On the menu today: Brace yourselves, today’s update from Kyiv will get heavy, and tomorrow’s is not likely to be any lighter. Exhibits about the ongoing war in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine and the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War offer vivid examples of how Ukrainians see themselves and this war at this moment. Yet another air-raid siren comes and goes with no discernible danger, and the city’s iconic Ukrainian Motherland Monument makes a highly symbolic, and probably long overdue, change.
Even Ukraine’s Museums Play a Role in Defying the Russians
Kyiv, Ukraine — Thursday was Ukrainian Independence Day, and quite a few Kyiv residents dressed in traditional clothing and draped the omnipresent national flag around their shoulders. The country’s national anthem is entitled, “Ukraine’s glory and freedom have not yet perished,” a message which feels particularly fitting for the moment.
I started my day at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, which is more connected to the ongoing war than you might think. If Vladimir Putin intends to destroy Ukraine’s independence and erase the country’s separate, unique identity, then the country’s national history museum — full of roughly 800,000 artifacts and art laying out the country’s heritage and culture separate from Russia going back roughly a millennium — would be a particularly tempting target to bomb. Shortly after the war started, the museum’s most valuable artifacts and pieces were shipped out to undisclosed locations in western Ukraine. The front of the museum has some sandbags and plywood in place as fortifications. (It did cross my mind that Russia might want to bomb Ukraine’s national history museum on Ukraine’s Independence Day; this is foreshadowing for another air-raid-alert story down below.)
Irina, one of the museum’s English-speaking docents, gave us a thorough and fascinating lesson about Kyiv’s foundation and early history that is, alas, probably not of immediate interest to an American political-newsletter audience. But she also told us that black-market antiquities smugglers and dealers had become more active since the war started, and that Ukrainian law-enforcement authorities had recovered several items that were now in the museum’s collection, including a sword that was several centuries old. The museum accepts certain items recovered from the black market by the authorities, but because the seized items rarely have any verifiable documentation, they present challenges for archeologists, as they can be dated but often their provenance — where and when they were found, what was found near them, etc. — can’t be proven.
The first floor of the national history museum featured a vivid display on the Russian invasion, with bullet-ridden street signs from Bucha, burned-up bulletproof vests and helmets removed from a destroyed Russian BMD transport, notebooks recovered from Russian soldiers, and even a set of pictures of some Russian soldier’s wife or girlfriend. Another display noted that the invading Russians were using the Atlas of Motor Roads of the USSR, which was published in Moscow in 1975 and depicts the highways in Ukraine as they existed in 1974.
At times the exhibit mocked the invaders, displaying some empty bottles liquor found in their forward operating bases and declaring:
The extremely low morale and psychological condition of the russian [sic] military is evidenced by the systematic use of alcohol by the personnel. In the former positions of the occupiers, a huge number of empty bottles of hard alcohol is found. The Ukrainians who survived the occupation say the looting of liquor stores became widespread. . . . Incompetence of the leadership, heavy losses and the use of soldiers as cannon fodder cause them to distrust their commanders.
The [sic] in there is because the descriptions on the displays never capitalized “Russian” or “Vladimir Putin.” How much do the Ukrainians loathe the Russians right now? They won’t even capitalize their proper nouns.
One part of the exhibit featured a stretcher, sticking out from the display and free to be touched, that still visibly had, as the display explained, “traces of blood of a russian [sic] occupier, found at the plant VIknalend (Dymer).” VIknalend was a window factory north of Kyiv.
“Touch the dried blood of our enemies” is the sort of thing that you just don’t find at the Smithsonian.
The third floor was a massive memorial and exhibit on the battle in the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol, which went from February to May 2022 and ended in a Russian victory. Mariupol was effectively leveled in the process, killing anywhere from 21,000 to more than 100,000 civilians. AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, and Lori Hinnant were the last journalists in Mariupol, and offered a harrowing, gripping portrait of fleeing the city as the Russians attempted to hunt down them specifically.
I should note that almost every soldier memorialized in this exhibit was a member of Azov, which has evolved from a regiment to a brigade to a battalion, and is now part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Azov has an infamous reputation here in the West. For starters, Azov couldn’t have picked a logo that looked any more like the Schutzstaffel or SS if they had tried, and there’s no way that they haven’t been informed that using that symbol makes them look like Nazis in the eyes of many Westerners. It supposedly is meant to look like an intersecting “I” and “N” for “Ideya Natsiin” or “National Idea.” The Azovs stick with the symbol anyway in defiance, insisting that the symbol means what they believe it means, not what outsiders from other places contend it means. (Thankfully, in America, we have no idea what it’s like to have a symbol — say, the Confederate flag — and vehement disagreement between locals and outsiders about what that symbol means.)
Second, Azov was sufficiently tied to far-right extremism for the U.S. to ban any military assistance to the group in 2015 . . . then to rescind the restriction in 2016 . . . then to reinstate the ban in 2018 and to reemphasize the ban in 2022. One of the issues has been a dispute over whether Azov qualified as a group barred from receiving U.S. aid under the “Leahy Laws,” which ban the U.S. Defense Department and State Department from providing assistance to a unit of a foreign security force when there is “credible” information that the unit committed a “gross violation of human rights.”
I think this statement from the group in 2015 to USA Today illuminates the problem:
Andriy Diachenko, a spokesman for the Azov Brigade, said only 10 percent to 20 percent of the group’s members are Nazis. “I know Alex is a Nazi, but it’s his personal ideology. It has nothing to do with the official ideology of the Azov,” Diachenko said. “He’s a good drill sergeant and a good instructor for tactics and weapons skills.”
