If one were to design a bingo card about poor media coverage of Ukraine, the text on the free space would have to be “Two Ukraines.” Specifically, the “two Ukraines” we read or hear about in the most superficial coverage of the country by inexperienced commentators are the “Ukrainian-speaking west” and “Russian-speaking east.” Ever since the 2004 Orange Revolution thrust the country into Western news cycles, Western correspondents and pundits wholly unfamiliar with Ukraine have embraced what was originally a Kremlin-spun tale of a country hopelessly divided by language. It was simple, familiar – and totally wrong.
Any Ukraine-based journalist, or any Ukrainian for that matter, knows how ridiculous this tired trope is. Regardless of which language they prefer to speak in day-to-day life, virtually all Ukrainian-speakers are fluent in Russian and vice versa. The divide in terms of who uses which language primarily is more rural versus urban than east versus west. Many people whose language contains a lot of Russian identify on censuses as Ukrainian speakers, and even the definition of what is Ukrainian and what is surzhyk – meaning a mixture of both languages – is fluid as you travel from one end of the country to the other. Bilingual conversations using Russian and Ukrainian simultaneously also occur.
It is for this reason that the Washington Post’s op-ed by Henry Olsen on the topic of Ukraine’s March 31 presidential election provoked such profound cringing on Twitter from so many Ukrainian and Ukraine-based colleagues, commentators, and friends. Granted, it’s an opinion piece, but as the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” And the article in question can certainly be challenged on factual grounds.
Things go horribly awry from the second line, where Olsen writes of “ethnic voting divisions.” No such division exists. Had he even bothered to look at a map of the election results, or even the results themselves, he would have seen that over 80 percent of the population voted against incumbent Petro Poroshenko – is Ukraine 80-percent ethnic Russian in his mind? Looking only at the winner of the first round, Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, his 30 percent doesn’t correspond to the population of ethnic Russians in the country, which is about 17 percent. Later in the article, ethnicity is switched for language, yet even then the numbers don’t add up – 68 percent claim Ukrainian as their primary language.
Next Olsen tries to give us a geography lesson, but again fails as we see that Zelenskiy managed to win western Ukrainian regions such as Volyn, Chernivtsi, and the most western of all – Zakarpattia. Also interesting is the voting patterns of soldiers serving in front line areas. Poroshenko, who made “Army” part of his reelection campaign slogan, was expected to carry the armed forces vote. But as Kyiv Post war correspondent Ilya Ponomarenko pointed out, soldiers serving in the Donbas gave him a “poor grade” – out of 79 special polling stations at the front, Poroshenko took only 40, winning 37.6 percent of the vote and roughly tying with his main rival Zelenskiy. In Ukrainian politics, expect only the unexpected.
Olsen goes on to make some predictions that would be laughable were they not so insulting. He says Zelenskiy’s “Russian-speaking voters will want peace with Russia.” I assure you that virtually everyone in Ukraine, regardless of language, would prefer peace with Russia. What they don’t want, is “peace” that surrenders their sovereignty and independence. Plenty of Ukrainians are willing to fight for its freedom, and many of them speak primarily Russian. They come from eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, including the territories occupied by Russia in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and Crimea. Most of my own interaction with military personnel was in Russian, and plenty of video footage online shows Ukrainians using Russian in the thick of combat. In fact, plenty of ethnic Russians fight in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The piece ends with a conclusion that could have easily come from a Kremlin media outlet such as RT or Sputnik. Totally ignoring Ukraine’s diversity, Olsen proclaims Ukraine is two nations trapped in one. Thus, he repeats the Kremlin narrative on two levels. First there’s the myth of a hopelessly divided nation with one half perpetually striving toward Moscow. The other is the idea that Ukraine is some artificial construct that should perhaps just be partitioned a la Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia.
The subtle message to Americans is “Forget Ukraine- it’s just another hopelessly divided Eastern European backwater teetering on the edge of becoming the next Bosnia and Herzegovina.” That may be the author’s opinion, but it bears no resemblance to the facts on the ground. Ukraine is an ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and religiously diverse country, but it is one country. The fact that Vladimir Putin had to use military force to divide it is the proof.
Jim Kovpak is a journalist and satirical writer specializing in Ukraine and Russia.
