Putin’s underestimation of the bond between the two countries makes this war the least popular and most self-destructive action he has taken
My paternal grandfather, Vassily, was a Ukrainian who lived in both Russia and Ukraine and spoke both languages. He and my father stopped speaking to each other around the time I was born, and I met him in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, in 2004. I was in my 30s; Vassily was 94 and very likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. In Vinnytsia, a medium-sized city near the country’s center, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews lived as neighbors, their ethnic and cultural differences blurred by 70 years of Soviet rule. As for Vassily, for 12 years he had shared a one-bedroom apartment with his kindly third wife, Sophia, a Russian whose parents had perished in Stalin’s purges.
Ukrainians and Russians share much of their culture and history, and an estimated 11 million Russians have Ukrainian relatives. Millions more have Ukrainian spouses and friends. Like me, many have memories of spending summers in Odesa, Kherson and elsewhere in Ukraine, a country that Russians call their “brotherly nation”. The two people also fought alongside each other in the second world war – which in Russia is still sometimes called the great patriotic war – and lived side by side under Soviet tyranny and repression.
Alex Halberstadt is the author of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and other publications
