As Kyiv prepares to celebrate Independence Day during its second year at war with Russia on Aug. 24, some have no time to take a break for the holiday. They’re too busy fighting to make sure Ukraine stays independent.
Dnipro Battalion soldier Serhiy Shvets, 39, will spend Independence Day the same way that he did last year — at the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine in the eastern Donbas. Shvets said Ukraine’s true independence will only come with battlefield victory.
“The real Independence Day will come after our victory in the war,” Shvets told the Kyiv Post by phone, echoing an idea that President Petro Poroshenko told the U.S. Congress in March.
“We don’t just fight for our territories,” Poroshenko told the American lawmakers. “Even though we have a centuries-old history and 23 years of independence, the real battle for independence takes place now.”
About 7 percent of Ukrainian territory is under Russian occupation in an unprovoked war that the Kremlin started in late February 2014 with the military invasion of Crimea.
Ukraine achieved independence through the collapse of the Moscow-led Soviet Union in 1991, not through rebellion and war, like many Western nations. But, 24 years later, the mostly peaceful dissolution of the communist empire proved to be too good to last.
The outcome of this war could determine Ukraine’s destiny for decades to come.
Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian and Lviv Catholic University professor, agrees.
“This is the war for Ukraine’s future,” Hrytsak says. “It is being decided now if Ukraine can change and take the path of sustainable development, or not. We know from history that often such choices are made amid a disturbance.”
The war helped many Ukrainians first start to think seriously about the nation’s identity.
That is what happened to Oleksiy Nikiforov, a Ukrainian soldier living in Kyiv.
Even though he had been a Ukrainian marine in Crimea since 1995, the Russian-born Nikiforov didn’t identify as Ukrainian until March 2014, when Russia’s invasion of Crimea forced him to make a choice.
He was one of the 64 soldiers out of a 300-member battalion that chose Ukraine over Russia and left the occupied peninsula. He has since been studying at a military academy in Kyiv. After his studies end in 2016, he plans to go to the front lines of the war in Donbas.
Unlike Shvets, he’s looking forward to celebrating Aug. 24. He is set to march in the parade on Khreshchatyk Street. It will be the first real Independence Day celebration that he will witness. In Crimea, the day was a minor holiday with a small official ceremony, he said. Now the day is simply too important.
“When we were sitting locked at the marine base, pressed with all the tension, we would listen only to Ukrainian music,” he recalls. “I don’t know why, but we switched to it at once.”
He is looking forward to the parade and the moment when he and the other soldiers will respond to the greeting of “Glory to Ukraine,” with the shout “Glory to the Heroes.”
Before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Nikiforov thought the slogan was for Ukrainian nationalists, not him. Today it gives him goose bumps.
Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko and staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.
