Our disturbed neighbour has been trying to quash our freedom for centuries, so a strong spirit and defiance is encoded in our genes

OLIA HERCULES 28 December 2022 •

After I left Ukraine, and many times during my younger years in Cyprus, Italy and then England, where I’ve lived for 10 years, cooking professionally and writing cookbooks and teaching, I’ve had to explain doggedly, not only where my hometown was, but where Ukraine was too. Sometimes, I succeeded with: “Have you ever played Risk, the board game? You know the massive landmass in Europe, the one that’s famously hard to defend because it’s so open in the East? That’s us. No, no, it’s not part of Russia. It’s hot in south Ukraine, like the Med, and yes, we do have a beautiful language of our own and our own unique culture.” And now everybody knows Ukraine and knows Kherson, and even knows Kakhovka. I wish it was for a different reason.

I was born in 1984 in Kakhovka, the second-largest city in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, about a two-hour drive from the border with Crimea. My childhood is filled with memories of the majestic river Dnipro, mum’s homegrown vegetables and walking on mulberry-laden streets of my hometown. My mother, who brought me here, returned to live with dad in Kakhovka; my older brother and his family never left Ukraine. So here we all are, reliving the trauma of 2014, and then some.

How clear it has now become that the immediate post-Soviet desire to live abroad is simply no longer there. Don’t get me wrong, we are all grateful for all the help and the warm welcome – in fact I have never been as proud of being both British and Ukrainian as I have been in the past nine months. People really showed up: Ukrainians in their integrity and resistance and the British – and people all over the world – in their support for us. 

It has been amazing seeing clips of small Ukrainian children speaking fluent Welsh within four months of starting to learn it, and to see my own teenage niece who went from zero English in April to being named “star of the term” at our local school in East London recently. Those are all positives. But it is also evident how far Ukrainians have come in building a country where they actually want to live and which they will defend until the end. So many, now in exile, are pining to get back; so many, including my own father, have returned already.

Ukrainians have built their souls, their mindset and their way of life, informed by the tragic experiences and strong resistance of their ancestors. What is happening now – the murders, kidnappings, erasure of culture, genocide – is not a new thing. My own grandmother was sent to northern Russia in a cattle train at the age of seven in 1931 and my grandfather, who has numerous medals for bravery for fighting in World War II, was sent into a gulag in Sakhalin (near Japan) in 1947. Both my grandmother and my grandfather managed to return and lived a difficult, but full life.

Our disturbed and disturbing neighbour has been trying to quash our individuality and love of freedom for centuries, so a strong spirit and defiance is encoded in our genes. Thanks to this spirit – which is also shared and successfully projected by our president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as the Ukrainians themselves, those who remain in Ukraine, in exile and the diasporas all over the world – I have no doubt that Ukraine will prevail.

There is so much to fight for: our families, our friends, our homes, our pets and gardens, the breathtaking nature, the animals, the landscapes, the words, the art, the songs, the food. The latter had a particular significance for me. During my adult life, my kitchen has been my sanctuary and cooking, my meditation. Mindfulness at its best. Any time I felt sad or stressed, the bag of flour and grandmother’s rolling pin came out. Up and down, rolling, shaping, feeding children, “stress be gone!”.

In February of 2022, the magic disappeared. I went through such intense trauma while my parents remained in occupied Kakhovka (they received phone calls threatening that Dad would go into “the basement”), I could not eat and I could not cook. I thought I lost the power of food forever. Eating and cooking are so closely wired in my brain with love for my family, when my family was in danger, the connections between pleasure and cooking felt torn and shattered.

When finally, my parents managed to escape and my brother, serving for Territorial Defence in Kyiv, came out unscathed defending the capital, I made borsch and slowly, slowly, I first resumed the cooking, and finally the eating.

Since then I learned and remained conscious of one thing – as well as the physical attack, we are subjected to a psychological one. The intermittent bombings are meant to be debilitating, feeling any joy has long become a guilty act. I remember that it physically hurt to hold my toddler when Russia bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol. Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I write this. So to all Ukrainians, please remember to really live – for yourselves and for your children – this in itself is a further act of resistance.

To our supporters globally, we thank you, please keep supporting. Especially this winter, when the infrastructure is damaged, and people in Ukraine are making do. It has been so strange to see Kyiv’s Golden Gates – so recently bright and bustling – now absorbed by darkness in the night. Ukraine itself has once been called “the Gates of Europe”. I feel like right now it represents the less poetic “curtain wall”, a fortress. We cannot wait for it to go back to its pre-2014 borders – and to move forward.

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A DT reader and commenter; Iwona Stephenson, regularly quotes a conspiracy theory. She has inserted it again today in the comments section of the above article:

“It’s such a shame that a Washington Post journalist didn’t write publicly in 2008 about the offer Putin made to her husband and his boss, the Polish Prime Minister.

You know, the one where Poland and Russia split Ukraine between them.

The journalist Anne Applebaum, her husband Polish Foreign Secretary Radoslaw Sikorski, and his boss Donald Tusk.

Sikorski blabbed in 2014 when he thought he was speaking off the record to Ben Judah of Politico.

Germany and Belarus dictator Lukashenko are backing Tusk as Poland’s next PM in the 2023 elections. Go figure.”

………

Ms Stephenson has always expressed her strong dislike of Donald Tusk; she basically believes he is a Russian agent; like Schroeder, Merkel and Sarkozy. Basic internet research appears to support her claim:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-poland-sikorski-idUSKCN0I92A720141020