Cultural combatants

The Ukrainian folk dancers leaping and twirling across the stage under a cloudless September sky never seemed to tire. While the rainbow of streamers flowing from the women’s floral wreath headdresses whipped and fluttered, the dancers’ smiles held steady. Their vibrant costumes included white, blue, and green, but red provided the dominant shade—a tribute to Ukrainian tradition. In Slavic ­cultures, the color symbolizes blood—and life.

The dance performances made up just one part of the three-day Washington Ukrainian Festival at St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Silver Spring, Md. Between performances, visitors munched on piroshki ­dumplings and shopped for unique handmade crafts like the vyshyvanka, a traditional embroidered shirt. Other, less-traditional items made direct reference to Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

“When life gives us lemons, we make Molotov cocktails,” declared one T-shirt emblazoned with an exploding, cartoon-­style bomb. It hung above a table of patches, stickers, and other military paraphernalia in contrast to the festival’s more lighthearted offerings.

The Molotov cocktail is an apt symbol for the Ukrainian cause: a homemade weapon, built by civilians determined to support a battle they are desperate to win. While that fighting spirit remains widespread among Ukrainians and their diaspora in Washington, D.C., recent polls suggest support among U.S. legislators and voters has cooled.

That’s given renewed significance to this annual festival that began in 2002 in the shadow of the capital. While diplomats and professional lobbyists address growing opposition in Congress, Ukrainians living in the United States are ­doubling down on a softer form of cultural diplomacy aimed at shoring up grassroots support for their country’s cause.

The rising disagreement over funding for Ukraine, and open-ended support for the country in general, has come to be known in Washington’s policy circles by its vivid shorthand: “Ukraine fatigue.” It mirrors a discernible trend of waning support across the rest of the country. According to numbers released by Gallup in November, 41 percent of respondents said the United States is doing “too much” to help Ukraine, while just 25 percent say we’re not doing enough. Only 33 percent feel the country is doing the “right amount.” Sentiments also vary drastically along partisan lines: 62 ­percent of Republicans say we’re doing too much, compared with 44 percent of independents and just 14 percent of Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, the question of continued aid to Ukraine complicated proceedings to find a new speaker for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and pass a government funding bill. The House Freedom Caucus and other conservative Republicans have grown increasingly adamant that Washington reduce or eliminate what they say is excessive funding to the beleaguered Eastern European country. A September open letter, signed by more than two dozen Republican senators and House members, vowed to oppose further aid until the White House can provide more clarity on how U.S. funds are being spent.

“What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan? What does the administration define as victory in Ukraine?” the letter demanded to know.

The Ukraine funding debate encountered a new complication when Hamas attacked Israel in early October. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana supports separating funding for Israel from that for Ukraine, while Democrats want the aid packages combined under one bill. Johnson has voted against further Ukraine aid in the past. Democrats, including President Joe Biden, broadly support continued aid to Ukraine. The issue is sure to feature prominently in next year’s presidential campaigns.

For Ukrainians like Tamara Woroby, a university professor who attended the recent festival in a white vyshyvanka with blue floral embroidery, the brinkmanship on Capitol Hill—with Ukraine aid treated as a so-called “political ­football”—sets a deeply troubling precedent.

“It concerns me,” she said in between trading hugs with passersby. Woroby’s Ukrainian parents immigrated to Canada after World War II, and she now serves St. Andrew as president of the parish council.

The desire to help the war effort remains a top priority at St. Andrew. Every week, the church sends a 67,000-pound shipping container of supplies to Ukraine, Woroby told me. A local pharmaceutical group has donated $6 million worth of Ukraine-bound goods through the church’s channels. St. Andrew also printed and delivered 10,000 Ukrainian-language prayer books for soldiers and civilians.

Woroby sees U.S. aid to Ukraine as a cost-effective means of countering Russia, one of the few countries with nuclear weapons, whose potential menace reaches far beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Russia’s aggression remains a daily reality for many ­expatriates who visited the festival. Nina Kravetz, 21, left her native Kyiv before the war to study economics in New York City. Her father is a Ukrainian army general, and her brother also serves in the military, she said. That makes her loved ones—two generations of one family—targets in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Kravetz, dressed for the festival in a black-and-red ­vyshyvanka, came to Maryland from the Big Apple to ­celebrate Ukrainian culture, in spite, or perhaps because, of the war that keeps grinding on.

“There is the war, but this festival is life,” she said.

WHILE THE UKRAINIAN diaspora maintains its grassroots advocacy, Ukraine-focused diplomacy has continued in parallel at the highest levels. In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, then came to Washington to engage U.S. officials at the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. Analysts described the visit as less successful than the one Zelenskyy made to Washington in December 2022, when he addressed a joint session of Congress. Zelenskyy asked to do the same this fall—and House Republicans declined. Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Congress “just didn’t have time.”

Below the commanding heights of international diplomacy, Ukrainians living in Washington are conducting diplomatic efforts of their own. Ukraine House, a cultural center in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood, sits among the capital’s concentration of diplomatic offices, embassies, and ambassadors’ residences. Opened in 2021 with a visit by Zelenskyy, Ukraine House is officially private but exercises well-connected influence in the city, including regular events in “close synergy” with the Ukrainian Embassy, according to the Ukraine House website. Events run the gamut from concerts of Ukrainian folk music played on the bandura, a traditional stringed instrument, to Independence Day socials held every August to celebrate Ukraine’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Marianna Falkova directs Ukraine House. She told me that when the war began last year, “the biggest challenge was to keep on going.” She and her team initially canceled events but reversed course the following month.

