A girls basketball star and Ukrainian refugee
When Dasha Biriuk was 15 years old, she was separated from her mother, Iryna Tsekova, as they fled war-torn Ukraine by Russian soldiers because they disapproved of a photo on Tsekova's cellphone.
Tsekova was responsible for getting them out of Berdyansk, a seaside Ukrainian city targeted by Russia in its invasion because of the city's port. Some escape convoys were being bombed, but she knew someone leading an alternate route to Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia. At 6 a.m. on March 31, 2022, she arrived at a 20-vehicle caravan with Dasha; her youngest daughter, Maria; and a friend.
Russian soldiers were known to pull Ukrainians from escape convoys and transport them to prisons. Some were tortured and murdered. But Tsekova persuaded the soldiers to release her. She and her daughters successfully escaped their home and joined 6.3 million refugees displaced by Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
Nine months later, they traveled 6,000 miles to Tennessee on a journey scarred by war and mended by basketball: Dasha is a star 6-foot-1 junior shooting guard at Webb School−Bell Buckle in Tennessee now, and she has scholarship offers from Vanderbilt, Maryland, Mississippi State, Ohio State, Louisville, BYU and Clemson. She was named a TSSAA Miss Basketball finalist last week and will lead her school into the Division II-AA Middle Region tournament this week.
The mother and daughter are bonded by basketball. Tsekova, 45, played professional basketball in Europe from age 17 to 40 and once was an assistant coach for the Ukrainian senior women’s national team. Together, they share a passion for the sport as they rebuild their lives in the United States.