“Don’t forget about us,” Jerry Dutkewych, the first director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine, said to me as I stood up to leave my exit interview in August of 1997. At 23, it was hard to know what role my time in Ukraine would play in my life. I could hardly imagine that almost 25 years later the whole world would be lit up with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. Ukraine is showing the world how its years of nation-building and democratization have led to a united and dedicated resistance to autocracy and aggression. In a time when our own democracy has seemed on the brink, Ukraine is reminding us what it means to fight for freedom and justice.
Since 1992, the United States Peace Corps has sent thousands of volunteers to Ukraine, more than most countries in the world. I was in the fifth group and was one of the first Americans that my neighbors, students, and English teacher colleagues had ever met. I taught English in a high school in the southern city of Mykolaiv. I learned both Ukrainian and Russian (Mykolaiv was a predominately Russian-speaking city). It was the first time I had encountered life in a bilingual environment, and that experience ended up shaping my career as a linguist, for which I am very grateful.
As Peace Corps volunteers, we were there for both economic and political reasons. The country was in major transition — poverty and hunger were prevalent in some regions, the elderly were suffering without regular welfare payments, businesses were trying to privatize, teachers were changing the way they taught, organized crime and human trafficking were on the rise, and heroin addiction, AIDS, and suicide were all problems that everyday citizens were dealing with, some for the first time. Some people were nostalgic for the more stable days of the USSR, but they were also hopeful about new contact with the West and the opportunities for new business ties, trade, travel, and education. Ukraine was looking West, and we were there to help in the small ways that we could.
During my two years, I had many conversations with Ukrainians about the changes in their country, comparing what life was like in the U.S. I talked to people about anything they wanted to know — religion, homelessness, or who my favorite author was. I helped my English teacher colleagues write a textbook and my friends, who were musicians, translate their lyrics.
I remember one afternoon in particular when the German language teacher came and sat down in my classroom. “We don’t know how to do democracy,” she said. “We have never had a democracy.” But Ukraine and Ukrainians have proven that they do, in fact, know how to do democracy and do it well. They have protested rigged elections, fought for their rights to trade with the EU, and maintained a free press and free speech despite consistent pressure from the Kremlin. They have cautiously promoted language policies that valorized the Ukrainian language and sought to unify the country while at the same time including rights for Russian speakers.
Ukraine is the borderland of Europe (the word literally means “on the border”). It sits between Russia and all of the democracies that make up the so-called West. The country is a battleground — economically, politically, and socially. Ukrainians have been required to disagree with their own kin to create the country they have become, to fight their own Slavic neighbors for their freedom. And by doing so, they are protecting us all.
In 1994, the United States and Russia signed a treaty with Ukraine that promised Ukraine protection in return for the removal of nuclear missiles back to Russia. That treaty was broken in 2014 when Russia took Crimea, and we did not come to help. That is part of the reason why we are where we are today — on the brink of a larger war, engagement of NATO, the EU, and possibly the U.S. As historian Allan Lichtman has put it, “the West’s failure to defend Ukraine will go down as one of the great mistakes of history.”
We will always remember Ukraine for the bravery and strength they have shown this week. We will remember the heroism of everyday citizens, the defense of Kyiv against all odds, and President Volodymyr Zelensky going into battle with his troops. Ukraine deserves our full support. For me personally, I realize that it was a mistake to not return to that place that provided me a better education than all of my years in college and graduate school. I will be returning to Ukraine to visit my former host sister and students as soon as I can.
Lyn Wright is an associate professor of applied linguistics in the English Department at the University of Memphis. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) and former Fulbright Fellow (Russia).