Andrii Batitskii and his wife Kateryna Bondarenko are building a life from scratch in Surrey, B.C., after fleeing war in Ukraine.
Originally from Kharkiv, a city just 30 kilometres from the Russian border, the couple are two of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who came to Canada through the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET), a temporary emergency visa program that was enacted shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The program offered an expedited process for Ukrainians to live and work in Canada for up to three years.
According to the federal government, more than 960,000 Ukrainians were approved to come to Canada through CUAET, which stopped taking applicants
