Gabi is 26 years old, she was born in the Carpathian Ukraine and she grew up there. Even today she calls the territory a “Mecca of tolerance” with love in her voice, because so many ethnic groups are living there that in the end everybody is a minority. “The current territory of Ukraine belonged to five different countries in the last 100 years, so we are quite flexible,” she says.
Ukraine has been independent only since 1991 and it was somewhat later before the television started to air shows and news in the Ukrainian language. Gabi remembers that she and her girlfriends always used a kind of Babylonian mixed language, consisting of Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian and some slang. Still, the western region of the country is not representative of the whole of Ukraine at all.
The situation today
“The average citizen thinks that joining the EU brings well-being,” Gabi says. However, not many knew exactly what it meant. They rather focused on a wish, behind which the actual “how” of the realisation disappeared.
The revolutionary events on the central Maidan in Kiev had shown the diversity of political streams. Besides the ultra-rights, the nationalists and the oppositionist Julia Timoschenko, the former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko had been there, trying to style himself as the figurehead of the protests in hardly understandable Ukrainian. “The singer Russlana (winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2011) was much more credible,” says Gabi.
The singer had tried to mediate between the parties and she warned the protesters not to attack the police. On the other hand, Klitschko had failed in his self-imposed role, and so did the ceasefire that he negotiated with former state president Janukowitsch, who fled the Ukraine for Russia.
“To be honest, I don’t understand this fight for independence,” Gabi says. “Ukraine is so strongly dependent on Russia that independence does not seem so tempting at all.”
She says a Ukrainian practice may explain the deaths on the streets. “In Ukraine it is usual to pay for demonstrators and rioters. I am sure that much money was distributed in the crowd on all sides this time as well.”
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