I was the only person in my family who voted for Zelenskyy. And because of it, I ended up in a bitter fight with my mother at Easter. What should have been a family gathering turned into a political battlefield.
Army. Language. Faith” will destroy Ukraine, I argued with my relatives. I warned that toxic ethnic nationalism, fused with militarization and hysterical Russophobia, would deepen authoritarianism, normalize censorship and repression, and lock the country into a permanent state of war.
Back then, however, I associated all of this with Poroshenko and his camp - not with Zelenskyy.
Not with the Russian-speaking, secular Jew who promised he would “kneel before Putin” if that was what it took to end the war.
Not with the man for whom Bandera was no hero, and the OUN-UPA were those who had “shot Red Army soldiers in the back.”
I could not have imagined, even in my darkest nightmare, that under President Zelenskyy, neo-Nazis would penetrate virtually every sector of the defense and security apparatus; that Nazi collaborators would be glorified at the state level; that entire military regiments would bear their names.
I never believed that the Azov movement would evolve from a marginal fringe into two full military corps, or that men once involved in pogroms against Roma and Vietnamese communities would receive high military ranks and positions of power.
Most of all, I never imagined that I - a Jewish woman and a Holocaust scholar - would become a target of neo-Nazis directed by the security services of a state whose president is himself Jewish.
Today is a day of reckoning for my political choices. I find myself reflecting on what, if anything, I can still do to help undo their catastrophic consequences.
Marta Havryshko