Why Ukraine Matters to Me, 3 VIKTOR KRAVCHUK

 Why Ukraine Matters to Me, 3

VIKTOR KRAVCHUK
AUG 9, 2025
This is part 3 of our three-part series called Why Ukraine Matters.

Why Ukraine Matters to Humanity, 1
VIKTOR KRAVCHUK·
AUG 4
Read full story: https://substack.com/redirect/e6108b20-0699-4bc1-b63f-3cd6a9794888?j=eyJ1IjoiOG1hOTIifQ.cIj3zdxxgLAE0Kc2Pv6DJk4AEqMTg7YdnfnuGKbdL0Y

Why Ukraine Matters to You, 2
VIKTOR KRAVCHUK
AUG 7
Read full story: https://substack.com/redirect/8850ffb1-df73-45f5-8b13-57fe0f562efe?j=eyJ1IjoiOG1hOTIifQ.cIj3zdxxgLAE0Kc2Pv6DJk4AEqMTg7YdnfnuGKbdL0Y

This one today is the easiest and the hardest at the same time, but let’s say it before I overthink and let it slip away…

PART III- WHY UKRAINE MATTERS TO ME

I have said so many times I am here because of freedom and democracy.

Said those words so many times that I’ve worn them out, and every time I write them again I feel something weird.

Something like I should not be repeating things that so obvious and so tangible.

And I am tired.

So tired that I saw myself wondering if there’s a way to just give Russia some of our land and stop this hell.

But then I think of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a man who carries a strength I don’t have.

How he holds the weight when so many of us can barely stand.

And then I remember that this is not for me.

Not even for my family or my child I haven’t seen in years.

It’s for the ones whose names I’ll never know.

The ones who carried my blood before Ukraine even had a name on a map.

Before our language was written, but already spoken in fields and kitchens.

It’s for the Cossack warriors who carried the dream of a free Ukraine across the centuries.

It’s for the poets and philosophers who wrote our soul into existence and died for it.

For Vasyl Stus, who died in a prison colony because he dared to believe in Ukraine.

For Taras Shevchenko, who carried our heart in his poems when it was illegal to even speak it.

It’s for those who defied the language bans and the book burnings.

Also for all those prison cells that held our best and brightest just for loving their own land.

It’s important to remember every single day that I grew up in the ashes of those fights.

The ashes from all of them, who were already fighting the same enemy, already defending the simple right of existence.

They died for this land.

The land our invaders say is not real.

But it’s here. I see it, breathe it.

I live it.

Even when so many can’t, because they are far from home, or because they will never open their eyes again.

This land is not just under my feet.

It’s inside me.

It’s not an idea.

It’s me.

I am them, all those ancestors.

I am the dream they carried.

That’s why I’m still here.

I carry inside me generations of people who paid with their lives for the right to belong to this land.

For the dream that Ukraine would matter.

And it does.

That’s why Ukraine matters to me too.

—Viktor

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