“We decided that keeping silent is what Russia wants us to do,” Falkova said, her voice full of indignation. Ukraine House held its first humanitarian fundraiser the same month, together with the U.S. Peace Corps, to help buy and deliver first aid kits to Ukraine.

Today, the organization’s “Unbreakable” program coordinates medical care for Ukrainian victims, mostly children, who need prosthetic limbs after Russian attacks. In partnership with U.S. organizations, the center has so far raised $40,000 to bring five Ukrainian patients to the United States for treatment.

Ukraine House also has taken its cultural diplomacy on the road with exhibits traveling across the United States. One photo series called “Relentless Courage: Ukraine and the World at War,” features striking images from the front lines.

FOUR DAYS BEFORE the Russian invasion, the Washington-based nonprofit United Help Ukraine (UHU) held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Ukrainians and their supporters gathered on the monument’s steps to protest Russia’s buildup of troops and weapons on the Ukrainian border.

During the initial days of the invasion, UHU staffers and volunteers took to the phones, said Maryna Baydyuk, a Kyiv-born Ukrainian and longtime D.C.-area resident who teaches neuroscience at Georgetown University. Baydyuk has served as UHU’s president since 2018.

“We were calling members of Congress, asking, ‘What are you doing?’” Baydyuk recalled. The U.S. government immediately sent $350 million in military aid to Kyiv.

Total U.S. aid to date has swelled far beyond that. It now stands at nearly $77 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a prominent German research group. About $47 billion went to direct military aid, while the rest supported nonmilitary needs like government funding and humanitarian assistance. Total Ukraine aid makes up about 0.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and amounts to just under 10 percent of the Defense Department budget, according to the Kiel Institute.

The discussion of U.S. funding for Ukraine, and the competing ideas on how to support the country from abroad, have evolved along with the war. During the conflict’s early months, Baydyuk said UHU decided its cultural diplomacy was “not as useful” as providing hard assistance in the form of money, logistics support, and battlefield supplies like medical kits, tourniquets, and bulletproof vests.

The group’s efforts have not gone unnoticed among Ukraine’s official diplomats. As a part of his visit to Washington in September, Zelenskyy awarded Baydyuk and UHU a National Order of Merit, which recognizes exceptional national service.

Amid the new normal of a longer war, UHU’s strategy for U.S.-based engagement has had to adapt, Baydyuk said. The group’s awareness team shifted its focus to raising funds for Ukrainians by organizing concerts, festivals, art sales, and other specifically cultural means to promote the Ukrainian cause.

In late October, UHU hosted a Ukrainian festival at Truro Anglican, a church in Fairfax, Va. The partnership between Truro and UHU began with a student in the church’s English-as-a-second-language ministry. It serves learners from dozens of countries in the diverse immigrant communities in Washington’s suburbs. That student, a Ukrainian woman, also worked as a volunteer with UHU. She asked to use the church grounds to hold a festival ­celebrating Ukrainian life and culture. Funds raised through the festival support Ukrainian children and others displaced by the conflict.

Matt Yi, Truro’s director of outreach, said the number of English-language students from Ukraine has grown since the larger war began, though a Ukrainian community existed previously at Truro and in the area. The church’s members, Ukrainian or not, have connected local Ukrainians with the English classes, helped them find jobs, hosted war-displaced Ukrainian families, and assisted with practical needs, like clothing and furniture, that come with resettlement.

Despite pockets of local support like this, Baydyuk admits “Ukraine fatigue” is real. But she believes the same arguments in favor of continued support for the country still apply, even as the war grinds toward its two-year mark in February.

Baydyuk notes Washington gave Ukraine security guarantees three decades ago, when it left the Soviet Union and began to develop as an independent country. Those guarantees included a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to surrender its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal—a significant national security gamble—in exchange for pledges of peace from both the United States and Russia.

Washington offered support for Ukrainian sovereignty then, and the letter and spirit of that agreement have only grown more important since, Baydyuk insists. Yet the language of a diplomatic accord often fails to translate to action—or to the prevention of action, in the case of Russia’s current invasion.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S.-based policy research center, has criticized the Budapest Memorandum as unenforceable and too vaguely worded to carry much weight in courts of international law. The center also faulted Ukraine for long neglecting its own military.

A Carnegie report from June called the Budapest agreement a “prime example of a model not to be repeated.”

But Baydyuk insists the Budapest Memorandum still holds security imperatives for Russia, Ukraine, and the United States: “People can say, ‘This is not our war,’ but the U.S. has an obligation to protect.”

But when asked what she would say to someone with no particular stake in Ukraine’s current struggle, Baydyuk summarized her argument—and the argument of millions of Ukrainians—in moral terms.

“This is not [just] a conflict,” she said. “This is a war between good and evil. It concerns anyone who values human rights, sovereignty, democracy, independence. This is a black-and-white issue. If you believe in good, you should care about Ukraine.”

—William Fleeson is a writer and journalist based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in BBC Travel, National Geographic, and Newsweek