Hard-won, not granted: Ukraine celebrates its independence thanks to its armed forces – and despite Moscow

On Aug. 24, Ukraine celebrated its most important state holiday: Independence Day. Contrary to false claims made by Russian propagandists, the country obtained sovereignty against Moscow’s will, and the ongoing war is just one of the stages in Ukraine's century-long struggle for statehood.

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On Aug. 24, 1992, the first anniversary of modern Ukraine's independence, President Leonid Kravchuk, Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, and Verkhovna Rada chair Ivan Plyushch welcomed Canadian guest Mykola Plaviuk at Kyiv's Mariinskyi Palace. From 1917-1921, the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) maintained its autonomy from Moscow, and Plaviuk arrived bearing a flag emblazoned with the short-lived state’s coat of arms, the Kleinod presidential chain, and a document recognizing Ukraine as the legal successor of the independent Ukrainian state of the early 20th century. When the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine, the UPR government and its leader, Symon Petliura, had fled abroad, continuing their work in exile for seven decades. Plaviuk was the sixth and last head of this government. With the transfer of the symbols of state power to the officials in Kyiv, the history of the UPR government in exile ended. It was disbanded and voluntarily handed over all its powers — albeit largely symbolic ones — to the president, parliament, and cabinet of the Ukraine that had gained independence from Moscow in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

Symon Petliura

However, Plaviuk and his comrades did not agree in full with the official version of history adopted by Ukraine’s post-Soviet leadership. In the summer of 1991, the dissident Levko Lukianenko, who had gotten into the Ukrainian parliament on the wave of Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and had already spent a few years working closely with UPR officials abroad, prepared a document declaring the resumption — rather than acquisition — of Ukrainian statehood. In doing so, Lukianenko aimed to emphasize the connection between modern independent Ukraine and Petliura’s republic. However, due to pressure from other Rada deputies, most of whom were communists or, at best, former communists, the word “resumption” disappeared from the final draft. Moreover, the document declared Ukraine’s independence without so much as mentioning the UPR or other Ukrainian state entities.

In the decades following 1991, Ukraine’s communist deputies and their Russian counterparts have droned on and about how Ukraine supposedly got its independence by accident — implying that the legally recognized state did not fully deserve statehood. They have claimed that the nation was not ready for sovereignty and had not fought for it, that independence simply fell into its lap, and that those who received the windfall did not know what to do with it. The myth of Ukraine's “accidental” statehood laid the groundwork for all of the falsehoods that Kremlin propaganda has used in an attempt first to justify first the seizure of Crimea, then the hybrid war in Donbas, and, for the past two and a half years, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In reality, however, for decades thousands of Ukrainians fought for their country's independence, doing everything possible to gain it.

The myth of Ukraine's “accidental” statehood laid the groundwork for the falsehoods of Kremlin propaganda

Anyone who knows a little bit about history and is familiar with the modern Ukrainian army can clearly see the legacy that shaped the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Mazepynka caps, the salute “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!”, the design of decorations, and even marching songs all originated among Sich Riflemen, the Ukrainian regular military units of 1917-1919. The formation, which emerged at the time when Vladimir Lenin was ostensibly “inventing” Ukraine (if we were to believe Russian propaganda), was made up of ethnic Ukrainians who had fought on the eastern front in the First World War as part of the Austro-Hungarian army. It was they that formed the core of the regular army in the young Ukrainian state.

Ukrainian Sich Riflemen

The Riflemen earned a special place in the Ukrainian pantheon, comparable only to that of the Heroes of the Battle of Kruty, a small band of university and school students who were defeated in a suicidal attempt to stop the Bolsheviks on the approaches to Kyiv in the winter of 1918. But whereas the Heroes of Kruty were mostly unarmed and untrained youths, the Sich Riflemen were the elite of the Ukrainian army — battle-hardened and highly motivated fighters. The Russian press branded them the main enemies of the “Great Russian idea” and accused them of sympathies to Hetman Mazepa (1687-1708), who had been mythologized by Russia as history’s most odious Ukrainian freedom fighter — at least until Stepan Bandera and his “Banderites” came along. Today, the anthem of these “Mazepa sympathizers” is performed by Pink Floyd (sadly, without the verse about Galician volunteers on a mission to rescue Ukrainians from Moscow's captivity), and Kyiv commemorated them by renaming the street that used to bear the nom de guerre of Bolshevik revolutionary Fyodor Sergeyev — better known as “Artyom.”

