The memories that fire the courage of Ukraine’s freedom fighters

Among the numerous videos depicting the courage of Ukrainians in recent days is that of an ageing and furious woman trying to hand sunflower seeds to a pair of heavily armed Russian soldiers.

“You’re occupiers, you’re fascists,” she shouts, among less polite descriptions.

“Take these seeds and put them in your pockets so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”

There was a depth of grim poetry in the old woman’s curse: the sunflower* is the national plant of Ukraine, taking its strength from the light of the sun.

At least, she was saying, some lustre of hope should spring from the death of invaders.

The video of the encounter shot across a world transfixed by the tough bravery of outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainians, led by a young president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who himself — an overnight hero to many — has taken to the streets to exhort his people to fight.

In an undated photo, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks at a front-line position from a shelter as he visits eastern Ukraine.Credit: AP

If a nation is the sum of its history, Ukrainians in search of motivation to defend their cities have no shortage of memories, handed down through the generations, to fire their spirits.

Their national anthem itself is a fighting hymn, promising sacrifice for freedom:

“Ukraine has not yet perished, nor has its glory, nor has its freedom,

Luck will still smile on us brother-Ukrainians.

Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine,

and we, too, brothers, we’ll live happily in our land.

We’ll not spare either our souls or bodies to get freedom.”

Ukrainians and those from many countries have declared Ukraine’s 1932-33 famine an act of genocide by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Among the most enduring memories within the Ukraine story is the Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine, that killed perhaps 5 million Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933.

Ukraine and many other countries officially declare it a genocide imposed from Moscow by Joseph Stalin, either as a deliberate effort to crush Ukraine’s independence movement or as a result of Stalin’s Soviet industrialisation and collectivisation policies.

The story is told and retold within Ukrainian families across the diaspora.

Liana Slipotsky, a Prahran woman born in Australia whose life has been embedded in Ukrainian culture to the point she did not speak English when she first went to school, retains a transcript of a story of the Holodomor told to her by her mother, Tania Slipeckyj, who witnessed the horror walking to school as a child.

“In the ditches along the main road lay starving people with swollen bellies.

“Those people did not look like humans — their skin was taut and swollen as if someone had poured water under the skin, and it was very shiny; also their faces, arms and legs, what we could see of them.

Ukrainian troops ride on an APC with a Ukrainian flag in a field with sunflowers in Kryva Luka, eastern Ukraine, on July 5, 2014.Credit: AP

“They sat slouched in the ditches and many of them died.”

Liana’s mother remembered vividly, too, when the Bolsheviks organised brigades to go house to house, seizing all food stored away for the winter. A neighbour revealed to the brigade where her father had sealed off a woodbox to hide a store of wheat.

“Together with my sister, we watched as the grain that my father had stored for us to survive the winter, scattered. This tragedy has remained in my memory my entire life,” recounted Liana’s mother.

Liana, who is the Noble Park branch president of the Association of Ukrainians in Victoria, is currently giving away her material possessions and preparing to return to Ukraine to help the freedom effort.

She is not planning to take up a gun, but to use “a wooden spoon, maybe to make our national dish borscht, a beetroot soup”, in an effort to help restore her people.

“Every Ukrainian is born with this inherent fight in them, this need for freedom and to be allowed to live in peace,” she says.

“Life has no meaning without a free Ukraine.”

Her friend Teresa Lachowicz, whose own parents were toddlers when they fled with their parents from Stalin’s horrors in the 1940s, says she had taken leave from her work as a business consultant to do anything possible to rally support for Ukraine.

She had been in contact with a friend in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, who had told her “the days are hard, but the nights are torture”.

Her friend had chosen not to flee, but to use her time making Molotov cocktails — known as “welcome cocktails” — and camouflage nets.

In the city of Lviv, she had been told a popular cafe, the Pravda, had switched from brewing beer to “brewing Molotov cocktails”.

“This fight has been going on since the days of Stalin,” Teresa says.

“If Putin thought he was going to rob Ukrainian people of their identity, he has managed to achieve exactly the opposite.

“This has brought us closer together, all across the world.”

Ukraine’s very geographic location, which gives the country its name, has meant from the beginning that it would suffer invasion after invasion.

Ukraine, most scholars agree, means “borderland”. To the west lies Europe; to the east the vast steppes of Russia and beyond, Asia.

Armies of the empires, thus, have crisscrossed this borderland as far back in history as you might wish to venture, with all the consequent suffering that accompany armies and the lust of empires.

In World War I, Ukrainians found themselves split by the opposing empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary. Villages were destroyed as the two empires clashed, some Ukrainians found themselves fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and others for the Tsar. When the fighting was done, Ukrainians from both sides were accused of collaborating with the other and placed in concentration camps or shot.

Towards the end of the world war, Ukrainians found themselves shunted to and fro in the brutal Russian Revolution, which led to Russia wiping out its monarchy and adopting a Bolshevik government. Much of the fighting during the initial civil war occurred in the Ukrainian provinces, where numerous atrocities took place as the various armies swept through.

Through all of this, the name Ukraine was attached to the geographic area, but not given internationally recognised national status.

After its own civil war, however, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged to become one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union on December 30, 1922.

Ukrainian nationalists, however, had to wait until 1991 for the independence that came with the break-up of the Soviet Union. Finally, Ukraine was an independent nation, no longer called “the Ukraine”, which had always implied it was a province of another nation.

“In 1991, we exhaled with relief,” says Liana Slipotsky.

“And now, in 2022, we look with incredulity at the injustice of what Putin is trying, and we cannot and will not allow it to happen.”

*In 2014, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald photojournalist Kate Geraghty and foreign correspondent Paul McGeough harvested sunflower seeds from the East Ukraine crash site of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, brought down by a Russian missile. The seeds, after careful quarantine in three countries, were distributed to the families of all 38 Australian citizens and residents who died in the crash.

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