“This year, Christmas won’t be a routine holiday,” Christian Caryl writes in Opinions. “It will give Ukrainians one more occasion to make an emphatic statement about who they are — and their determination to survive as a nation.”
Kyiv’s army as a collection of"fighters against Orthodoxy” whose leaders include “Protestants, Uniates [Greek Catholics] and atheists.” The same writer denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s offer of a truce around Dec. 25 “because the leadership of the Russian army is Orthodox and for them Christmas is Jan. 7.”
Ukrainians respond with a shrug of contempt. “My family made the shift [to Western Christmas] 10 years ago,” says political consultantAdvertisement The embrace of Dec. 25 mirrors a larger cultural, political and economic reorientation. In 2013, tens of thousands of Ukrainiansto protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to scrap an economic cooperation agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych’s subsequent downfall prompted Putin to seize Crimea and send Russian troops into eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Since then, however, the Kremlin’s aggressiveness has only accelerated Ukrainians’ determination to reject everything it stands for. Close economic and political ties with Europe are now taken for granted. Once ardently pro-Russian politicians have morphed into Ukrainian patriots. And Ukraine’s once-tentative military cooperation with the West has attained a scale unimaginable just 12 months ago.
So pay attention as Ukrainians gear up for the holidays amid the cold, the darkness, the death and the suffering imposed on by them by Putin’s regime. This year, Christmas won’t be a routine holiday. It will give Ukrainians one more occasion to make an emphatic statement about who they are — and their determination to survive as a nation.
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