Historian Sofia Dyak has been heading the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe since 2010. It is an independent research institution that researches urban history, digital humanities, archiving, and public history. Before heading the Center, Sofia was one of its researchers, she studied in Lviv, Budapest, and Warsaw. In her thesis, Sofia compared how the postwar integration developed differently for the two cities: Lviv and Wroclaw. The Center has never considered Lviv as the thing-in-itself, and always works in contexts—with its headquarters in Lviv, it always puts Ukrainian issues in global contexts.
After the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Center also focused on documenting the war and supporting the researchers—that is how “The Most Documented War” symposium appeared; this year, it was already held for the second time, engaging international experts. “Its title—‘The Most Documented War’—is not about competitions over size, but about the tragedy of every subsequent war in human history. Usually, the last war is the most well-documented, which reflects technical advancement, achievements, and their availability. The awareness of what is important and worth preserving is also changing,” explains Sofia.
Read our conversation to know how to effectively build the war archive, why stable academic institutions are so important for the Ukrainian society, and how not to lose focus on people while working with the history.
What changed in the cultural and historical life of Ukraine after the war had broken out? In your opinion, what are the key challenges for Ukrainian researchers?
Cultural organizations are a kind of the society’s membrane that simultaneously enables and responds to changes. Over the last ten years, these institutions have been actively reconsidering their missions and tasks, taking war challenges into consideration.
But any organization is first and foremost the people who create it and who are part of society. Many of them were forced to move either within or outside the country, when the war broke out. And since 2022, quite a lot of Ukrainian researchers, particularly women, fled abroad—it was their choice, forced by the war. This mobility is different and uneven. Academically, Ukraine is mostly presented by women who shape the image of the academy and the research sphere. Men’s voices are not so often heard on international academic events, which reflects the reality of war and the inequalities it brings.
Everyone tries to find their place in the new situation and to continue their work, as it is a vital part of living through the war. It is not only about the movement of people, but also about the transformation of experiences, ways of thinking, and work. And now, on the third year of the full-scale war, the questions about further trajectories of the researchers’ work are even more acute, as scholarships and programs abroad slowly come to an end.
The war prompts existential questions, intensifies reflections on meanings, including the meaning of one’s work, both in the subject and methods of research, their social relevance, and working conditions. It is important to find sense in the research and create these senses here, in Ukraine. And this is a great challenge, first and foremost for the institutions, which should become an attractive place to work—in terms of content, processes, and decent conditions. They also should be a place to return to and create something new.
Great and hard challenges are ahead of us, so support and solidarity within Ukraine are now important like never before. We see the demand for research, teaching, presentations and taking part in discussions in specialized or more public spaces both in Ukraine and abroad.
The efforts of individuals work on a sprint course, as a response to a request from the outside. But if we are running a marathon and thinking about long-term processes and changes, often described by the term “decolonization” and aimed at changing approaches to creating knowledge about our region, we will not overcome this challenge on our own. Whole institutions and environments should engage here to create opportunities for researchers, to encourage and inspire them.
It is difficult to have research on Ukraine in the international arena without building a high-quality and dynamic academic field within the country.
I sincerely hope that many will return to Ukraine and continue working in their professional fields, not only contributing to development and change, but also qualitatively strengthening them.
Please tell me about the work of the Center for Urban History, how did the Center priorities change with the beginning of the full-scale invasion?
Our Center is in Lviv, so it was clear that after the beginning of the great war, the city will see numerous refugees. We decided to do things related to simple human solidarity first and foremost. In our building, we have a conference room and a cafe, as well as a shower on office premises. Based on this, we set up a shelter for those in need. Here, people could spend a night, have a rest, and receive needed information. Many cultural institutions that had such spaces, especially large halls, did the same.
Working in the institution that deals with the urban history research, it is impossible not to have associations with the past: with the city during the Great War, that we now all know as World War I and that we performed an exhibition and digital project about in 2014; and, of course, with 1939, when people fled from the German occupation to Lviv, occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union. Most of the refugees were Jewish Polish citizens who made a complicated decision on which of the two occupations gave them better chances to survive. The war is also a story of hard decisions at the level of a separate person, as well as one’s loved ones or families, which are made in a situation of great threat, but with hope for life. The refuge at the Center operated until August 2022, and it has become a place of temporary rest for more than 400 people over that time.
