‘This is a war of destruction. Either we destroy the Russians or they destroy us’

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. 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.

Today, Khortytsia, the wooded island in the Dnipro where the Cossack Sich stood, is a Ukrainian military base, surrounded by a minefield. Helmeted soldiers stand at sandbagged checkpoints on the highway bridges which cross it.

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. Catherine went on to conquer Tatar Crimea and to found Odesa, calling her Ukrainian possessions Novorussia. Vladimir Putin has focused his assault on the same lands today, nearly 250 years later.

But Putin did not reckon with the Cossack spirit. When President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refused the US offer to rescue him at the start of the war, he exemplified Cossack spirit. 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.

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As a community volunteer, Svyatoslav Shcherbyna (63) mans a checkpoint on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia. He began learning about Cossacks in the late 1980s, when glasnost loosened the Soviet stranglehold on Ukrainian history. “I got goosebumps when I read about a Cossack garrison called Shcherbyna!” he recalls.

Shcherbyna stopped speaking Russian and learned Ukrainian. He helped to build the reconstructed Sich on Khortytsia island. In 1990, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to a Cossack festival there, commemorating 500 years of Cossackhood.

“Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union,” Shcherbyna says. “People wore traditional embroidered shirts and waved Ukrainian flags. Their spirit had been awakened. They suddenly realised they were Ukrainian.”

The Cossack revival gained momentum with independence in 1991. Ukrainians felt they were not so much building as rebuilding a country, picking up where the Hetmanate was crushed by Catherine II. 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.

Arrests and beatings

Shcherbyna became a regional councillor, and a tour guide on Khortytsia island. His personal struggle against Russian domination cost Shcherbyna repeated arrests and beatings over the past three decades.

A stallion carried a wounded Cossack hetman or leader across the river to safety, giving the name Zherebets (stallion) to the village on a tributary of the Dnipro where Shcherbyna was born. In one of countless efforts to erase Ukrainian culture, the Soviets renamed the village after a communist hero. The name changed again after independence, but Shcherbyna regrets that residents did not restore its Cossack name.

‘Most of this region is already occupied. My village is shelled every day. There are fresh graves every day’

Sheltering from the sun under the camouflage net canopy which covers his checkpoint, his AK 74 assault rifle resting on his knees, Shcherbyna paints word pictures of Cossacks carrying chaika boats on their shoulders to stage a surprise attack on Turks and Tatars in Crimea. He tells of a French cardinal who hired Cossack warriors to capture a fortress on the English Channel in the mid 17th century, then refused to pay them because they employed magic to accomplish in one night what the French failed to do in 10 years. He tells me of a chest filled with gold on a Turkish ship sunk by Cossacks in the Dnipro. “I grew up on Cossack legends,” he says. “Some may even be true.”

Shcherbyna’s sister still lives in the family home in Zherebets/Tavriyske, very close to the Russian-occupied zone. “Most of this region is already occupied. My village is shelled every day. There are fresh graves every day, and people are losing their health because they are living in fear. This is my native village, where I was born.”

As in Cossack times, there are traitors. Shcherbyna and his comrades recently apprehended a suspected spy. “He was a grandad on a bicycle, poorly dressed, taking pictures for the Russians. He had 200,000 hryvnia (€5,300) in his pockets, to pay others to collaborate. The commander thanked us because he was very dangerous.”

The Cossacks were not an ethnic group, but a combination of descendants of the medieval Kyivan Rus’ (9th-13th century) civilisation that survived the Mongol invasion, and serfs from the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1569-1795). They migrated to the fertile lands of the Dnipro River to live in freedom. The word Cossack, meaning “free man” in Turkish, was first used in 1492 by an Ottoman leader complaining to the Poles of Cossack attacks on his troops.

Over nearly three centuries, Cossacks defended their borders, and concluded shifting alliances with Poles, Russians and Tatars, often enrolled as paid military auxiliaries. They formed an educated elite who created their own Bbroque style and in 1615 founded the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, still a prestigious university today.

‘Typical Cossack’

Andriy Yemets (51) is the director of a children’s theatre and is known to all as Cossack Mamai. “I look like a typical Cossack,” he explains. “Cossack Mamai is usually depicted sitting cross-legged and holding a musical instrument. He is not a specific person but a symbol of patriotism and wisdom. This hairstyle is called a herring. Cossacks are Orthodox Christians and wear one earring to honour their guardian angel, who stands on the right side.”

Yemets began coiffing himself in the herring, a shaved head with a plait or ponytail growing from the top of the skull, in 1991, when Ukraine gained independence. He twirls his long Cossack moustaches with his fingers while talking. “The real explosion of Cossack identity started with the Russian invasion [of Crimea and Donbas] in 2014,” he says. “Whole units, like the Azov battalion, wear similar haircuts, moustaches and earrings. It is popular.”

The hopak, the Cossack dance performed with crossed arms in a squatting position, is Ukraine’s national dance, appropriated by Russia, like borscht soup, which Unesco recently recognised as Ukrainian. “When there is a beautiful Ukrainian song, they translate it into Russian and say it is a Russian folk song,” Yemets complains. “In the 18th century, Muscovy stole the name Kyivan Rus’ and started calling themselves Russians.”

