It’s not an easy task to speak with someone belonging to a people oppressed like the Ukrainians are currently; you might expect to feel pity, shyness or horror.
None of those feelings came to me when I spoke to Alla Pysana, an active member of the Ukrainian Community in Turin, Italy, which has organized many sit-ins and demonstrations for peace since the Russian Invasion began.
Pysana, who’s an employee in the Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Ukraine in Turin, appeared rather determined and sure about what she was saying, demonstrating no weakness except the natural dismay for the fate of her people.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you back before, I’ve been on the phone all the time”, she starts saying when we start the interview, “I’m from Netišyn, a city in western Ukraine, there I have relatives and friends, as well as all over Ukraine, from where I receive constantly terrible news: in major cities like Lviv sirens sound many times a day for the risk of Russian air attacks. People receives dispatches and guides that illustrate what to do in case of bombings, how to find or create a shelter, and so on”
She is calm when she reports all these predicaments to me, so calm that instinctively I ask her if they had expected the invasion the whole time, despite President Volodymir Zelensky ‘s protestations of alarm from Washington.
“We’ve been at war for 8 years, people are used to it. During the latest weeks the growing tension has been perceived clearly by Ukrainians and the Government provided all the infos about how to behave in case of an open conflict. Of course psychologically it was a shock. Nonetheless, our nationals started to fight for the Fatherland, young people began to enlist voluntarily in the Army, allowing women and children to escape westward”.
The importance she puts on the word “Fatherland” is striking. It is a noun or a concept that we, in the western world do not hear much anymore, maybe fortunately or maybe not. It is impressive seeing how, in such a crisis, the familiar call of the idea of nation plays a major role, without which all would be lost. In some manner it marks the difference of our western comfort from a warfare scenario and It makes you close to understand why, no matter the size of a dire situation, nationalism appears almost everywhere.
Of course such a strong national feeling may be dangerous if it guides towards fascism or Nazism, an allegation Putin made explicitly towards the Ukrainian establishment, calling his invasion a sort of “war of liberation”.
“Lies”, replies Pysana when asked about that, “if you’re Italian and you love your country, are you a Nazi? No, and the same is for Ukraine, where no Nazism issue has ever been in place.”
This fiery answer needs to be fact-checked: Ukraine has indeed a problem with far right paramilitary movements, like Pravyi sektor, (literally Right Sector), which recall the typical fascist cameraderie, gesture and key-words. The Pravyi Sektor’s power lies in the 10,000 members in the corps, which are growing due to the emergency.
The existence of a parallel army with specific political aims is not what could be said to be a core feature in a perfect Democracy, and nobody is brave enough to say that Ukraine has ever been that.
But at the same time anybody can say that a “denazification process” is not what Putin is doing, because most of the people are not Nazi, nor the President himself, who is Jewish. So the Nazi fetish is just part of the fictitious casus belli Putin wanted to create.
Another attempt at false flag was the security of the two separatist Donbass’ Republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, which Moscow recognized just a few days before the invasion.
The Republic of Donetsk tried to open a representative office in Turin back in 2016 and thanks to some links with local politicians it seemed to have succeeded for a bit.
“But they failed and they’re no longer operating” claims Pysana, who declines to comment over the links that the Representative Office had with a local major politician involved in the Regional Government of Piedmont (Turin’s Administrative Region).
The Square in front of the Regional Government’s venue was chosen to be the spot for demonstrations of the Ukrainian Community. This one demands respect for their national identity, but at the same time does not express hatred to the Russians.
“My father was Russian, my mother Ukrainian”, reveals Pysana at the end of our call, “I’ve lived both in Siberia and Ukraine. Of course I felt the difference between the two cultures, but I never experienced discrimination, in either country. That was created by Putin as an excuse to invade.
When I went to my grandparents in Donetsk they spoke Russian and I Ukrainian but we understood each other”
The image given by Pysana’s words of two brotherly peoples torn apart by a conflict is too tough to be understood properly if you don’t live it daily in the cries for help you receive every day from your motherland, even if no longer live there.
The Ukrainian Community abroad risks becoming a new Belarussian one, because if we don’t act, Ukraine might surrender, Zelenskyy might be deposed and then it will be too late to glue together the pieces of the vase. It will be late for almost everything.
But in the meantime the Ukrainian people have already acted without expecting anyone’s help, in a national disillusionment that tastes like pride.
But while it could be a moral victory for them, it is not so far from being the harshest failure in decades for the Western world, which is behaving more fearfully than the Russians are – despite the sanctions.
