Eighty-one years ago today, Nazi Germany was defeated. Millions died to make that defeat possible. Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Jews, Poles, Roma, Indigenous soldiers from across the Soviet Union, Allied forces from around the world. Their memory belongs to all of humanity, and it deserves better than what the Kremlin has done with it.
Today in Moscow, tanks might not be rolling through Red Square, but they keep destroying the land where people of Ukraine live. A state that invaded Ukraine in 2014 and launched a full-scale war in 2022 will claim to honour those who defeated fascism, while practicing it. That is not a victory parade. It is a desecration. May 9th, in any country still capable of honesty, has to be renamed for what it now reveals: a shame day for the russian people who continue to allow Putin to do what Hitler and Stalin did before him.
There is a growing conversation about what to call this. Ruscism (рашизм) — the term Ukrainians have used for years and that Timothy Snyder helped bring into Western discourse, names the ideological formation: a fascism that masks itself as anti-fascism, sustained by mass complicity. But ruscism alone doesn’t capture the deeper structure. What we are watching is also the violence of Russian imperialism, or in sharper Ukrainian usage, Muscovite imperialism, refusing Moscow’s stolen claim to the heritage of Kyivan Rus. Russia is the last unbroken European empire. Until decolonization becomes visible on russian lands themselves, the killing will continue. Putin’s death will not be enough. The empire has to end.
Germany learned. It took total defeat, occupation, and a generation willing to turn on its parents, but Germany learned, and today stands with Ukraine. Learning is possible. Slow, painful, never voluntary, but possible. We have to believe future generations can do this work, because people are dying right now to give them the chance.
Today, Saturday May 9th at 3:00 PM, please join us at Kamloops City Hall. We have stood here every Saturday since February 24, 2022 — the day the full-scale invasion began. We will keep standing until Ukraine is free.
The second Saturday of May is also our Rushnyk Yednosti — the Towel of Unity. We chose this Saturday deliberately, because it falls in the same weekend as Mother’s Day, and we honour the mothers who give life to future generations, the mothers who stitched these cloths, who passed them down, who carry their children through war and exile and still teach them to hope. As the Ukrainian saying goes: рушник вишиваний, на щастя, на долю дала — she gave an embroidered rushnyk, for happiness, for destiny. That is what a mother gives. That is what we honour today.
Bring an embroidered towel. Any embroidered towel. Ukrainian rushnyky carry centuries of prayer, protection, and memory, and on this day we invite people from every heritage to bring the embroidery of their own ancestors: the cloths your grandmothers stitched, the patterns your people carry. We lay them together. We stand together. We show that the answer to empire is the woven plurality of peoples who refuse to be erased.
And if you have no embroidered towel, paint one. Take a piece of paper, find your colours, and draw the patterns of your people. Sit with your children and paint together. Look up the embroidery of your grandmothers, your great-grandmothers, the patterns your ancestors carried across oceans and borders. Every heritage has its threads: its colours, its symbols, its stories. A child who paints a pattern today learns something about where they come from that no textbook can teach. The painted page laid beside the woven rushnyk says the same thing: we are here, we remember, we stand together.
Bring your towel or bring your paper. Bring your mother, if she is with you. Bring her memory, if she is not. Bring your children, give them this memory to carry. Bring your family. Bring a friend who has not yet stood with us.
3:00 PM. City Hall. Kamloops.
Слава Україні. Memory eternal to all who died defeating Nazism. Memory eternal to the mothers. May ruscism follow Nazism into history.
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