that my childhood nightmares were made of.”

Vorel’s sense of justice and desire to help saw her leave the comfort of Anacortes for a besieged Ukraine earlier this year. She was neither a medic, nor a combatant — but she was willing to help, any way she could.

“It was so tough to watch, that I concluded that I really needed to go there so that I could both have a better assessment of what’s going on, but also to just engage,” Vorel said.

Nearly seven months removed from her early 2023 trip to Ukraine, Vorel is back in Anacortes with a deep drive to support Ukrainians still on the front lines.

Her resolve for Ukrainians facing a barrage of shells, bullets and war criminality led her to start the non-profit group Sunflower F.U.N.D., which stands for “Funding Ukrainian Network Directly.”

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