When you publicly insist that your organization is mostly not Nazis, many people in the West will not feel all that reassured. We’re really looking for a zero-Nazi policy from anybody who wants our aid. This doesn’t mean that Putin’s propaganda is correct that Ukrainians are Nazis — for God’s sake, the country elected a Jewish president — nor that the Ukrainian military is morally akin to Nazis. But Azov, even today, probably isn’t as anti-Nazi as we would like it to be. It would be easier for the Ukrainian government to distance itself or denounce the extremist members of Azov if the group’s members hadn’t proven to be such tenacious fighters against the Russians.
Were these exhibits propaganda? If by propaganda you mean false information, then no. If by propaganda you mean information designed to induce or provoke a particular emotional reaction, then yes, absolutely. But whether or not you agree with how the Ukrainians describe and portray events in the Russian invasion, you probably ought to know and understand that this is how they see themselves, and this is how they see their opponents.
Outside of the museum, Irina showed us archeological excavation sites, and we came across several museum employees drying rugs from its collection that were . . . er, ironic in their images of Stalin and Lenin.
At a time when so many in Ukraine justifiably detest everything to do with Russia, the Ukrainian museum staff were taking steps to preserve rugs that celebrated some of history’s greatest monsters from Russia — because the era of Soviet domination is part of Ukraine’s history as well.
At lunch, while we were in the restaurant, I suddenly heard faint air-raid sirens alongside the pop music and other conversing diners, and for a moment wondered if it was part of the song. My traveling companion assured me that yes, it was indeed a real-life air-raid siren blaring down the street outside. Readers, never mind moving to the shelters, no one around me batted an eyelash. Kyiv residents have really gotten used to air-raid sirens over the past year and a half.
From there, it was on to the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, which was featuring a special new exhibit entitled “Ukraine – Crucifixion,” also about the first year of the war, and not sparing in the horror or brutality. A large poster outside the museum was not subtle about how Ukraine sees itself, as “the shield of Europe,” protecting the rest of the continent from a barrage of Russian attacks:
Inside, a video played clips of support for Ukraine from U.S. politicians, diplomats, and celebrities, and the Independence Day message depicted the Ukrainian and American flags alongside each other.
One nearly entirely dark section in the museum’s basement recreated how terrified residents of Hostomel, a northwestern suburb of Ukraine, survived in their basements for 37 days as Russian troops — and apparently quite a few Chechens — occupied the area, until they were fought off by the Ukrainians. In videos, surviving Ukrainian grandmothers and mothers describe how Chechens would periodically enter the basements and declare that they had been sent by Chechen despot Ramzan Kadyrov to rescue them. The Chechen soldiers would then insist upon playing with the Ukrainian families’ terrified children, and make the families record videos thanking Kadyrov for rescuing them. (You can read a more detailed account of a survivor here.) There’s a particular sadism in forcing your hostages to thank your boss for taking them hostage.
Ukraine’s Second World War museum is not far from the Ukrainian Motherland Monument, which is one of the most famous symbols of Kyiv — a 203-foot-tall woman holding up a sword and shield, taller than the 151-foot-tall Statue of Liberty. The photo that ran with yesterday’s newsletter showed workers lifting up a Ukrainian national emblem before mounting it to the shield of the Motherland Monument, replacing the Soviet emblem earlier this month. The “Soviet emblem” they mean is the interlocking hammer and sickle.
The Ukrainian national emblem — ubiquitous in the country — is the tryzub, which is a trident, but also can be interpreted as a falcon or falcon’s claw, and it derives from the seal-trident of Volodymyr the Great, the first Grand Prince of Kyiv. (Hey, our docent Irina’s lesson about the history of Kyiv came in handy after all!)
In the war museum, a staffer made sure that my traveling companion and I saw an exhibit all about the trident, explaining its significance in Ukrainian history. The exhibit description stated, “The temporary exhibition is aimed at a reflection of the most interesting facts from the history of the Trident, drawing attention to the most important stages of its evolving into the state coat of arms, serving as a peculiar response to the actual public questions regarding the reproduction of the Trident on the shield of the motherland monument.”
In other words, “This is our symbol, and it’s been our symbol for centuries, and it’s further proof that we are different from you Russians, and we are not some long-lost part of you.’
Again, this is propaganda, which is not to say it isn’t true. It is meant to provoke an emotional response, but it also reflects the Ukrainians’ sense of who they are and what they stand for. You may see Ukraine differently, but this is how they see themselves in this current moment: They are victims of an aggressor, their soldiers are heroes, their enemy is an irredeemable bunch of brutes and rapists, the United States and NATO are the best allies they could ever want, and there is no sign that anyone is remotely interested in stopping the fight, or opening negotiations anytime soon.
ADDENDUM: I was originally going to offer a “well, duh” response to the headline that “Early Intelligence Suggests Prigozhin Was Assassinated,” in the Wall Street Journal. But I would be a bit surprised if the initial report of a surface-to-air missile were inaccurate, and a bomb exploded on the aircraft or some other form of sabotage caused the crash, as U.S. intelligence believes.
Either way, if this was indeed Putin getting his revenge, note that the Russian dictator presumably had multiple opportunities to assassinate Yevgeny Prigozhin, but he chose to do so in a manner that guaranteed the deaths of nine other people, including the pilots.