2023-07-07 22:37:32
If there is a place in kyiv where you can almost feel the enormous price in human lives that the population of Ukraine is paying when the 500 days from the beginning of the Russian invasion, that is the independence square, the nerve center of the city. The flower beds and the lawn of this emblematic space presided over by a estatua de Berehynyaa pre-Christian Slavic deity, and where the most important events and revolutions in the recent history of the country have taken place, have become an improvised memorial where passers-by place yellow and blue flags, the colors of the ukrainian flagwith the written name of a familiarand amigo or an acquaintance fallen on the battlefield or in a bombardment.
Victoria Myshhorizof 27 yearswrites a short message on the back of one of the thousands of badges dedicated to his brother Viltor, eight years younger than her, before breaking down in tears: ‘Yasen, one day we will play the flute together’, it can be read. It was in the summer, “on a sunny day,” that she received a fateful phone call of a comrade in arms. “He had written down my phone number as a contact number in case something happened,” he explains. The person on the other end of the line told him that his brother was missing in action. “I felt confused y lost“, he recalls. The only thing he knows about the last days of his existence was that his brother was killed “by the Russians while he was carrying out a reconnaissance mission” on the Dnipro front. Not having been able to recover his corpse, the Plaza de la Independencia is the only place where you can pay homage to him. He neither forgives nor forgets. The aggressor country holds nothing but grudges. “As long as Russia exists, it will try to rob us not only of our land, culture, history o beloved; they will try to rob us our identity“he warns.
The human losses are enormous. about 80% of Ukrainians admit to having a friend, acquaintance or relative who has been killed or wounded on the battlefield. Even more; 60% declares to know a deceased. However, such a reality does not seem to push them to seek an end to hostilities with Russia at any price, according to the polls. Rather the opposite: it reinforces their conviction that they are actually fighting a war for their survivalbefore which only fits a victory o one agreement that includes powerful security guarantees from the West against a new invasion. According to a survey of kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) held last May, almost 85% He declares himself in favor of continuing the war and not making concessions to Russia, a percentage that has practically not changed since the start of the war.
“Ukrainians do not think that this is a war of the Ukrainian Army against the Russian Army; it is an existential war; they think that when you are faced with an enemy who has declared that he wants to kill you, there is little room for negotiations,” he explains. to EL PERIÓDICO, from the Prensa Ibérica group, Anton Grushetskyi, CEO of KIIS. And they have no faith that territorial cessions will calm Russia’s appetite for expansion and “put an end to the war”, continues this expert. “Ukrainians have tried to live together with Russia, and it hasn’t worked; Putin says that Ukraine doesn’t exist. How can they not react like that? He corroborates in a WhatsApp message Oleksii Haryan, teacher of Compared Policy in the kyiv Mohyla University and director of the foundation Democratic Initiatives.
Years of harassment, trolling in the networks and institutions, as well as countless hybrid wars launched from the neighboring country prior to the start of the invasion have made the Ukrainian population enormously skeptical regarding the intentions of the neighboring country, particularly while he current Russian political leadership, headed by Vladimir Putin, remains in power. “Ukrainians have found that the ceasefire of 2014 it was never implemented, and they think that if the Russian troops are not defeated, an eventual armistice will be used by Russia to regroup and attack again,” says Haran. “The main problem the Ukrainians see is security: a Stop the fire without being a full member of NATO or without solid security guarantees from the West would be tantamount to surrender,” Grushetskyi points out. Only 40%, according to the KIIS, would be willing to postpone the discussion of the the state of the Crimea provided that the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 was demilitarized. “The Russian attack against southern Ukraine came precisely from there,” recalls this academic.
The war has ended up cementing the Ukrainian national identitybased on the consensus that Russia is an aggressor and enemy country, and that the future lies in integration with the West and its economic institutions y defensesuch as NATO or the EU. And it is a phenomenon totally independent of the geographic origin or the language, experts agree, in a country where there has always been talk of deep divisions between a Russian-speaking East and a Ukrainian-speaking West. Russia “has bombed Mariupol, Kharkov… are cities where the majority language is Russian; these people no longer want to have anything to do with Moscow, this is not even Belgium,” says Haran. “It is something that we even noticed regarding the attitude towards the Russian language, considered the language of the enemy: 60% of Russian speakers they think they should speak more Ukrainian, with 52% saying Russian should never be taught in school; It is noteworthy that in the East, 30% of the population considers that their mother tongue should be eliminated from the school curriculum,” Grushetskyi certifies.
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