For better or worse, Ukraine is not a quiet borderland of Europe anymore. We’re a frontier now – and frontiers don’t get omitted from the maps.
10/10

Full essay is in my newsletter: open.substack.com/pub/stasolen...

Ukraine stood up, resisted and turned itself into the shield of modern Europe.

In 2024, abandoning Ukraine would mark the death of Europe – politically, economically and ideologically. More and more people are finally realizing this.
9/

I do feel pleased and relieved about this change. The unfairly ignored Ukrainian kid in me finally feels seen.

But then I remind myself that the price paid for this recognition is human blood.
8/

I don’t have any hard data to support my observations. It’s something that I just see. Or rather, something that I can’t unsee.

After 20 years of noticing Ukraine’s absence on so many maps of Europe, I have a sharp eye for that. I trust my radar.
7/

I’m talking about the political maps that communicate a much subtler concept of Europe.

These maps represent Europe as a shared idea that happens to have real geographical borders. And Ukraine is there.
6/

And, for the first time in my life, I think Ukraine is succeeding at that.
I’m seeing more and more maps of Europe that include Ukraine.

Not the geography maps – those have always existed in a static form and included Ukraine along with the European part of Russia.
5/

Being a borderland is a tough and ungrateful fate. People keep forgetting you exist.

So since 1991, it has been a continuous struggle for Ukrainians to carve a place for our country on the modern map of Europe – both on physical maps and in the minds of fellow Europeans.
4/

Borders mean much more to the people who inhabit them, and Ukrainians are one of Europe’s key border folk.

We have always been, as Serhiy Plokhy put it, “the gates of Europe”: from the spread of Indo-Europeans to the Mongolian invasion and to modern Russian aggression.
3/

Ukraine’s absence always communicated a bitter sense of invisibility. Here I was, sitting in Kyiv, a capital of a dynamic democracy bordering four EU countries.

And yet, apparently, I was not in Europe. Together with my forty million compatriots, I was stuck in a non-place.
2/

Exactly, this is a typical colonial/invader mindset that Russia never grew out from.

Source:
www.ft.com/content/ac39...

То що тепер, підтримувати Ассада? За «стабільність і добробут»?

Ви зараз говорите так само як вестерни говорили про азов у 2014-15 році.

Нагадаю, що ми говоримо про спротив режиму, який вбивав тисячі цивільних хімічною зброєю.

Опозиція ніколи ніде не є ідеальною, тому не бачу сенсу сперечатися про це.

Головне, що ситуація змінюється і застій зрушився. Як це закінчиться— ніхто не знає.