Ukraine Independence Day, National Unity Totem

2023-08-24 18:40:39

Ukrainians celebrate Independence Day on Thursday, August 24. On this holiday, President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed the ” free people of Ukraine, as the country enters its 19th month of war. Destroyed Russian tanks were also placed on a central thoroughfare in the capital kyiv.

This day was established in commemoration of Ukrainian independence, proclaimed on August 24, 1991. The declaration came days after a failed coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In reaction, the deputies of the parliament of the Soviet republic of Ukraine meet and proclaim independence with 321 votes for, two against and six abstentions. Supporters of the Republic of Ukraine gather in front of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, to celebrate sovereignty.

The act of independence is submitted to a popular referendum a few months later. The sovereignty of the former Soviet republic was confirmed on December 1 by the vote of 90% of the population in favor of “yes”. The Ukrainians then elect their first president, Leonid Kravtchouk, a few days before the official fall of the USSR.

The day after the referendum result, Poland and Canada recognize independence, followed by the president of the new Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, then the United States and some sixty countries.

“Clean” Ukrainian history

Since then, Ukrainians have therefore celebrated August 24 as a symbol of the advent of the nation-state. “ Ukrainians have fought hard since to reaffirm the fact that they have their own millennial history, that they have their own identity and culture, distinct from their neighbors “, recalled the historian Antoine Arjakovsky at Franceinfo Last year.

This is indeed not the first attempt to create a Ukrainian territorial entity. From the 9th to the 13th centuries, a Slavic principality called “Kiev rus” extended over territories that covered present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. This entity was also used by Vladimir Putin at the start of his offensive in Ukraine to deny Ukrainian national identity and justify war. The Rus’ of kyiv disintegrates from 1223, after the Mongol invasion.

Another Ukrainian entity was born with the Cossack Hetmanate in 1649, when the Ukrainian Cossacks created a territorial organization on the territory of what is now central Ukraine, and fought the republic of two nations (made up of Poland and Lithuania), the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. The Hetmanate is however suppressed after a victory of Russia, in a context of regional rivalry with Sweden and Poland.

More recently, in 1917, an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic was created during the Russian Revolution, but in 1922 it became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, incorporated into the USSR.

Military parades

From 1997, Independence Day is most often accompanied by a military parade called the “march of the unconquered”. That year, the Ukrainian military aviation accompanied the parade. However, military parades were canceled between 2010 and 2014.

In 2014, the year of the first Russian offensive in Crimea, thousands of Ukrainians gather in Kiev to raise the yellow and blue flags and attend the first military parade since 2009. President Petro Poroshenko takes advantage of the event to make a show of force and announce an investment of more than two billion euros in the country’s armed forces. Meanwhile, in the East, the pro-Russian separatists continue the bombardments.

On Independence Day 2019, newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky announces on Facebook that the military parade will not take place, in order to return the money planned for the organization to the armies. Instead, a “Heroes Honor” march is held to decorate veterans. During his speech, Zelensky assures us that “ Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, regardless of age, gender or religion, must be one people ».

In 2022, Independence Day also marked the six months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the generalization of the conflict to all Ukrainian territory. The military parade had again been scrapped, in favor of a parade of deteriorated Russian army tanks.