The Center also opened its doors for a narrower circle of colleagues and partners. In spring 2022, part of the Ukrainian institute team, colleagues from Kyiv and Kharkiv, worked here temporarily. Finally, we altered our residency programs and introduced scholarships for researchers in the humanities in Ukraine, in cooperation with and with the support of our long-lasting partners. For us, such programs are not only about the financial part, but also about the networking and support, about critical feedback and comments, about the creation of new knowledge in reliance on each other.
Almost all the Center’s team remained in Lviv, and we were joined by new colleagues from Kyiv and Kharkiv and other institutions. This allowed us to continue and reformat the work in our program areas—research, education, digital and public history. In the first week after Russia’s full-scale invasion, my colleagues and I began discussing what we could do professionally as researchers in the fields of history, sociology, visual studies, cultural studies, and digital humanities.
Realizing from the experience of past wars how important sources are for future war stories, we began to move in four directions: collecting narratives of experiences of forced displacement; archiving selected Telegram channels, through which many Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies about the war; visual documentation of changes in everyday life and urban space; collecting and recording diaries and dreams. We relied on some previous experience: since the beginning of our work, the Center possessed its collection of digital and digitalized sources about urban life, that comprise our Urban media archive. These are pictures, videos, maps, oral history interviews, and—since recently—documents. In 2013, we recorded interviews on Maidan with people from various regions, and in early 2014 we continued to do it in Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkiv. In 2020, we asked people to share their experience in living through the pandemics and the quarantine. But the full-scale invasion was a challenge of a completely different scale—methodologically and ethically.
Recording testaments or collecting material is just the beginning. It is important not only to record, but also to understand how to organize the materials into an archive, i.e. to think through the entire logistics, where and how we are moving.
This is not just our challenge: different specialists work in this area—from lawyers who prepare materials for judges and future tribunal, to artists and journalists. Documenting the war in Ukraine encouraged the emergence of many initiatives. This realization prompted us not only to communicate with or contact our colleagues, but also to think about a sustainable format for meetings and conversations. In 2023, we held our first symposium “The Most Documented War,” which was attended by more than 150 experts from Ukraine. People had a chance to get to know each other, to share their experience and practices responsibly. This year, we presented a catalogue of documentation initiatives, where you can register your project, find partners or look for someone to consult. It is vital that individual experiences create and enhance the broader field of documenting, studying, and understanding war.
We are working to ensure that the exchange of experience is long-lasting and sustainable. That is why the symposium is an annual event, and this year it was the second one, and it was international. It became possible thanks to the cooperation of partners—the Center, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the University of St. Gallen, and since this year—a newly created institution INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. And, of course, thanks to the active involvement of all parties.
The title—”The Most Documented War”—is not about competitions over size, but about the tragedy of each subsequent war in human history. Usually, the last war is the most well-documented, which reflects technical advancement, achievements, and their availability. Understanding of what is important and worth preserving, also changes. It concerns not only professional historians, lawyers, or journalists, but people who live through this war, who see themselves as subjects and their experience as historical.
The very process of collecting experiences is important. Even if some testaments do not end up in the archive (as people who share their testaments, have the right both to give permission for their distribution and withdraw it), all the participants have a chance to speak out, share, communicate and receive support. These are micro-acts of creating connections, conscious empathy, and coexistence in society.
How did you work with visual and digital materials?
Visual and digital components are very much present in the documentation of Russia’s current war against Ukraine. War pictures are a specific documentary genre.
We are also collecting a photo archive related to this war—we did not take the photos ourselves, but asked photographers to do so. Taking into account all the restrictions of martial law, we asked to focus on urban daily life and its changes, on spaces: shelters, bomb shelters, volunteer centers, heritage sites in the city, barricades, but also on street life in general.
We also asked people to send us their photos with descriptions. It is a kind of self-documentation that lets include private views into the archive.
There is a lot of everyday life in these photos. For example, once we received a photo of a sea. At first glance, it looks like a calm image of a beach. But it is a picture of war: it can be deducted from the date and from the fact people can’t walk to the seashore now, as it is mined. Or a photo of an early spring garden in the country. But the description clarifies that this is the time when the air alarm sounds. As a result, not only did we get visual materials, that are important sources of the war, but we could also analyze people’s moods, what is meaningful and valuable for them, and what hurts. In the city, there is not just a railway station full of refugees, or a building destroyed by the rocket, but also a green tree in the city center. The thing that looks normal is a part of the war and can become a part of its history. The context changes everything.
