Ukrainian history is incredibly complex, and it is even harder for foreigners to study because many foreign-language sources about Ukraine were not written by Ukrainians themselves, but often by people who viewed Ukraine through a colonial or imperial lens, or who were commissioned or funded by those same forces to produce such works, while at the same time supporting policies of disinformation against any open expression of Ukrainian identity.
But despite understanding all of this, I still find it emotionally difficult not to react when someone from abroad — someone who barely knew anything about Ukraine before 2022 — starts repeating claims they read "in some tumblr post", "on reddit" and so on, while never checking who exactly wrote it in the first place.
What also makes it worse is when these people do not understand the historical context of Ukraine's relationships with neighboring states, and, most importantly, the formation of people's identities across all of these countries, yet still project their own historical perspective onto someone else's history without any understanding of the differences.
For some reason, this can be incredibly fucking difficult for me emotionally. Because on top of the stress of Russia's genocidal war, you also feel that the world is constantly examining both you and your country piece by piece, freely criticizing and reshaping it according to its own views, pressuring you to see yourself the way they want you to see yourself, constantly weighing whether you are "a good nation or not" — all while knowing that they have this privilege over you, where their opinion of you can genuinely affect matters related to your protection and even your ability to stay alive.
And so you find yourself in a constant situation where you have to become your own advocate and historian for others, or else be consumed by the feeling that everything has already been decided for us.
