Perspective: To understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict, look to colonialism
“You are being told that we are Nazis,” Zelensky said. But 8 million Ukrainians died fighting with the Soviet army in World War II. Zelensky’s grandfather served in the Soviet infantry; my grandfather, born and raised outside Kyiv, spent the war running radio cables between the front line and Moscow.
“You are told that we hate Russian culture,” Zelensky said. “But how can you hate culture? Any culture? Neighbors always enrich each other’s cultures, but that does not make them one entity,” he said. “We are different, but that does not make us enemies. We want to build our own history, peaceful, calm and fair.”Zelensky’s address was both an appeal and a prayer, a clearheaded response to Russian justifications for war.
On Wednesday evening in Kyiv, Zelensky echoed this sentiment as he warned that at any moment the embers of the former Soviet empire could burst into a catastrophic flame. Shortly after he addressed the nation, that is precisely what occurred: Russian missiles began targeting Ukrainian military sites, not just in the occupied territories in the east but also in the metropolises of Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv. Smoke rose over cityscapes. Civilians descended into bomb shelters.
Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian. In one of his most-cited poems, “The Caucasus,” written in 1845, he ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. “We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen / While drunken justice sodden sleeps,” he writes.
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