Becoming Our Own Goal

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The war forced us to immediately realize that victory requires both weapons and patriotism and that there are fundamental values we can never compromise. The need to renounce toxic Russian culture seems to have caused some confusion in those predominantly Russian-speaking regions now suffering the most from the invaders’ crimes. After all, decommunization removed only the upper layer, leaving almost intact the imperial heritage we must now renounce because our very survival and the existence of the Ukrainian nation and state depend on it.

Just a few weeks before the invasion, in Kharkiv, they would have never agreed to rename Pushkin and Zhukov streets, asserting that it was another part of their cultural heritage. In Odesa, nobody minded the empress, who was called a “she-devil” in one of the folk songs, and who ruined the “land of joy” or, citing Shevchenko, “finished off” the Ukrainian statehood. And in Kyiv, the Bulgakov Museum was not far from the street named after Petliura, whom the Russian writer disgraced. When Pushkin and Tchaikovsky ceased to be perceived as symbols of cultural