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12 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 2019 surzhyk (a combination of Russian and Ukrain- ian)! So much for my having learned Russian while studying Ukrainian! The languages may be similar but they are not the same. By this point, Serhii and the other volun- teers had returned from the front after a quick trip to drop off supplies. They found only five men at their usual rendezvous because the rest of their forces (around 100) were i n a zone closer to the fighting. They passed a burned out tank and show - ed us a video they took of it as they drove by. They picked up shrapnel in one of their tires, creating a small leak, and it took them some time to replace the tire. The van we used wa s an old one donated to Serhii by some supporters from California who take time off from work in the United States and join the soldiers at the front during their two week vacations . Brian and I stayed an extra day to tour Dnipro , and Serhii drove us around the military museums and cemetery. Dnipro has suffered the greatest loss of personnel in this war with Russia , and there is a beautiful memorial built in the cen- ter of the city as well as a museum focused on the volunteer army , which is funded exclusively by do- nations. It has a wall dedicated to pictures of each soldier lost; an outdoor exhibit of destroyed army vehicles; a series of photos including the 40% of volunteers who are women (although they serve mostly in the back zone s and not on the front lines); and a bare room devoted to a 360 degree surround film (with ten projectors) of very moving war footage. The cemetery is full of recent graves with wooden crosses indicating th at un known sol- diers who gave their lives in the wa r are buried there . The volunteer army didn’t have dog tags un- til recently , and they are using DN A from parents to match up each unidentified soldier before they place a stone monument with pertinent infor- mation on it. Serhii told us about the battle that took place in Dnipro shortly after the separatists took over Donetsk, a battle in which he actively took part. Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky , who was governor of Dnipro at the time, ordered his supporters to de- fend Dnipro from a takeover by the separatists. De- spite Kolomoyskyi’s questionable business deal- ings, if not for his decision to support Ukraine, Dnipro would have fallen to the Russian - backed separatists. With Dnipro under control of Russia, many believe that the conflict would have spread even further w est. We walked a bit around Dnipro after the military tour Serhii gave us. All the banners were in Ukrainian , but all the people in the restaurants we went to spoke Russian although they switched to Ukrainian once we engaged them in conversa- tion. There were many upscale restaurants with good food , full of people who could afford them. The beautiful regional art work (Petrikivka) was on sale in the park along the main street and there was no other evidence outside the museums we visited that there was a war taking place not more than three hours away. Although we did see a paltry (and peaceful) demonstration taking place as we arrived by supporters of the National Corps, peo- ple protesting recent sea rches by the National Po- lice of the houses of several National Corps mem- bers based in Dnipro, reportedly in response to the Nadia Savchenko affair. On the train rides back from Dnipro to Kyiv and then to Lviv, we were seated next to a man in his forties w ho spoke Russian on the phone, but once Brian and I started speaking to each other in English, he engaged us in English as well . It turned out that he w orked in IT and had spent some time in California and NYC and Florida. Despite being a Russian speaker, for which he seemed apologetic, he identified as Ukrainian (as more than 80% of Dni pro people do) and said his parents speak Ukra inian and his children speak Ukrainian , ex- plaining that Russian was the lingua franca when he was growing up and it was impor tant to speak it to attend university and get ahead in those days. He was very much pro - Ukrainian in his attitudes as many of his compatriots are ( according to sur- veys ) , more so than you would expect from a city so close to Donetsk where many still cling t o a pro - Russian worldview. The trip presented us with a new perspec- tive on the deep social and security challenges that Ukraine faces. We witnessed the daily decisions of individual Ukrainians working to improve their communities and protect their country . D ivisions in Ukraine (often over language and culture ) re- main, but there is also a remarkable unity in the country , and in Dnipro we witnessed the tran- scendence of linguistic and cultural divisions. Through the remarkable work of volunteers serv- ing orpha ns and patriotically supporting the sol- diers defending their country, we were honored to play a tiny role in supporting the o rphanage in Pe- trovsk. Author Oksana Malanchuk was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar 2017 – 2018 in Lviv, Ukraine. A retired Research Investi ga- tor for the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, she is a member of UNWLA Branch 50 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and 3 rd Vice President of the Detroit Re- gional Council.
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