Shcherbyna became a regional councillor, and a tour guide on Khortytsia island. The pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was later poisoned and disfigured, almost certainly on orders from Putin, campaigned in 2004 as a descendant of Cossacks. Ukrainians felt they were not so much building as rebuilding a country, picking up where the Hetmanate was crushed by Catherine II. The Cossack revival gained momentum with independence in 1991. They suddenly realised they were Ukrainian.” “People wore traditional embroidered shirts and waved Ukrainian flags. “Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union,” Shcherbyna says.

In 1990, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to a Cossack festival there, commemorating 500 years of Cossackhood. He helped to build the reconstructed Sich on Khortytsia island. Shcherbyna stopped speaking Russian and learned Ukrainian. Shcherbyna mans a checkpoint as a community volunteer. Svyatoslav Shcherbyna “got goosebumps” when he learned he was descended from Cossacks. “I got goosebumps when I read about a Cossack garrison called Shcherbyna!” he recalls. He began learning about Cossacks in the late 1980s, when glasnost loosened the Soviet stranglehold on Ukrainian history. When a Ukrainian naval officer on Snake Island in the Black Sea replied to an ultimatum with the now famous words, “Russian warship go f**k yourself,” he echoed the defiance of the Cossack settlement of Konotop, which in the 17th century voted to endure bombardment rather than surrender.Īs a community volunteer, Svyatoslav Shcherbyna (63) mans a checkpoint on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia. When President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refused the US offer to rescue him at the start of the war, he exemplified Cossack spirit. Vladimir Putin has focused his assault on the same lands today, nearly 250 years later.īut Putin did not reckon with the Cossack spirit. Catherine went on to conquer Tatar Crimea and to found Odesa, calling her Ukrainian possessions Novorussia. The Russian empress Catherine II ordered the destruction of the Sich in 1775, ending the Cossack Hetmanate or proto-state and consolidating Russia’s domination over Ukraine. Helmeted soldiers stand at sandbagged checkpoints on the highway bridges which cross it.

Today, Khortytsia, the wooded island in the Dnipro where the Cossack Sich stood, is a Ukrainian military base, surrounded by a minefield. They watched horsemen in Cossack costume and listened to tour guides recounting the legends of the warrior caste whom Ukrainians consider to be their founding fathers.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, tourists from around the world visited a reconstruction of the Sich, the fortress capital built by Zaporizhzhian Cossacks in the 16th century.

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