The Oxford and Cambridge Alumni Society, Czech Republic are very proud to have been able to organise an online Zoom interview with Kateryna Yushchenko. Kateryna is the former First Lady of Ukraine as wife of Viktor Yushchenko, 3rd President of Ukraine from January 2005 to February 2010.

A native of Chicago, Kateryna grew up in a household of Ukrainian immigrants, with her family directly affected by the tragic events of the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet Russia carried out the Holodomor (or Terror-Famine) genocide on the Ukrainian people, starving millions of her countrymen to death. In fact Kateryna is named after two aunts who were victims in the Holodomor. As such the current actions of Russia in Ukraine bring back painful family memories and explain much of the dogged resistance on the part of the country to the aggression - they see history repeating itself.

After graduating from Georgetown, Kateryna went on to work for the US State Department in Humanitarian Affairs, and then in the Reagan White House, before emigrating to Ukraine in 1991. She married Viktor, the Governor of the central Bank of Ukraine, in 1998 and was at his side throughout his political career, including the assassination attempt on him by poison ordered by Vladimir Putin, an attempt which he barely survived and which left him disfigured.