American - Jewish - Ukrainian

A year ago today, residents of Martha's Vineyard stood vigil in support of Ukrainians under Russian assault.

Esther Wang provides a deeply reported glimpse of Watching the War from New York among people of Ukrainian descent a year on. Nothing is simple.

... after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Sophia [a pseudonym] began asking herself if she should describe herself as Ukrainian American — a question she says has been common among her friend group. “Specifically for those who are Jewish, there’s been a real reevaluation of who we are and our identity in the wake of all this,” she says. “It was easier, for decades, to call this conflict not our issue. That it was a ‘brother war’ — that Russians and Ukrainians are both Slavs, they can go fight it out.”

That’s changed for her. Early on, her grandfather’s neighborhood in Kyiv was bombed, and her family in New York didn’t hear from him for three days. She’s also seen these shifts play out among her family members in Brooklyn. One day last year, she recalls, “my grandmother took the remote and changed the TV from the Russian channel to the Ukrainian-language channel. And she never changed it back. I’ve never heard her speak Ukrainian in my life — apparently she’s fluent.”

... Sofia identifies as a leftist and says that over the past year has gotten into her share of debates with other leftists about Russia’s history as an imperialist power, and with those who sneer that she’s a “liberal” when she criticizes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “People don’t really seem to think that there is colonization because Ukrainians are ethnically similar-looking to Russians,” she explains.

There's much more and the entire article is worth reading. It was unlocked when I happened on it, but that may not last.

We in the U.S. don't expect targets of classic land-grab imperialism to look what we label "White"; and many of us expect the imperial invader to be us. This war strains our prior assumptions. May we find and persist in compassion for all.