Documenting material present in the digital informational space, specifically in social media, is another important direction. One of the challenges of documenting this war, as well as modern times generally, is keeping something that is fluid and fragile by its nature, created mostly for quick exchange and regular updates. At the end of February 2022, we decided to archive the Telegram channels—this project is led by my colleague Taras Nazaruk.
Tell us about the process of recording the interview. How and what did you ask people about?
At the Center, the interview collection project is led by my colleague Natalia Otrishchenko, a sociological researcher who has been curating our collection of oral history sources, Urban Stories, for many years. Natalia headed the development of methodology for the war testaments collections at the Center and built the team and international partnerships.
Speaking for the interview recording itself, it was necessary to prepare for the process emotionally, above all, as it is usually hard to watch people in a highly vulnerable state. It requires some adjustment, thinking over the questions, the script, on the one hand, but also intuition and professionalism, on the other hand, to be able to understand during the conversation, which topic could be dwelt upon, and which should be omitted, how to work with complex emotions—those of the narrator, but also with your own, how to take safety issues into account. We focused on day-to-day life in the war. The topics that are important are those of space—home, the road, a new place; connections —with people, but with oneself, too, own physicality; time—its different duration and perception.
These conversations present a different chronology of experiencing and realizing the war—for some in 2014, for others in 2015, and for some in 2022. In this approach, openness for the past is linked to openness for the future. People who agreed to talk, knew we would publish the interview after some time,—this relieved the feeling of anxiety that the testimony could become public immediately. It is a different approach from the one used for the media, or in testaments for war crimes investigation.
A conversation is also about trust. All respondents were asked about their readiness for a second conversation, and almost all agreed. This year, our colleagues at the Center and international partners in Poland, Germany, and Luxembourg are working on the second wave of the interviews with those they spoke with in 2022. We also hope we will speak to these people after the war and create an archive together, where human experience is not captured in a single period of time but is presented in dynamics.
How does your work with the memory of World War II help in projects related to the Russian invasion?
Surely, as a historian, I thought about the sources we have and those we lack for studying the past war experiences, the way they appeared and were preserved. When analyzing the sources of World War II, specifically for the history of Ukraine, it becomes evident there are not enough voices about everyday experiences.
Today, there are a lot of initiatives that collect and encourage appearing of ego-documents and personal testaments, there is a great understanding of their importance, but there is also more freedom for expression. However, we do understand that even having as many of those testaments as possible, we will never have a complete history of war, just like we won’t have a complete history of peace. It will always be a part of our reality, but it is vital to have more fragments for better understanding of the past.
War is a time of rethinking everything, including the historical profession. In this process, what I find useful is re-reading two texts that I work with, that I think over, especially with the respect to this issue. Both texts were created during the war, underground, neither of the authors survived the war, both are important and well-known, but located on different shelves of “the historical cabinet,” so to speak.
The first text is “Apology of History, or the Craft of the Historian” by Mark Block. Written in 1941-1942, it is a classical text, that history students read in their first year of study. Block called for not flattening the multidimensionality of reality, not reducing it to an “image in black and white,” but first looking for understanding and explanation of the deeds and actions, and only then making judgements. It is a human, even human-oriented text, written in very dark times.
The other text is the “Oneg Shabbat” archive or the Emanuel Ringelblum archive, known by the name of the historian who created it in cooperation with his colleagues in the Warsaw ghetto. This archive is one of the largest collections of historical sources on the Holocaust.
Besides, it is also an important methodological “text” for the history discipline as a whole. Ringelblum, who was born in Buchach and moved to Warsaw, was not only a historian, but also an active participant of public organizations. One of the approaches he presented in the archive, and which reverberates with me greatly, is about the importance of documenting various experiences and testaments—not only those that are similar or close to ours, or coincide with our views—political, ideological, or social. In the reality, that was totally and consistently destroyed, the archive appeared as the act of resistance to preserve the memory about the complex reality of the Jewish society and to testify to the horrific crime that later became known as “genocide.” It is relevant for us nowadays and for history writing in general. The past and the present are places for different views and experiences.
