Ukrainians will never forget

As the world focuses on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, it’s important to remember that violent death is an everyday occurrence in Ukraine.

On Feb. 10, a Shahed drone, made in Iran and fired by Russia, struck an apartment building in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Seven people died. The entire Putyatin family perished: the father Hryhorii, 38; the mother, Olha, 35, and their children, Oleksii, 7, Mykhaylo, 4, and the 10-month old Pavlo.

Kharkiv announced a Day of Mourning on Feb. 11. One day later, the Putyatins were buried.

The death of the Putyatins is unlikely to move many people outside of Kharkiv. Bombs are exploding in various parts of the world. Civilians are dying. Refugees are fleeing. Children are being killed. The Putyatin tragedy is just one of many, and, like all these tragedies, it will soon be forgotten amidst news of even worse tragedies.

But there is one person who will not forget: Tetyana Putyatina, Hryhorii’s mother. Her words at the burial are worth quoting:

“May all of Russia see what it did! I will never forgive them. For my children and grandchildren. What were they guilty of? May Russia burn, just as my children burned! I will never forgive them, even though I was born in Russia.”

Tetyana Putyatina is probably ethnically Russian, and, like most residents of Kharkiv, she almost certainly preferred speaking Russian to Ukrainian. In all likelihood, she watched Russian television programs and films and listened to Russian music.

She was likely a member of the very constituency Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to be liberating on Feb. 24, 2022.

Instead, Putin has made her into an undying enemy of Russia. Chances are that everyone who attended the funeral shares Tetyana’s views of Russia. And it’s a certainty that the vast majority of Ukrainians, especially in the Russified east and south, is as hostile to Putin and his terrorist state.

The Putyatin case also illustrates how national identity is formed and consolidated. Imperialism, genocide and war — the three key components of Putin’s foreign policy — are never regarded with understanding by the targeted populations. Some people will resist and fight. Most will harbor anger, resentment and hatred of the invader. All will realize that they need to make a choice: to align themselves with the victims, people like themselves, or with the victimizers, people unlike themselves. Fence-sitting becomes impossible, and national identities become forged in the fires of the charnel houses.

This is something the intellectually-challenged Putin has never been able to understand. Death and destruction are no way to court a population. Quite the contrary, they are guaranteed to turn the populace against you. Many Russians greeted the invading Germans in 1941, because they promised relief from the horrors of Stalinism. When it became clear that the Nazis were even worse, Russians died fighting the Germans with Stalin’s name on their lips.

Ironically, in stoking Ukrainian hatred of Russia — and it is Russia that Ukrainians now hate — Putin has effectively promoted Ukrainian national identity and statehood as well as guaranteed that he will not be able to prevail. Even in his best-case scenario — the complete occupation by Russia of Ukraine — Ukrainians such as Tetyana Putyatina will continue to resist and hate Russia as their political and cultural oppressor. Regardless of the outcome of the current war, it will take decades for anything resembling a normalization of Russo-Ukrainian relations to take place.

After all, the current war is far from the first example of Ukrainian resistance to Russian predations. Over the last century alone, Ukrainians resisted Russian imperialism in 1918-1924, resisted collectivization in 1929-1931, waged a guerrilla war that took tens of thousands of Soviet lives in 1944-1955, were in the forefront of the dissident movement in the 1960s-1980s, and led the fight for the USSR’s dismantling in the late 1980s.

And Ukrainians have been fighting Russia and its proxies since independence in 1991: the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Revolution of Dignity of 2014 and now the full-scale war.

Millions of Ukrainians died in the process, but, remarkably, they continued to resist — partly because of their resilience and determination, but mostly because Russia left them no choice: it was fight or die. Putin has already killed tens of thousands. He may, with the help of the U.S. House of Representatives and Donald Trump, manage to kill additional tens of thousands. But he won’t defeat Tetyana Putyatina, because, like her fellow Ukrainians, she will never forget.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”