Publication

Deputy Director of the IWP Kateryna Zarembo for EUObserverToday Ukrainians commemorate the 1st anniversary of Euromaidan. It was exactly one year ago when the first people came to Maidan square in Kyiv to protest against Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the Association Agreement with the EU.\
Tomorrow is another remembrance day. The fourth Saturday of November is the Remembrance Day of Holodomor (artificial famine of the Ukrainian peasants in the Soviet times) and Political Repressions Victims. Unfortunately, this death toll still claims its prey today. The political repressions victims of the Euromaidan formed the «Heaven Hundred» (in reality, they were more than a hundred). People are starving to death now in the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the East.

As a nation Ukrainians are very young. According to Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytskyi, its modern appearance counts up to 100 years– not because Ukrainians only appeared 100 years ago but because the Ukrainian nation encountered breaks in its existence. 100 years for a nation is quite a short period of time even in regular circumstances. Now imagine that during these 100 years the Ukrainian nation was constantly oppressed, deceived, manipulated and russified in all fathomable and infathomable ways. One of the biggest atrocities committed to the Ukrainians was Holodomor, the artificial famine, which took the lives of some 3,3 mio of people on Ukraine’s territory. (Stalin’s and Soviet crimes in and against Ukraine cannot be limited to Holodomor only, of course).

Prominent Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak argues that Ukrainians are a post-genocide nation which has yet to realise this. This is just one example of self-realization that the Ukrainian nation is missing. There are numerous unresolved issues of the national memory which the Ukrainians have yet to agree upon. So, Ukrainians are building a state and a nation – all at once. Right now Ukrainians are at the stage where the Old Europe was some 200 years ago.

Time only works against us. Ukraine is at war. Parts of its territories are occupied.

And one year onwards, the revolution is not over. It will only be over, late Kakha Bendukidze said, when there is change of elites in Ukraine. The reform process is not flawless, too, and corruption, unfortunately, is here to stay.

Still, looking at how Ukrainians are struggling for their freedom, how passionately they are defending their land, how Ukraine, against all odds, survives as a country and as a nation – looking at it all from a historical perspective, what the Ukrainians are doing is pretty amazing.