DENVER (KDVR) — Images from Ukraine show the destruction that has occurred in the last year. The invasion began one year ago next Monday.

Also on display over the last year have been the efforts of Ukrainians in Colorado to help their family and friends back home get through a very daunting situation.

“Every hour we’ve wanted to see how they’re doing, if they’re still alive because there’s a lot of shelling on civilians, on their apartment homes,” Artem Butenko, a Ukrainian-American living in Colorado, said.

Butenko said he and other Ukrainians always wait for the call that their loved ones are still alive, after a shocking Russian invasion last February.

The images of a nation and its people over the last year show one of the darkest, if not the darkest, in its history.

“We do have hope,” Butenko said. “We do everything that we can with our nonprofit fund to raise money, we set up projects and events. It was a tragic year.”

Butenko called his countrymen and their allies there and back in the states heroes.

“We as Ukrainian Americans want to do everything that we can to help them, to protect them,” Butenko said. “Because at the end of the day, they’re at the front lines defending their country and whereas the ‘Western world,’ as they would say, believe in freedom, believe in peace.”

Click here to donate to the Colorado Ukraine Aid Fund.

The invasion will mark one year on Feb. 20.