The Victory Day is a special holiday. It is very personal for everybody. As each of us has a story of his family, a personal tragedy, and personal pertinence to the feat. Someone’s ancestor died in one of the battles of the Great Patriotic War.

Someone’s ancestor reached Berlin. Someone did not survive the horrors of the Blockade or concentration camps... It is all these stories that the Victory in the most horrific, the bloodiest war in the history of mankind was made up of.
And when today some call for rewriting history, cancelling the Victory Day, and subjecting our past to revision, it is, at the very least, sordid. By consenting thereto, we betray our ancestors. We doom them to a second death by shooting at their memory and, willingly or not, become accomplices of the Nazis.

We are made to forget that the basis for the Victory was the common struggle against the Nazism of the Orthodox peoples who have come out of one Kyivan font of Baptism and who have now become enemies and are looking at one another through a gun sight. Notwithstanding the pain we are feeling because of the present war, we are simply obliged to remember the tragedy and meaning of the Great Patriotic War.

Nowadays, celebrating the 9th of May in Ukraine is already courage and a manifestation of a particular civic position. This year, the 9th of May is not celebrated as a national holiday for the first time. Throughout the last ten years, the authorities have been trying to eradicate this holiday, foul it up, and brainwash the citizens with lies and propaganda. But if our ancestors were true victorious heroes, does it befit us to show cowardice and bend to the actions of people who have lost their conscience?
I wholeheartedly greet all the descendants of the victors and the veterans who are still alive (there are very few of them left!) on the Victory Day! A lot of warm and heartfelt words can be said on this day. Chinghiz Aitmatov once wrote brilliant lines about mankurts — people whose memory was artificially erased after they fell into dependence upon stronger conquerors. So, I wish all of us not to become mankurts, not to give in to the fashion for false history, but carefully preserve our gratitude to those who earned the right to life for us. For it is thankful memory of the heroism of our ancestors that makes us People.

Happy Great Victory Day, friends!