And yet I'm older than my country's independence.
For most people, the independence of their birth state is so ironclad they rarely get to really think about it. Others won independence centuries ago and mark it as an occasion for a fun celebration, rather than one focused on thinking about what they as a nation sacrificed to be free.
I believe there are few, if any, nations in the modern world where independence means as much today as it does in Ukraine. Ukraine's fight for independence took centuries. And when we finally got it after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its successor, Russia, soon tried to subjugate Ukraine again. For my generation, an independent Ukraine was something we first took for granted, and then learned the hard way to cherish.
I was two years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. My early years took place in the tumultuous 1990s, when a newborn state was stumbling its way into democracy. It was a rocky transition, and that's how it felt, even for children. Our 1990s were marked by poverty, unemployment and uncertainty about the future.
Things soon got better economically, but we were still discovering Ukrainian identity, slowly carving it from the ever-present Soviet cultural legacy. There is no bigger manifestation of it than the language we speak.
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