The Sich Riflemen observed a knightly fighting ethic and accepted a challenge even in the most hopeless conditions. As the experience of 2022 has shown, there can always be hope — provided that foreign partners are willing to help with arms and ammunition. But the Riflemen, and the UPR’s army at large, did not have such partners, and in 1921 the UPR and its army were finished — at least on Ukrainian soil. Thousands of its soldiers and officers had perished in battle, and many others became victims of the Red Terror. But those who managed to escape abroad began to make plans to liberate Ukraine from the invaders.

“Sich Riflemen left a trace in the history of Ukraine’s liberation struggle, which no slanderers can erase. This trace was imprinted on Ukraine’s vast expanses with streams of blood, which washed away our guilt before the nation for the failure that we had suffered in this struggle, if this guilt can at all be attributed to the Sich Riflemen,” Marko Bezruchko and Vasyl Kuchabsky write in the afterword to “A History of the Sich Riflemen,” published in 1937.

Bezruchko and Kuchabsky, Sich Riflemen themselves, offer a firsthand account of the events of 1918-1921, which they describe as an endless chain of troubles and misfortunes that befell their unit, the army at large, and Ukraine as a country. They cite the Ukrainians' desire to win independence as the primary driver in their long and fierce resistance to the Bolsheviks — the very independence that the official Russian narrative now calls accidental and undeserved.

When “A History of the Sich Riflemen” was released, the group’s commander, Colonel Yevhen Konovalets, was still alive. But not for long. Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov assassinated him in the Netherlands a year later amid a Soviet propaganda campaign that labeled Konovalets a “Mazepa sympathizer,” listing him among the enemies of Bolshevik power. In exile, Konovalets had founded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) — the very entity that saw Stepan Bandera head one of its wings well after its founder's death by Kremlin assassination.

Today, the figure of Stepan Bandera has been mythologized to such an extent that it is almost impossible to draw the line between legend and historical truth.

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One thing is certain: Bandera, his associates, and the warriors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — formed by the OUN — would never have agreed with the thesis that independence was simply granted to Ukraine. From 1942 until the late 1950s, tens of thousands of underground fighters led an armed struggle against the Soviet government. It was a real war — a war for an independent Ukraine. Many of the UPA fighters lived to see this independence, understandably perceiving it as their victory. As one of them, Ilya Oberyshyn, who hid from the Soviet authorities for several decades and came out of hiding only at the very end of the USSR, wrote in his memoirs:

“For 40 years I had not slept in a bed. I was always on the run. There is no village in the region where I have not hidden. In summer, disguised as a peasant in the markets of Ternopil, and in winter, wherever I could, mostly in attics, burrowed into straw... They could smell that I was alive and did not stop looking for me until the last days of the KGB. But as soon as I heard the results of the Ukrainian referendum on the first radio newscast on Dec. 3, 1991, I realized that it was not their immense power, but I, lonely, exhausted, who had won. My comrades who had given their lives for Ukraine won.”

I wonder how Oberyshyn would react to the claims that independence just fell into Ukraine’s lap.

Oberyshyn had every reason to distrust even the most liberal Soviet rulers, for they, too, persecuted supporters of Ukrainian independence and those suspected of disloyalty to the Soviet regime. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Khrushchev thaw, the KGB carried out mass arrests among Ukrainian intellectuals, and some Ukrainians who were openly disloyal to the Kremlin died under mysterious circumstances.

Even the most liberal Soviet rulers persecuted supporters of Ukrainian independence

The Kremlin’s persecution of Ukrainians endured right up to the end of Soviet rule. In the 1980s, as in the 1940s and 1950s, Mordovian and Siberian Gulag camps were again filled with “bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists.” A vivid example of these reprisals is the death in custody of the poet and dissident Vasyl Stus in the fall of 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev was already General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Today, the cause of the Sich Riflemen, the Heroes of Kruty, UPA fighters, and Ukrainian dissidents is continued by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which have kept their country independent in the face of Moscow's attempts to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state. Ukraine meets its third Independence Day since the start of the full-scale invasion unbroken, having regained a significant part of the territories seized by the Kremlin in the winter of 2022, and even leading an offensive on Russian soil. I wish only to live to see another Independence Day. I am sure things will be even more interesting by then.

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