Marusya Bociurkiw is a filmmaker, writer, and Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University.
As a kid in the 1970s, I found Ukraine, The Ukraine back then, embarrassing. The anthem (Ukraine Has Not Yet Died). Letters with Soviet stamps, from an aunt we’d never met, asking after us by name. My father, exiled, a Holocaust survivor and refugee, with stories he couldn’t or wouldn’t share. Ukrainian Saturday School, boring and unfair.
It wasn’t until I first travelled to Ukraine in 2003 and met my very modern cousin, and avant-garde artists, and student organizers, and queer folks, that I understood: the diaspora was frozen in time; the country of Ukraine had moved forward, vibrantly. This, I realized, is the difference and the connection between diaspora and site of origin.
Ukraine changed me. Over time, it changed the diaspora, too. Whether through the sharing of Crimean wine and advocacy strategies with university students in Lviv, or filming LGBTQ+ activists in Odesa, the country taught me the difference between nationalism and citizenship, an idea born out of a series of corrupt governments. Ukrainians, congenitally mistrustful of government, have created a robust civil society. The community centres and shelters I visited were forged out of nothing, but were deeply networked with one another, and with the rest of Europe.
As best I can, during this war, I follow Ukrainian friends and colleagues on social media. They are not cowering in bomb shelters. They are organizing for rights for Ukrainian Roma; planning for Kyiv Pride; building a shelter for women and children displaced from Donbas. I am here, but I am also there. I feel both the destruction and the resilience in my bones.
I wish you could travel to Ukraine and understand how this young nation (only 33 years old!) is a laboratory. For experiments in food, literature, and visual art. For complex formations of feminist activism, for creative ways to survive. I know of women who are keeping their bombed villages going, setting up co-ops, building international connections. A Kyiv friend tells me there are more bookstores in the city than ever before. Timothy Snyder writes from Ukraine: “Ukrainians are living freer lives now than Americans.”
Anniversaries creep up on you. Three years, or 10 years (the invasion of Donbas and the illegal annexation of Crimea occurred in 2014) – either way the math is untenable. Since 2022, there have been 11,973 civilian deaths, according to the UN. Many think it’s probably much more. About 60,000 Ukrainian citizens have gone missing, into the vortex of filtration camps and Siberian exile; almost 20,000 children have been forcibly abducted, according to Ukrainian government figures.
Did you know that Ukraine in recent years has been the world’s largest recipient of USAID? This was money that funded independent media, countering Russian propaganda. (Removal of these funds is a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s misinformation campaign.) This was money for agriculture and for grain that helps feed the world, funding for NGO’s supporting women’s reproductive health, that helped survivors of rape at the hands of Russian occupiers.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s crass comments about wanting Ukraine’s mineral resources in return for “peace” only echo what Mr. Putin has been doing for years. In fact, the Russian occupation cleaves to a map of Ukraine’s most valuable natural resources: gas, coal, oil, wheat. Minerals, too, estimated to be worth tens of trillions of dollars.
Russia has already plundered about $12.4-trillion worth of Ukraine’s natural resources. The U.S. will follow suit; I’m quite certain that has always been the plan. This is a market-driven neo-liberal war, instigated by two autocracies at the end of their rope morally and financially, federations whose own riches have been plundered by oligarchy, or theocracy, or both; bankrupt by tax cuts to billionaires, and forever wars. Indeed, this has become the invisible rationale for most governments in the Western world: to govern as though people and cultures exist only as a market. Canada’s petroculture and its own colonization of resource-rich Indigenous territories is a case in point. If Indigenous communities, like the Cree in Saskatchewan, showed solidarity with Ukraine early on, it’s because of their deep experiential understanding of the embodied, geographical, and political ramifications of colonization.
But as Ukrainians now say when giving a toast, Let’s Be. Because to be means to say and write and publish what you want. To love who you want. To have the right to control your own body. To speak of colonialism, and also of resistance, in the classroom or in the art gallery. These freedoms – abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of speech – still exist in Ukraine.
Maybe now you understand.