As nine-year-old Yulia Mykytenko sat on her father’s shoulders amid a sea of orange-clad peaceful protesters in Kyiv, she had her first stirrings of what she would now recognise as national identity. She had been born in the early days of independent Ukraine. As she grew up in the 1990s, her family spoke Russian at home, and her father, Mykola, clearly felt an affinity with the Russians.
That would change with the Orange Revolution of late 2004 as huge protests gripped Kyiv’s maidan (central square) against the falsified results of a presidential election meant to bring Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych to power. She felt more like a tourist than a demonstrator at those first protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, part of what would become known as the Orange Revolution, but they awoke a serious interest in her country’s identity. After school, she attended Kyiv Mohyla University, where she studied the Ukrainian language.
Around the same time, she made a conscious decision to start speaking Ukrainian in her daily life and joined a pro-Ukrainian civic movement called Vidsich (‘Rebuff’), which campaigned to boycott the Russian goods which at the time were still ubiquitous. She turned 18 in the summer of 2013, a few months before what has become known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych had come to power in fair elections in 2010, but in late 2013, after months of playing the EU and Russia off against each other, he announced that he would not sign an EU association agree.