The Independence Day of Ukraine, in the times before the war, felt simpler and joyous. It felt like the end of history had arrived; the great wars of the 20th century were long gone, and the only thing our gravely wounded ancestors had passed onto us was this chance to start anew, this chance to depart from the corruption and stagnation of the Soviet Union, from our imperial past dictated by russia. It felt good to be a young state with a millennia-old history.
August 24th would also mark the end of summer, the day of the harvest of potatoes. After a day spent in the scorching sun collecting the plowed-out potatoes into giant brown sacks, family would gather for dinner in the garden, celebrating every meaning of the day: honoring the fruit of the earth, honoring the place and the people and the history around our statehood. This day I’d often take the final swim in the lake before the nights turned cold, or feel nostalgic about the summer not enjoyed thoroughly enough, or look forward to the fall season.
I look forward to the fall season no longer. Independence Day now is marked by the blood spilled for Ukraine, it brings ache, and weariness. The merciless retreat of the light marks the beginning of the slow descent into the cold season. This cold season, prophesied to be yet another worst in the long line of misfortunes, I don’t want it; I am not ready for it yet. I haven’t yet taken enough of the heat in; I need another summer in between this summer and the fall to recover sufficiently from last winter, let alone be ready for the next one.
Oh this specific Independence Day feels particularly complicated, a challenging point in our history consisting of challenging points. Using the Odyssey as an example - like Agamemnon and his soldiers burning Troy after years of siege - russia is trying to burn and destroy a place it cannot conquer militarily.
Then, the internal challenges. On the one hand, new allegations of corruption among our top officials have been exposed, indicating money pulled out in cash to bail a minister, while the state budget is sorely lacking. On the other hand, the fact that the public knows about this, and in such detail, is an indicator of progress: some decade ago, folks who would bring top level corruption to light would risk their own life and limb doing so.
Ukraine has made progress. But it still needs so much support, so much time and space and resources which we don’t have now, to become the stronger and better version.
This Independence Day is a celebration of the resilience of a very nuanced country, and of a vision of a future that is in no way guaranteed to us despite all of the bravery of the past years.
Get ready for winter, they say. Get ready for the de-dollarization of the world economy. Get ready for climate collapse. Get ready for an escalation of ballistic missile attacks from russia. Get ready to live without electricity. Get ready to use the first aid protocol. Get ready to use weapons. Get ready for a possible repeated russian incursion from the North. Get ready for Russians destroying our food. Get ready for another possible hunger. Get ready. Get ready.
I get ready by not having all that much to lose, other than everything.
As a Millennial, I was born ready.
I was born a couple of years after the Independence of Ukraine was declared. The best years of our tumultuous independence, turns out, were the years I went to school, the nerdy academic school in a provincial town where we got ready to apply humanities concepts to make meaning of a globalized world, where we learned languages and became curious about other peoples and cultures.
The years of transition from the tumultuous 1990s into the early 2000-s were somehow relatively good years, but I cannot recall a single fully calm and secure period of time. We were never allotted a secure period of time to exist in, we Ukrainian Millennials. Ukraine and us Millennials, we both got very good at improvising and never really got the quiet stretch in which to become.
Now, Ukraine feels like an intersection and a battlefield of global change, where russia, a falling empire, exercises the most direct damage while causing ripples of instability to the rest of Europe. The struggle for our own freedom is also the fight for a free and secure Europe - we have heard this refrain, but especially now we need the free and secure Europe to step up its support to this nuanced country, this nuanced and weary and resilient people.
Truth is, we each can try to be as independent and responsible as possible, but buying a generator to secure electricity in your own private home can’t bring security on a systemic scale when we are all churned in this (yet another) grinder of history.
There is an interdependence between Ukraine and the rest of Europe, and to an extent with the rest of the ‘free world’. Interdependence in an existential sense. Two people are interdependent when each one’s outcomes depend not just on their own choices but on the other’s - and same is true of countries. I have a self, and I can need people.
There is an interdependence concerning all of us here within Ukraine and those outside, and our allies abroad, and even an interdependence between the survival of our land and nature, and ours. Litres of water, hours of light, the little everyday choices, it’s all connected; it is pointing to both a power and powerlessness in connectivity. Interdependence is a dynamic where the parties each have an extent of power - yet choose to have real mutual stakes; each has skin in the game.
Oh we’ve had skin in the game for so long.
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