Owning Their Ukrainian Identity Is an 'Act of Resistance' for These Stanford Students

On the eve of Catarina Buchatskiy’s 13th birthday, on Nov. 30, 2013, Ukrainian police attacked protesters in her hometown of Kyiv.

As Buchatskiy entered young adulthood, those protests changed everything for her and her country. It couldn’t have been a better introduction to her teenage years, she said.

Those protests, known as the Maidan uprising, decried former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to back out of a trade agreement with the European Union and instead remain more closely tied to Russia. More than 70 people were killed and hundreds were wounded in clashes between protesters and police.

Buchatskiy — now a 21-year-old international student at Stanford University studying international security — said it was the first day that Ukraine woke up and started taking its sovereignty more seriously. It was at that point, she said, that she realized she was part of something bigger than herself.

"That was the first awakening of my Ukrainian identity, because this happened on a day so monumental — not just to me personally," Buchatskiy said. "It became a day monumental to the entire country."

Yanukovych reached an agreement with opponents on Feb. 21, 2014, including imposing constitutional changes, but he fled to Russia that same day. Less than a month later, Russian President Vladimir Putin took control of Crimea.

Russia’s intense bombardment of the port city of Mariupol this week — including a strike on a hospital that included a maternity ward — is part of an apparent attempt to link Crimea with Russia along Ukraine’s southeastern coast. Russia’s attacks have caused the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

Another of 10 Ukrainian international students currently enrolled at Stanford, 19-year-old Andrii Torchylo, said that historically, every attempt Ukraine has made to build a democracy has been met with strong Russian opposition. He said Russia’s current attacks on Ukraine are an attack on democracy in Eastern Europe.

"If Ukrainian people are able to overthrow our tyrant, that means that Russian people can stand up to Putin. And that's what's happening right now," Torchylo told KQED last week. He is studying theoretical physics at Stanford and aims to graduate in 2024.

Thousands of miles away from their homeland, Buchatskiy and Torchylo said one way they can contribute to the fight is to keep control over the narrative of their identities. Both students said the fact that Ukraine's identity existed before Russia’s is often omitted from history.

Torchylo said there are very few Russian textbooks that recognize the existence of Ukrainian identity and include the colonization of Ukraine by Russia, but Ukrainians are learning to distinguish accurate historical facts from Russian propaganda.

Buchatskiy said she feels a responsibility to change that narrative. She has been affected by Russian propaganda firsthand and said it’s different from what Americans think propaganda is, because it’s not always as obviously recognizable as "fake news" and aims to instill pro-Russian sentiment. She said Russian propaganda undermines Ukrainian independence and influences Ukrainians to think that Russia was a better country.

She said when she was younger she felt an "inferiority complex" of being Ukrainian that wasn’t "easy to describe."

The annexation of Crimea challenged the validity of Ukrainian identity being separate from that of Russia, by weaponizing the use of the Russian language and saying it made Ukraine all the more part of the Russian empire. Buchatskiy stopped speaking Russian to preserve her Ukrainian identity.

"When those choices that you make every day — even the choice of what language you speak — when that's challenged, and [you're] told that choice makes you this, or makes you that," Buchatskiy said, "you come to realize that you have a personal responsibility in every choice you make to ensure that you are preserving your own identity and culture in it."

Now, she’s doing everything she can to do right by Ukraine. She said her decision to study international security at Stanford is her way of contributing to her country, calling it an act of "defiance."

"Every moment I spend being Ukrainian and protecting my Ukrainian-ness is a moment of defiance, and an act of resistance. Because there's people out there that don't think that we should exist," Buchatskiy said.

Torchylo’s family in Ukraine is doing all they can to protect their homeland — and he's doing everything he can in Palo Alto. He’s been attending protests and calling for donations to the Ukrainian army, for Western powers to continue taking steps to debilitate Russia’s economy and for educating non-Ukrainians about the country's history. He, too, said the conflict was bigger than himself.

"It’s more important than just my life, or my family’s," Torchylo said.

In December, Ukrainian officials estimated that 94,000 Russian troops circled the Ukrainian border. Torchylo recalled feeling that tension during his last visit to Ukraine on winter break, something he called his "last Christmas."

Both he and his sister are international students, but his sister decided to take a gap year and remained in Kyiv. His father volunteered for the army after his parents fled their farming town a day before the invasion.

"People are not supposed to just stand by and watch how the country of the aggressor [is] bombing Ukrainian cities like Nazis did in 1944," Torchlyo said. "It’s not supposed to happen."

While he said he feels "pathetic" for not returning to Ukraine to join the physical fight, he said he knows the Russian government is targeting the most educated and patriotic Ukrainians.

"When Russia attacks, their main goal is to kill the most patriotic, the most pro-democratic people of Ukraine — because those will be the ones who first volunteer to the army," Torchylo said.

Buchatskiy said she felt immense pride to see average Ukrainians taking arms to defend their homeland, and decided to help in any way she could. She's booked a one-way ticket to Poland and will reunite with friends at the Polish-Ukrainian border.

She said she is dropping out for a semester to serve humanitarian aid and distribute supplies. Some professors at Stanford put together a "military-aid" backpack filled with supplies for her trip.

Torchylo said he debated whether to fly to Ukraine and pick up a gun, but decided to remain at Stanford after speaking to a professor who told him that while it's much harder to live for your country than die for your country, it's more useful.

"I see my mission right now is to get as much as I can out of my Stanford education to come back to Ukraine to help rebuild my country," Torchylo said.

This story has been updated to note that Buchatskiy does not intend to work with the Red Cross, and that Russian textbooks often have not recognized Ukrainian identity (as opposed to Ukrainian textbooks, as the story originally stated.)