UKR is a heavily agriculture land, and they love their flowers, especially sunflowers, represented in yellow on their flag. The blue is the sky.
Women often wear flowers in their hair — more than any other country I know of. Wearing flowers has now become patriotic.
Ukraine Character
I’ve never been to Ukraine, though I have met some of its people in the US. From watching “Winter on Fire” (Netflix), and watching the war as it unfolds, I am arriving at the following conclusions:
- They are incredibly brave. Both at Maidan Square where, in the face of large numbers or riot police, the men locked arms. and held their line (December 11). Mariupol, which should have surrendered weeks ago, is still resisting (May 5). Watch this video from Maidan Square in February. They have no weapons, and are being shot at. Yet they come out to help each other. (Warning: One man gets hit in the leg. I think another is killed.) https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1520125695082516487?s=20&t=h8s2oCcgPmdlWMWmAlFxlA
- They understand solidarity, such as I have rarely seen anywhere. The resistance against repeated brutal attacks from riot police only succeeded because they stuck together. 20% of their army is women. See again, the above video. This video of a group singing a favorite song about a national flower, gives you a flavor of what they are about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIUoFuSuvTM
- They are smart. During Maidan Square, they knew not to provoke the police. Their army has already killed a dozen Russian generals, probably using geo-location, and they’ve sunk a battle cruiser — with no ships.
- They are organized. Again, evident in Maidan Square. During the war, they were supposed to lose in a week, out-gunned and out-manned, Kyiv and most of the country still stands.
Ukraine & Russia
Ukrainian and Russian history are somewhat intermingled. Moscow appeared after Kyiv. They share cultures and the orthodox religion. The languages are both Slavic, so somewhat similar, but Russians need some training to understand Ukrainian. I believe it’s similar to a Spaniard trying to understand Portuguese — not easy. In Ukraine, there are Ukrainian and Russian speakers. Both are official languages. Many Ukrainians are bilingual.
Civil War
After the Russian revolution of 1918, civil war broke out — between the Red Army (Bolsheviks, Moscow), the White Army (south, including Ukraine) and the Black Army — also from the south, mainly composed of “free anarchists”, a special term for those wanting all government to be self organized at the local level.
The war was particularly corrupt, nasty and brutal — from all sides. A very good podcast about this is from the Revolutions Podcast, episodes 10.8–10.11 (https://revolutionspodcast.libsyn.com). We can readily assume that there was no love lost between the opposing sides.
1922?
Holomodor
1945 UN
1991