What challenges for preserving the tangible and intangible cultural historical legacy stand before Ukraine in the context of war?
Obviously, we try to capture the destruction and keep as much as possible. The losses are tremendous. In the history of heritage, destruction or the threat of loss has played a considerable role. Realizing that everything tangible is fragile makes us become more sensitive, stop taking the reality for granted. Understanding our losses also leads to comprehending and redefining what is considered to be heritage.
The process of heritage creation is based on choice, selection, and then revision. The heritage may be regarded as something durable and stable, but a closer look reveals that the picture becomes very dynamic. It largely reflects broader social processes, challenges, limitations, that are projected on what can be considered heritage and what cannot. Therefore, heritage is not only about the history of something that is cherished in certain historical time and context, but also about something overlooked. Heritage may be both the means of forming a community, and the means of exclusion, hierarchization and discrimination. Looking at the list of historical and architectural sights in Ukraine, we may observe most of them are located in central and western part of the country. It does not mean that some regions have more heritage, and the others have less of it. It speaks of the fact that in a specific historical period a certain canon of what was decided to be called heritage and recorded as such was formed. Figuratively speaking, we would call an 18th-century palace the heritage, a late-19th-century plant—perhaps, but a 1980s plant—probably not. So, the question here is who and how determines how wide the window is through which reality must pass to become a legacy.
The industrial heritage came to the spotlight just some time ago, while it is a great part of Ukrainian history.
We have entire industrial districts, buildings from the 19th and throughout the 20th century that formed a significant part of cities and regions. There are a lot of examples of reconsidering the industrial—through commercial and cultural projects. But industrial is not only about large buildings and territories, it is about people, life stories in complicated, exhausting work that transformed everything—the body, everyday life, and nature. In other words, can these objects of infrastructure be a part of our tangible heritage? Could the ability to repair these objects become an intangible heritage, like cuisine, dancing, or clothing?
When buildings or objects are mentioned in the heritage registry or in catalogues, at least we realize our loss. But there are a lot of objects which we would never have considered to be our legacy, like family albums from destroyed cities, towns, and villages, most of which are lost or ruined. Last year, we started the initiative of collecting family photo archives from cities that had been subjected to urbicide—Severodonetsk, Mariupol and Bakhmut. It is quite a challenge to collect what has been kept—on paper or as a photo in a cell phone, and how to work with such materials. It is also a motivation to reconsider the very conception of legacy.
That is why people are so important for heritage as carriers of unique experiences, competencies, memories, communities and environments they create. Entire villages, towns, and cities are destroyed by the war, while their inhabitants are either killed, or found themselves under Russian occupation, or forced to become refugees. It motivates us to take care not just of tangible things, but to think also about the social meaning of heritage that can be created through cultural and emotional connection with the place that is important, but cannot be visited at the moment, and the current place of residence, which can help live through the traumatic experience of losing one’s home to the war.
War is also a conversation about the memory policy, which we are witnessing in Ukraine today. How should the memory policy be formed on the state level?
The notion of memory culture is closer to me than that of the memory policy. Memory policy is one of the elements that shape and influence the memory culture. It is undoubtedly an important element. There is a lot of power in the memory policy, which can enable and strengthen certain things or block and make them invisible.
For me as a researcher, but also a Ukrainian citizen, the historical memory should definitely not be centralized, but should be built on dialogue and as horizontally as possible.
If there is a single executive body, then it is not a dialogue, but a top-down communication. The formation of a dialogic culture of memory should involve very different actors from different structures and infrastructures: museums, galleries, archives, digital spaces, educational initiatives, libraries, and so on. It means we need places where we could keep, research, communicate, discuss, articulate, share.
If you stop to think about the future memory of the ongoing war, then hopefully we will not have a single centralized war archive. We can already see the creation of archive collections in different organizations and even by individual researchers or actors. There will probably be quite a lot of such archives, and a decentralized network will appear. Such decentralization poses both challenge and opportunity: it will allow the archives to be in many senses closer to people—not only in their locations, but also in their approaches, to give more people a chance to feel involved in the preservation of memory. We should remember that an archive is more than a place of storing documents and making them available. It is a means of power, and with that, of empowerment and enslavement, of giving voice and silencing. We contemplate a lot on the archives at the Center.