Yemets collects detritus from the war in the entrance to his theatre: a bullet-punctured flak jacket, a bloodied tourniquet, casings from spent bullets, missiles, rockets and artillery shells. The biggest casing is from a Russian Smerch (“tornado”) rocket. “The original rocket was twice this long,” he says. “This one shelled our position. I am a volunteer in the territorial defence, but I don’t fight.”

Crates of potatoes, cherries, pickles and biscuits, all donations for the defence forces, are stacked in Yemets’s theatre. Entry to Saturday morning performances is free. Theatre-goers ignore air raid sirens. “After the play, the audience donates whatever they want to, for flak jackets and drones for the army.”

Cossacks threw their cylindrical, fur-covered hats in the air to elect their hetman or leader. Every Ukrainian president since 1999, including Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has taken the oath of office on the Peresopnytsia Gospel, the earliest Ukrainian Bible, transcribed in the mid 16th century. A mace, symbol of Cossack power, is placed beside the president.

From the early 19th century, memories of the Cossack Hetmanate inspired Ukrainian aspirations for democracy and independence. Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, wrote about Cossacks. Nikolai Gogol created the Cossack character Taras Bulba, an ageing Zaporizhzhian Cossack who travels with his sons to the Sich. Lord Byron wrote an epic poem entitled Mazeppa, about the Cossack hetman who struck an ill-fated alliance with Sweden against Russia.

“We will give our bodies and souls for freedom. We shall prove, brothers, that we are from the line of Cossacks,” says a verse from the Ukrainian national anthem, written in the 19th century.

Defiant letter

The Ukrainian-born painter Ilya Repin depicted the true story of Cossacks writing an insulting, defiant letter to the Turkish sultan to refuse his patronage in 1676. That letter is studied by every Ukrainian schoolchild, and was immortalised by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in verse.

Vladyslav Moroko, the director of culture for the Zaporizhzhia region, holds a doctorate in history. He meets me at the Kozak (as Cossack is spelled in Ukrainian) Palace convention centre, which has been transformed into a refugee hub. Food and hygiene supplies are packaged in plastic bags bearing the seal of Zaporizhzhia, which shows a swaggering Cossack in leather boots, balloon trousers, tunic and fur hat armed with a sabre and musket.

“It is a myth that Cossacks were only warriors,” Moroko says. “The American far west was very similar to our Cossack lands. They were fighting and planting. They fled serfdom in Poland and came to the fertile land along the Dnipro. Cossacks, like American pioneers, pushed across a continent. One reason the Russians wanted to destroy Cossackhood was that it represented a new, proto-capitalist economic system. They sold what they grew. What made the US rich was destroyed here. In the steppes, the strongest army prevailed: Huns, Mongols, Russians.”

‘There is not a single Ukrainian generation that did not take part in a revolt or uprising. There is not a single Russian generation that did not take part in a war of conquest.’

Like every Ukrainian I have interviewed, Moroko sees his country’s tortured history with Russia as a continuum. “There is not a single Ukrainian generation that did not take part in a revolt or uprising,” he says. “There is not a single Russian generation that did not take part in a war of conquest.”

Before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, Moroko was fired for teaching in the Ukrainian language. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Donbas, he joined a group of historians. “We went from one recruitment centre to another to tell them that Russians came here to kill us, as they have always done throughout history.”

The Cossack hold over the Ukrainian imagination is all the more impressive because the 15th-18th century warriors did not inhabit all of present-day Ukraine. President Zelenskiy, who is Jewish and a native Russian speaker, may be Cossack in spirit but it is doubtful he has Cossack blood.

Like Shcherbyna and Yemets, Moroko claims Cossack heritage. “We consider we are all descendants of Cossacks,” he says. “My surname means ‘trouble’ in Ukrainian, or one who make trouble if you touch him. The Cossacks have always been a nuisance to anyone who messed with them.”

Moroko was surprised to find that his surname is shared by many of the residents of Sumy, 450km due north of Zaporizhzhia. He became friends with an army officer called Moroko there. “Unfortunately, he has shrapnel in his brain now, because he gave his helmet to a private.”

‘Fight to the death’

Moroko echoes two themes often heard in Ukraine. “This is a war of destruction,” he says. “Either we destroy them, or they destroy us. It is a fight to the death.” Ukrainians also believe that this is the long-delayed conflict which they escaped when they left the moribund Soviet Union in 1991.

“Starting on February 24th, this is our war of independence,” Moroko explains. “Before, Russia was trying to fight a proxy war, playing around with ‘little green men’. Now they are fighting in the open.”

Before we part, Moroko takes me to see a street mural which he commissioned as the region’s cultural director. He deliberately placed it opposite the office window of a university professor whom he accuses of adopting the Russkiy mir or Russian world view.

Three figures appear against the blue and yellow background of the Ukrainian flag, above a wheat field, and red poppies in tribute to the dead. To the left, a bare-chested Cossack warrior wearing the herring and long moustaches. In the centre, a general from the 1917-1921 Ukrainian war of independence. To the right, a present-day Ukrainian soldier decked in Nato-style uniform. “With strong faith in the final victory of Ukraine,” it says.

The mural is marred by several brown splotches. “Paint bombs, thrown by the [pro-Russian] separatists,” Moroko explains.