Ukraine, explained by someone who knows

Is it any wonder that Volodymyr Zelenskyy cannot trust a peace process engineered by Vladimir Putin, or any Russian, for that matter? For most of its history, Ukraine has been ruled by others — largely, the Russians — but somehow, has repeatedly thrown off the oppressive yoke.

The end of the First World War sparked a vicious Russian civil war overturning czarist rule, and Ukraine took a shot at freedom with its own War of Independence. The bloodshed lasted from March 1917 to November 1921. Ukraine got a brief, blood-tinged taste of that freedom for a year or two. But the Russians came back.

Somewhere during those few years, all four of my grandparents, still in their teens, were smuggled out by desperate peasant families, who sent them to Canada. They, and thousands of similar Ukrainian children (one child per family because even that was more than families could scrape up enough kopeks to fund) were chosen because they were the strongest and most likely to survive. Most worked their way across Europe, toiling on farms for pittances, arriving in Canada to rock-filled, thin-soiled land, gifted by Canada’s then-immigration minister, Clifford Sifton. He chose Ukrainians because the Prairies needed brute labour.

My baba on my father’s side had stitched vegetable seeds into the seams of her clothing and carried them to Canada, where she planted them and began selling vegetables in the old North End farmers market in Winnipeg. My mother was born in the family chicken coop — where they lived until there was enough money for gido to build a house.

As my parents grew up on hardscrabble land north of Winnipeg, some five million or more back home died in Stalin’s intentionally engineered famine, Holodomor, in the 1930s. During the Second World War, the Nazis moved in to take the country until 1944. More than five million more Ukrainians died fighting them, and the Nazis slaughtered most of Ukraine’s 1.5 million Jews.

My parents, aunts and uncles lived their early years here in poverty. But the majority survived childhood, then mostly moved to the city, worked and raised the second generation born in Canada, the one that included me.

The Soviets took back Ukraine after the Second World War. My grandparents refused to discuss our ancestral nation’s history with us. All one baba would say, shaking her finger in your face, was, “you be grateful dis country!” The other never did learn a word of English. Still, I learned, from watching her, how to write Ukrainian Easter eggs (understand, they are not drawn, they are written; they tell stories through the meanings of the glyphs written in wax and dyed, in batik fashion, onto the egg). I tried to learn to make perogies from my finger-wagging baba, but 65 years later, still cannot properly pinch the dough.

Ukraine continued to smart under Soviet rule. The Russians stuffed the countryside with nuclear weapons. In the event of war, better Ukrainians rather than the Russians be blown to smithereens by Western weaponry targeting the Soviet arsenal. In 1991, an attempted coup in Moscow and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave Ukraine another shot at independence. The Russians spent the next 20 years doing their level best to foul up Ukraine’s elections and install puppet leaders. But in 2013, the Maidan Revolution snatched back Ukraine’s freedom.

Hitting back, in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea in a nasty little war that never really ended. A 2015 European-brokered ceasefire guaranteed the West would protect Ukraine from future incursions and returned the nuclear arsenal in Ukraine to Russia. It’s believed by most Ukrainians that, had those nukes stayed in Ukraine, Russia would not have had the gall to attack ever again.

Putin kept Crimea and gleefully violated the ceasefire. Some years passed in an uneasy state of not-quite war, until he went back at it full bore. Almost seven million Ukrainians, largely old men, mothers and children, fled as my grandparents had. Just under 300,000 came to Canada.

But this time, Ukraine is fighting not just for itself. Ukraine is the bomb-shredded no-man’s-land between Eastern Europe and Putin’s lust for complete control of far more than the shattered Soviet Union. He wants it all back — and more.

The only thing stopping him is that infuriatingly stubborn chunk of land that has defied him and his predecessors for so many centuries. That piece of land, now using money and guns supplied by the civilized West, while Ukrainians do as they always have.

Sacrifice their blood for the freedom of children not yet born. I am Canadian. But I am also Ukrainian. And the Ukrainian in me asks, as Zelenskyy does: i У якому раю для дурнів хтось міг би довіряти словам Путіна в будь-якому випадку?

In what fools’ paradise could anyone trust Putin to keep his word on anything?

Slava Ukraine.

Substack columnist Judy Waytiuk (spoutingoff.com) is still trying to find perogies in Winnipeg that match the quality of her baba’s.