It has been almost three years since the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity, but despite the profound changes in public consciousness, no government-led reform has been an obvious success, and in many fields, the reforms have clearly stalled. This has led to despair spreading within our society and the Ukraine fatigue taking hold in the West. Apparently, overcoming these tendencies was a reason behind the cabinet’s recent approval of the Concept of Popularization of Ukraine in the World and Promoting Its Interests in the Global Information Space. However, it is clear that no popularization effort will work without substantive changes on the ground. The timing of these changes was among the issues raised by Den/The Day’s journalists during a recent interview with Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Viacheslav Kyrylenko who came to our office.
“The clan system has not disappeared yet, but it is reeling mightily,” Kyrylenko believes. “We are living through the moment of truth: either we will overthrow it for good, or it will regain its strength, fortify itself, and thus lay the groundwork for future dramatic events. The latter would be inevitable, since the Ukrainian nation has a Cossack nature, it will never accept enslavement. It has found inner strength even when it seemed to be lacking any. I am convinced that neither Leonid Kuchma’s ongoing participation in the Minsk peace process nor continued political role of several other members of the old regime affect the overall trend. The overall trend is now pointing to Europe... Ukraine is witnessing the beginning of a large-scale decolonization program. After all, development of the national film industry, banning Russian propaganda books and other such processes mark, in fact, the beginning of decolonization, which we seemingly had no time for before. Whenever pro-European forces came to power, it was already clear after six months that no actual power rested with them. Now, these negative trends have not become evident yet. Although, of course, there are a lot of negative phenomena worth fighting against, but most importantly, the public has to avoid despair.”
Den/The Day presented the vice prime minister of Ukraine with new books from our Library series and our “treasure chest.”
The complete interview with Kyrylenko will be published in the coming issues of this newspaper.
