At one time, Slava Stetsko, the long-time leader of the Revolutionary OUN, a People’s Deputy of Ukraine for three convocations, predicted: “When the Russian Federation, like an empire, collapses and if the Kuban asks to join Ukraine, why should we refuse it?”
Fifteen years ago, I happened to be in the Kuban, which was settled in 1792 by the Zaporozhians. How much time has passed since then, how much persecution the Kubans suffered for their pro-Ukrainian stubbornness, and the bazaar in Krasnodar still chatters in the language of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks. And what can we say about the remaining villages with Ukrainian names. The tsarist authorities failed to change them at the beginning of the 20th century in order to kill Ukrainian memory forever. And evidence of this is today’s interest of the Kuban people in the origins of their own history, their analysis of those events that made it possible to return to the bosom of mother Ukraine more than a hundred years ago.
More than a hundred years ago, Ukraine could not fully become a cathedral. So huge tracts of its ethnic territories remained under the control of its neighbors. If we talk about the Russian Federation, then from the Starodubshchina, Sloboda, Lower Don, Kuban and Chernomorshchina, as well as from the Belarusian now Brest and Gomel regions, the enemy constantly inflicts deadly blows on the lands of the Ukrainian metropolis. Is this how it should always be? My personal experience of communicating with Ukrainians in these territories indicates that Ukraine has never died there.
