By the time Erik Heinonen, a humanitarian worker for Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, returned to his home in Irpin, Ukraine, last month, the coffee shops and grocery stores were open again. It was safe to walk the dog and take his daughter to the playground.

Heinonen’s house was still standing. But his neighbor’s house, across the alley, was gone. The apartment building across the street had been hit with missiles.

“We were lucky,” Heinonen said over the phone the other day, as the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approached. “A shell had landed in our front yard. It broke windows and punctured a fence and left divots in the wall of the house. We were fortunate.”

Shortly after Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine, there had been a battle for Irpin, a city of about 65,000 just 13 miles from Kyiv, the Ukraine capital. Russian and Ukrainian troops fought over the city for a month. They fought in Henonen’s neighborhood.

By the end of March, Irpin had been liberated, the victory regarded as an early example of the Ukrainian resistance that, a year later, has Western and U.S. military experts questioning Russia’s capability of continuing a ground war.

Heinonen managed to get out of Irpin with his wife, Oksana, and their two children in the first days of the war. Stuck in a line of traffic six miles long, they made a three-day journey into Romania and managed to find places to stay — a rural village, later a place in the city of Ia?i. Heinonen continued his work for CRS as the Russian attacks caused Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.

CRS has been working with the Caritas confederation of Catholic relief organizations to help families displaced by the war. In a report issued Friday, CRS said the effort over the past year had helped some 6 million people throughout the region with all kinds of services, housing foremost.

Starting in July, Heinonen made trips back to battle-scarred Irpin. He brought his family to their house in January, understanding they might have to leave again.

For now, he says, with the war hundreds of miles away in eastern and southern Ukraine, life in Irpin seems normal, but quickly adds this: “It’s not normal to go to bed thinking you can very well be awoke by an air raid siren and the [target] could be the apartment block across the street, hit with a missile that was intended to destroy aircraft carriers, launched from 500 kilometers away. It’s insane, it’s infuriating, yes, all those things.”

People in the Kyiv region still worry about an attack from the north — from Russia or its ally, Belarus, though the leader of the latter said Thursday he would only order his troops into the fight if another country attacked Belarus.

A real worry, Heinonen says, is fire from the sky: “Russians firing missiles from the Caspian or the Black Sea, and those can hit anywhere in the country.”

Heinonen says CRS and Caritas partners are working on helping people in western Ukraine repair homes damaged in the first months of the war. “All of us are doing what we can to carry on,” he says, “with recognition that there are some very brave people defending the country.”

Here’s a comment about U.S. support for Ukraine from a 37-year-old man who obviously never looked at a map of Europe: “We should just stay out of it. Ukraine is halfway around the world and we have our own problems.”

Alex Hoxeng, quoted in a recent Associated Press story, appears to possess limited knowledge of geography. Eastern Ukraine is about 6,200 miles from Hoxeng’s home in Midland, Texas. That’s only about a quarter of the way “around the world,” the Earth’s circumference being nearly 25,000 miles.

Please forgive me for quoting this fellow, but I have a hard time ignoring ignorance.

Certainly the world would be a better place had the homicidal Putin never decided to send his army into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. But he did, a decision that has led to hundreds of thousands of casualties — of Russian troops, Ukrainian fighters and civilians — and the destruction of six Ukrainian cities.

And while I appreciate the AP approaching the “man on the street” for comment about the war, I don’t see where “just stay out” is an option. In fact, it’s absurd to think of cutting off aid to Kyiv. Look at a map. If Putin’s forces are not repelled from Ukraine, what then? Just look at a map.

“February 24 began a year of many emotions for every Ukrainian around the world,” says Marta Lopushanska, a native of Lviv who has helped raise funds for Ukrainian civilians and military through a Facebook page, United for Ukraine Baltimore/Ukrainians in Baltimore. She’s planning another fundraiser for Saturday at her husband’s Fells Point establishment, Barcocina.

“Beginning with shock, anger and fear, our hearts sank with seeing such injustice,” she says of the Russian invasion. “Days and weeks passed as we dealt with it, but not without the love of our friends and support of strangers. The USA is Ukraine’s biggest ally, but it’s all the individual Americans surrounding us and caring for our cause — they are now our brothers and sisters. We are all United for Ukraine.”

The fundraiser at Barcocina, 1629 Thames Street, runs from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The requested donation is $25.