Russia-Ukraine War affects CSB/SJU students
The war in Ukraine is impacting some in the CSB/SJU community. CSB senior Elena Harrington's family in Ukraine had to flee Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city.
Although on the other side of the globe, the Russia-Ukraine War hits close to home for some students at CSB/SJU.
This is the case for CSB senior Elena Harrington, whose uncle and cousin are both directly involved in the conflict. Harrington, who spent part of her winter break in Ukraine, is also deeply connected to the Twin Cities’ Ukrainian community.
“My family has been really involved with the Ukrainian community here in Minnesota. We’ve been doing activism with them for as long as I can remember,” Harrington said.
She offered a look into a country which has spent the last eight years embroiled in an ongoing conflict on its eastern border, a look which highlights the fact that most Ukrainians have considered their country to be in a state of war for nearly the last decade.
“[The eastern part of the country] has clearly been a war zone, but the rest of the country has just continued living like there’s nothing else going on. Everyone knew it was coming; they didn’t know when, so they were just living life normally until the inevitable happened,” Harrington said. “The entire time we were [in Ukraine] there was more and more talk of an invasion.”
Harrington, whose family fled Kyiv for the countryside, has struggled to maintain normalcy through the war.
“The first week was the hardest…I still went to class because my parents said I needed some sense of normalcy in my life, so I went to my classes but the entire time I was on the verge of tears,” she said.
The Russia-Ukraine War has now entered its fifth week, with Russian troops advancing as far west as the Ukrainian province of Zhytomyr. Those five weeks have been riddled with stories of a hopeful, and thus far successful, resistance from a nation still developing its civic identity.
“As is the case with a lot of different national groups the 19th century was the time period when they began to think more about creating a nation-state…and the Ukrainians were among [those groups],” history professor Greg Schroeder said.
Historically, the western part of what is now Ukraine was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Most of the middle and the eastern part were part of the Romanov empire and Russia, so it was in that context that the people we now call Ukrainians began to think of themselves as belonging together, according to Schroeder.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of an independent Ukraine, the country has begun to define a civic identity that is separate and different from the Ukrainian ethnic identity, that Schroeder thinks these dual identities contribute to the ferocity of Ukrainian resistance.
“When Ukrainians today resist, I think they are very clearly speaking to their sense of separate identity and their right to exist as a separate entity different from Russia. Without that I don’t think Ukrainian resistance would be as powerful as it is,” Schroeder said. “There are ethnic Russians in Ukraine who do feel closer to Russia. There’s also a component of ethnic Russians who do accept the Ukrainian civic identity.”
The Russia-Ukraine War, and Russian violations of Ukrainian sovereignty more broadly, are a result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-held desire to reunite the territory of the former Soviet Union, the dissolution of which Putin considers to be the “greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century,” according to Schroeder.
This largely has to do with a belief among some Russians that Ukraine does not have a legitimate sovereign identity.
“The territories that have become Ukraine were more or less assembled during the 20th century. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there was a clear tension between Russians who thought that Ukrainians were not a separate group and Ukrainians who thought they were,” Schroeder said.
Even though the war continues, there are ways that individuals can help Ukrainians during this time of hardship.
“What the Ukrainian people need the most right now is support, whether that’s in terms of money, in terms of prayer, or just people stating their opinions, people need to speak up,” Harrington said.