Volodymyr Zelensky
Ukraine President :: April 2022
America’s thoughts and prayers have been centered on Ukraine in the face of the brutal Russian invasion. To honor and acknowledge the important humanitarian and cultural outreach work done in our local Ukrainian-American community at this pivotal time, we asked the Ukrainian American Community Center if there was some local volunteer, staff member, or community member that they would like to see recognized. You responded that the person who best exemplified the Ukrainian spirit and solidarity was President Zelensky. You added that this is likely to be the first of many awards he will receive (!), and that an award in his name would be used for humanitarian aid.
We applaud your choice! President Zelensky has become a hero and a symbol of freedom for the whole world. In the face of numerically far superior Russian forces, he has demonstrated that a free people defending their homeland can find strength and resolve that invaders and usurpers never will. In his daily addresses to the nation and his many speeches to foreign parliaments, he has rallied not only his country but the entire West to the cause of freedom.
President Zelensky’s stalwart leadership of Ukraine against Russian tanks and artillery has caused people all over the world to rethink the democratic freedoms we so often take for granted. Because he is willing to die for his democracy, we value ours more.
President Zelensky also exemplifies the enduring Ukrainian spirit that refuses to be subdued no matter what the odds or the hardships. Although often we refer to the Russian invasion as starting on February 24, we know that even the latest chapter in Russia’s campaign to stamp out Ukraine goes back at least a century.
Ukraine declared its modern independence in 1917 and then bitterly fought against absorption by the Soviet Union until 1922. During the next 70 years Soviet Union persecuted Ukraine’s cultural leaders and tried to “Russify” Ukraine and suppress its language, and Stalin tried to destroy its traditional agrarian way of life through collectivization and deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. Many millions of Ukrainians lost their lives in the Holodomor genocide, the Great Terror, the Gulags and through punitive psychiatry, as well as in the long fight against the Germans and in the Holocaust.
Ukrainian independence fighters, human rights defenders and dissidents continually worked to overthrow the totalitarian communist regime, and finally in 1991 Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union and established a democracy.
The challenges from Russia and Russian-style authoritarianism never ended, however, and democracy has survived only because the Ukrainian people took to the streets in the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014 and have battled the Russian incursions into the Crimea and the Donbas region and now in a full-scale invasion.
And so Volodymyr Zelensky is the latest in a long line of Ukrainian freedom fighters, and through his example the world has come to fully appreciate and respect the irrepressible Ukrainian spirit.
Because of that spirit and because of people like President Zelensky who are imbued with it, Ukraine and its democracy will prevail in this latest Russian assault. Ukraine will survive and prosper. And the world will be reminded of the value of freedom
Congratulations!
Elissa and Bruce Peterson, Founding Members