Our Urban Media Archive is not only about collecting, storing, researching, making available, and popularizing historical sources, but also about rethinking the role of an archive in society as a whole and critically reflecting on how historical sources are created. Conceptually, an archive may be a place of democratization of not only historical science but also society as a whole. Therefore, I hope that our memory of war will be formed on the basis of multiple places, numerous voices and amidst discussions. The sprouts of this can already be seen, and this also distinguishes us from Russia, where today propaganda mobilizes historical memory for aggression.
Since the very beginning of the invasion, you and your colleagues have been speaking a lot about Ukraine on international platforms. What tendencies do you observe in these conversations, what changes in the perception of our country?
First, it is vital to understand that “international” can mean many things. When speaking about international, we often don’t mean the entire world, but mostly speak of the western countries. It means we are interested specifically in the developed countries with plenty of resources, and their support is critical for us. These are also the countries whose values we are looking up to, though sometimes uncritically. Many of them become closer to us—these are temporary or future home for the Ukrainian citizens who were forced to leave their home due to the war. Thus, from the Ukrainian perspective, that geography of “international” is both political and highly personal. War changes and intertwines these areas even more.
If to think about different parts of the world, with the outburst of the full-scale war we saw how we underestimate the countries of Africa, Asia, or Latin America, that have a considerable influence in the international institutions and affect the world order. Here the political also intertwines with the personal. When I talked to journalists who came to Ukraine after 2022, occasionally a remark came up that they had met people in these countries who themselves or whose parents had studied in Kyiv, Kharkiv, or other cities. It is important for us to see these connections with the world and analyze them critically.
Desire to stay focused on oneself is understandable in the situation of a threat to one’s existence. But we should also think about how we could change the distribution of attention in general. As there are countries that are always in the spotlight, but there are those that are remembered only when something horrible happens there. It is a movement in multiple directions: it is about how we are noticed and known, but also about those whom we ourselves notice and know.
Even before the war, Ukraine was not completely out of focus, as we are, after all, located on the European continent, although not in its central part. If we consider the region of Eastern Europe, the greatest attention of historians was paid to Russia, mainly to the union and imperial centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In fact, the war shifted this focus, as researchers started to be much more interested in Ukraine, in studying and trying to understand our country. Our researchers, cultural figures, and diplomats have become more actively involved in the dialogue about Ukraine on international platforms. War is a motivation to reconsider Eastern Europe and encourages to think not only via projects, but via institutions, too. One of such examples is the foundation of a new association for researching the region—RUTA, with its inauguration conference held in Ukraine.
It is important to understand we are better heard now also because we are strongly integrated into the world through migration. Today—through our fellow citizens, who ended up in various countries of the world, but also historically, as almost everywhere there are people with Ukrainian roots. It is not only the ethnically defined Ukrainian diaspora, but also people with Polish, Jewish, Mennonite, Greek, Bulgarian, and other family histories in cities, towns, and villages of Ukraine. It is a vast global presence and countless threads of connection through family stories. Such presence is potentially much wider than what we traditionally define as a diaspora. Ukraine can be close for many, if we see them here, in Ukraine.
From today’s perspective, how do you think, why did Russia receive so much attention throughout the 20th century?
Mostly Russian and Soviet studies, most of which emerged during the Cold War in North America and Western Europe as a way to study the enemy, contributed to this. A lot of resources, including government funding, have been invested in this research for decades. It led to long-lasting structural consequences, and changing this situation also takes time. Changing this perspective is quite a challenge.
The process of decentralization of research focuses did not begin in 2022, but it has intensified since then. In this process, as far as I am concerned, it is vital to break the direct and unbreakable chain of meanings in which the Russian Empire equals the Soviet Union and equals modern Russia. This chain is actively supported by the Russian government in its claims to be a global superpower. But we are now speaking about much more complex historical realities, so we cannot use “Soviet” and “Russian” as interchangeable synonyms. They are related, but not the same. One of the promising ways for critical studying and analyzing both the empire and the Union is through the research of what is called the “periphery.”
Studies of Soviet Union history are critically important not only from the perspective of Moscow as a political center, but also from the perspective of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Tbilisi, Riga, Grodno, Bishkek, and others.
