Enemy language: Eastern Ukrainians reject their mother tongue Russian | Ukraine

gamlet Zinkivskyi grew up speaking Russian in the city of Kharkiv, just like her parents. But when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, it was the final push for him to switch to Ukrainian completely.

“Unfortunately, I grew up speaking Russian, but it’s not nice to speak the same language as the army destroying whole regions of our country,” said Zinkivskyi, a well-known 35-year-old street artist. residents of Kharkiv, who usually refer to him by his first name.

The language change is part of a larger journey towards a more pronounced Ukrainian identity for Zinkivskyi, something shared by many in the largely Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine. It is a process that has intensified over the past three months, but which has been in the works for a few years.

As a young artist, Zinkivskyi had a long-held dream: an exhibition in Moscow. Kharkiv is only a few dozen kilometers from the border with Russia and has long been almost entirely Russian-speaking. Culturally, Moscow felt like the center of the universe. But when Zinkivskyi finally arrived at a gallery there in 2012, he was horrified. “They were obnoxious and condescending about Kharkiv and Ukraine, and frankly I thought: fuck them,” he said. He returned to Kharkiv and focused more on the Ukrainian art scene.

After Crimea was annexed in 2014, Zinkivskyi started trying to speak some Ukrainian with a few friends. Now he has completely changed and introduced political and patriotic themes into his art for the first time.

The question of language keeps coming up in Kharkiv. Oleksandra Panchenko, a 22-year-old interior designer, said since 2014 she has been trying to improve her Ukrainian, but admitted she still often speaks Russian with friends.

However, she is adamant that by the time she has children, she will be fluent enough in Ukrainian at home. “I grew up in a Russian-speaking family, my children will grow up in a Ukrainian-speaking family,” she said.

In 2014, there were separatist rumblings in Kharkiv, with some people contemplating the rapid annexation of Crimea and wondering if all of eastern Ukraine wouldn’t be better off inside Russia. But eight years of watching the miserable conditions in the Russian proxy states of Donetsk and Luhansk dampened those feelings, and the invasion of Russia almost extinguished them.

Panchenko, who painted her fingernails blue and yellow and describes herself as a staunch patriot, guessed the political allegiances of Kharkiv residents before the war, based on her wide circle of acquaintances. About 10% of the city was once what is contemptuously called vatniki – aggressively pro-Russian – she says. She described 30% as being like her, “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine”, and 50% were “neutral – they felt Ukrainian but not that strongly”.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed people in this neutral category more firmly into the patriotic camp, creating a much wider and more passionate pro-Ukrainian base than ever before, especially in the east of the country.

“There were a lot of neutral people here, but as soon as the war came, a lot of them decided to fight,” said Vsevolod Kozhemyako, a businessman who runs an agricultural business and was once featured on the Forbes list of the 100 richest Ukrainians.

Kozhemyako was skiing in Europe when war broke out and left her family to return to Ukraine and set up a volunteer battalion. His unit is based near the front line outside Kharkiv, in settlements that have come under incessant Russian fire.

Three of Kozhemyako’s four grandparents were Russian, and during Soviet times his passport listed his nationality as Russian. However, he said that since the Orange Revolution in 2004 he was a staunch Ukrainian patriot and rejected Russian influence in Ukraine.

“Russians and Ukrainians are absolutely different. I am Russian-speaking, I think in Russian and I have three quarters of Russian blood, but the part of Ukrainian blood in me has left its mark,” he said during an interview in downtown Kharkiv. , where he now allows himself a day away from his unit from time to time.

Kozhemyako and Zinkivskyi are old acquaintances, and when the artist told the businessman that he wanted to join, Kozhemyako welcomed him into the battalion, but told him that he had to fight with a brush and not with a gun. Since then, Zinkivskyi has been busy painting slogans on buildings damaged by Russian missiles. He also blocked street signs on Pushkin Street and renamed it English Street, which he said was a recognition of British military support for Ukraine.

“Gamlet is very patriotic and his works are quite philosophical,” Kozhemyako said. “They make people think in the direction of a new Ukraine. It is very important, especially now.

Geographical and cultural variations within Ukraine were one of the reasons Putin and other Russian leaders tried to claim the country was an artificial construct. Instead, they now find that their bloody invasion did more than anything to bring together the different parts of Ukraine under a common identity, in opposition to Moscow.

The Russian invasion simultaneously gave those who might be neutral in their allegiances a stark choice as to what kind of country they want to identify with, and provided a rallying point that allows for a broad and inclusive idea of ​​what it means to be a Ukrainian patriot. .

At the start of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a decree banning the activities of a number of pro-Russian parties, and the country’s most notorious pro-Russian politician, Viktor Medvedchuk, was arrested.

Medvedchuk, whose daughter is Putin’s goddaughter, has long been considered Putin’s man in Kyiv. But even some of his close associates rechristened themselves patriots following the invasion.

Yuriy Zagorodny, an MP, had been with Medvedchuk since they both worked in former President Leonid Kuchma’s administration in the early 2000s. However, he said, he decided at first of the war that his relationship with Medvedchuk was over. “Ukraine is my homeland, Russia is an aggressor, and Putin is the main criminal of the 21st century,” he said in an interview in Kyiv, employing radically different rhetoric than he used when speaking. a previous interview in mid-February.

Zagorodny said he joined the territorial defense unit in his hometown, south of Kyiv, in the early days of the war. He had spent a few nights at a checkpoint and other days supervising the construction of trenches.

He said he spent hours checking the papers of the drivers of passing cars; then, when he had to travel to Kyiv for parliamentary sessions, he was stopped at another checkpoint, where the men took him out of the car and verbally assaulted him when they saw that he was a deputy from the party of Medvedchuk. He assured the men that he was a firm patriot. “I have a feeling of guilt, but what we wanted was a peaceful coexistence between countries. Of course, now it’s all over,” Zagorodny said.

“Changing shoes in the air” is the Ukrainian expression for this kind of rapid transformation of opinions to adapt to the prevailing climate, but for all that there may be cynical self-preservation at work, there is also feels that people have had to make a choice: either side with a Ukraine fighting for the right to exist, or side with a Russia that launches missiles and bombs on cities dormant, and where freedom of expression is no longer legal.

For many, this is an easy choice, and by launching the attack on Ukraine as he did, Putin deprived Russia of many of its natural supporters in the country.

“My 11-year-old nephew talks about ‘Putler’ – a mixture of Putin and Hitler. He will spend his whole life hating Russia, and his children too. Maybe in several generations this will change, but no more sooner than that,” Zagorodny said.

In the port of Odessa, the mayor, Hennadiy Trukhanov, widely considered pro-Russian, released an angry video at the start of the war in response to Kremlin claims that he was defending the country’s Russian speakers. “Who the fuck are you going to defend here? He asked. In the central city of Kryvyi Rih, the mayor, Oleksandr Vilkul, previously seen as pro-Russian, has also rebranded himself as a patriot and has come to the defense of the city.

In addition to strengthening the sense of Ukrainian identity among politicians and the general population in the south and east of the country, the war also helped to increase respect for these regions in the patriotic strongholds of the west and the central Ukraine, where some doubted the loyalty of eastern parties, especially after 2014.

Kozhemyako said any doubts about those areas should now be considered settled: “A lot of people in western Ukraine have seen how Kharkiv is fighting,” he said.