The genocidal attempts of the aggressor to “erase” any mention of Ukraine and Ukrainians from the Crimean cultural space are manifested not only in demonstrative repressions for songs and symbols. For example, last week in occupied Yalta, the aggressor’s special services organized a seemingly “innocent” “national cultural festival” “Borscht Unites”, at which the “key issue” was that supposedly “borscht originated about 500 years ago, and was first mentioned in Novgorod handwritten cookbooks of the 16th century”.
At the same time, such collaborators as Aikui Harutyunyan, “professional Belarusian” Roman Chegrinets and fake “deputy chairman of the Bulgarian national-cultural autonomy” Lyudmila Radeva, respectively, said that borscht can supposedly be “anyone’s” except, of course, Ukrainian. And if this show in the restaurant “Bulba and Salo” still had tragicomic features, then the provocative “exhibition “Travel with the Heart”” held at the Sports Palace of occupied Yevpatoria presented “the cultures of different nationalities of Crimea and Russia,” including “the peoples of the Far North,” and “naturally” except Ukrainians.
The policy of “cultural erasure” of ethnic Ukrainians, both in the described “hidden” cases and in obvious forms, such as the mass destruction of Holodomor monuments carried out by the occupiers recently on the Left Bank of the Kherson region, was previously described by our Association in appeals to the relevant international structures not just as a manifestation of racial discrimination, but precisely as the genocidal practice of the aggressor.