These perspectives often show how the practices of domination, control and abuse work, but also those of participation, inclusion, and advancement. In other words, the periphery is very central. It is a large part of the complex historical experience. If we throw it out of history, it will only further complicate understanding of where we are and who we are. You can throw away a monument, but you can’t throw away everything—it is impossible to burn all archives or wipe out the memory. That’s why it is so important not to be afraid of the painful experience and be able to analyze it and form our own narratives.
There are going to be changes in research when the former periphery studies the former centers, and not vice versa. It is a big question and challenge to properly develop Russian studies in Ukraine, at least for obvious security reasons, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Russian Federation as a neighbor and as an adversary.
It can even be said with some dose of paradox, that we need a bit less focus on studying Russia in the world and a bit more focus on studying Russia in Ukraine. Here, we can develop our expert position—for ourselves and for the world.
How to communicate effectively pro-Ukrainian narratives for the international environments?
Undoubtedly, the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine is a hybrid one, and the history, the past is one of dimensions we cannot ignore. But it is also vital to think asymmetrically, not to focus only on the agenda. Therefore, one of the tasks for historians today is to study the Russian discourses, to show how propaganda and myths that Russia is spreading become part of the war. On the other hand, however, we should not limit our work to the Russian propaganda research only, we should not only see the political dimension of the history, but also keep focus on the life and changes in Ukraine, on people’s testaments. In order to do this, we should change our approach to historical knowledge, culture, and work with present and past.
The dominance of Russian narratives must be countered not only quantitatively but also qualitatively.
Here, it is highly important to form narratives that present Ukraine as a part of this region, as a place through which the history of different levels can be written, both national and urban, transnational and global. Since the late 19th century up until now, countless numbers of people have emigrated from the territory of modern Ukraine—we are far better integrated into the world than we can imagine. The history of Ukraine is entangled.
Thus, to write the history of Lviv, we should address Polish, Jewish, and Soviet history. It is so for most cities and villages in Ukraine.
The history of a particular country is not formed within a closed framework; it is very much connected to neighboring countries and neighboring historiographies. We need, first and foremost, enhance understanding of the region through the Ukrainian perspective, but at the same time, make it inclusive rather than Ukraine-centered.
How can Ukrainians stay strong and not be crushed by the baggage of historical memory, and what is the Center’s role in it?
Resilience is formed not by a single core, but by many points. Throughout the difficult years of revolutions, pandemics, and war, one of those points has always been and continues to be the Center for Urban history, that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Our core value is to strengthen the research circle inside our country and help it sound on the international arena. It is a long marathon for many, and we can see our role in promoting quality research, enhancing critical study, and inclusive understanding of the past. Not only for the sake of our past, but for the sake of creation of a more responsible and friendly society—both for people and nature.
A lot has changed in these two decades: more institutions and initiatives have appeared, including those focusing on the cities. Partnerships and cooperation are key factors for all our directions—from research to educational projects and digital and public history. It fills us with great joy in the cooperation and lets us accomplish together what cannot be done alone. The challenges are immense, and the responsibility is great, as we are talking about our mutual future.
There is a lot of violence and suffering, broken lives in our history of the 20th and now the 21st century. Through our research and formats of public history, we can give voice to those who have been hurt, killed, overseen and pushed out of the spotlight. It is a continual and never-ending process, which is also a measure of achieving justice. The future is open, and the past is a continuous discovery and rediscovery. Despite all the nightmares of the 20th century, especially the two World Wars, that brought so many deaths, ruins and suffering, we can see how life was getting back to normal. Yes, it was crippled, with pain and losses.
War is a great injustice and misery, but we have to understand there will be the end of the war and there will be victory. For those who experienced the war, who are losing their relatives, the war will last in their memory. And the post-war era will be similarly long. The post-war era is not only about restoring cities and buildings, but also about long-term work with trauma and loss, with grief, about healing our wounds and living with our scars, about the continuous analysis and reflection. Therefore, we should neither catastrophize our experience nor try to wipe it out and forget, but study and analyze it as such that will help us become a better society and country where everyone can be themselves.
Translation — Olha Dubnevych
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[The translation of this publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework “European Renaissance of Ukraine” project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation]
