Fight over a 't': For Ukraine, it's culture; for Russia xenophobia

Don’t tell Ievgen Klopotenko that borsch is just food. For him, that bowl of beet-and-meat soup is the embodiment of everything Ukraine is fighting for.

“Food is a powerful social instrument by which you can unite or divide a nation,” said Klopotenko, Ukraine’s most recognisable celebrity chef spearheaded what would become an unlikely cultural victory over Russia.

“It's our symbol,” Klopotenko said. “Borsch is our leader.” If that seems hyperbolic, you underestimate how intrinsic borsch (the preferred Ukrainian spelling) is to this country’s soul. More than a meal, it represents history, family and centuries of tradition.

And now, at the one-year mark of the war with Russia, Klopotenko uses the dish as a rallying call for preserving Ukrainian identity.

It’s an act of culinary defiance against one of Moscow’s widely discredited justifications of the war — that Ukraine is culturally indistinct from Russia.

Thanks to a lobbying effort that Klopotenko helped lead, Unesco issued a fast-track decision last July declaring Ukrainian borsch an asset of “intangible cultural heritage” in need of preservation.

Although the declaration noted borsch is consumed elsewhere in the region, and that no exclusivity was implied, the move infuriated Russia.

A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson accused Ukraine of appropriating the dish and called the move an act of xenophobia and Nazism.

But in Ukraine, where until a year ago Russian was widely spoken, the declaration legitimised a notion that many had struggled to express. “People started to understand that they are Ukrainians,” Klopotenko said.

“A lot of people started to eat Ukrainian food. A lot of people began to discover Ukrainian traditions,” he said.

Before the start of Soviet rule in 1917, Ukrainian cuisine was more diverse and robustly seasoned. That was quashed in favour of a more uniform palate with socialist sensibilities.

Even after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine’s cuisine didn’t quite bounce back. But Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was a trigger.

Trying to identify and hold onto Ukrainian heritage, Klopotenko and others began researching pre-Soviet Ukrainian cooking, hoping to return it to the mainstream and give people another toehold for reclaiming their culture.

In 2019, he opened his Kyiv restaurant, 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered (100 Years Ago Ahead), a reference to what Ukrainian cuisine was before Soviet rule, and what it could be again. The menu draws heavily on flavours and ingredients many have forgotten.

The effort to have it declared a cultural asset began in 2018, when Klopotenko enlisted the help of Maryna Sobotiuk, an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Policy and co-founder of the Institute of Culture of Ukraine. They assembled a dossier that would become the country’s application to Unesco.

Like Klopotenko, Sobotiuk said it’s a cause much deeper than dinner.

“Our neighbors want to not just take our territory, but also our culture and our history,” she said, calling culinary heritage a soft power with tremendous potential to motivate and inspire.

“It is important to give people something they can align with Ukraine except war.” Darra Goldstein, a food historian and expert in Eastern European cuisines, agreed, noting that the difficulty of delineating culinary boundaries doesn’t diminish the cultural import of the dishes.

“It's not simply a matter of claiming ownership of a dish. Instead, food goes to the heart of national belonging, how people define who they are,” she said.

As more Ukrainians have rejected Russian culture since the war began, and consumption of traditional Ukrainian foods has spiked, he and others see an opening for codifying and celebrating more of their own.

Klopotenko said the next step is to raise the profile of the country’s cuisine as a whole, at home and abroad.

“The war accelerated the growth of Ukrainian culture,” he said. “Russia wanted to kill the culture with the huge invasion, but it’s worked the other way.” It’s a sentiment shared widely on the streets of the capital, where restaurants have revamped menus to replace Russian dishes with Ukrainian ones. They’ve been rewarded with packed dining rooms despite rolling blackouts and frequent air-raid warnings.

At Kyiv’s Volodymirsky market Tetyana Motorna has sold pickled fruit and vegetables for decades. “Borsch is everything for Ukrainians,” she said.

“The war has made borsch even more important. … With borsch, we prove that we are a separate nation. It confirms us as a nation.”