Ukrainian Roots Podcast / Подкаст «Українське коріння»

Since 2024, Liliia Ratushna has spent part of every single weekend at high visibility locations around Vancouver, holding a sign about Ukraine, raising money for Ukrainian defenders, and reminding Canadians that the war isn’t over and Ukraine is still fighting for its freedom. These weekly rallies are organized by UA Rally, whose abiding mission is to draw attention to russia’s war in Ukraine. In...

Daria Kolomiec is a cultural activist, producer, performer, a TIME Magazine Next Generation leader, and creator of the Diary of War documentary podcast and performance project. Diary of War captures the raw and emotional stories of real Ukrainians enduring russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine; stories from Diary of War have been performed by non-Ukrainian actors in North America and Europe. Through...

Margo Gontar is many things: a journalist, artist, musician, co-founder of StopFake.org , and in 2017, Kyiv Post named her one of Ukraine’s Top 30 Under 30. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Margo has leveraged social media to educate people outside of Ukraine about life under bombardment. If you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who follow Margo on X or Threads or...

The plight of Ukrainian children is the subject of Children in the Fire , a soul-stirring documentary feature from the celebrated filmmaker behind the Academy Award-nominated Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom . Children in the Fire highlights the ways in which Putin and the terrorist state are intentionally targeting Ukraine’s children. What makes Children in the Fire truly remarkable is...

It might surprise some listeners to know that Ukraine has a significant Afro-Ukrainian population. Many of them are descendants of the African students who studied in Ukraine during Soviet times. Some have gone on to great fame, like Olympian and MP Zhan Beleniuk, who has a Rwandan father and Ukrainian mother, or Gaita-Lurdes Klaverivna Essami, AKA Gaitana, who was the first Afro-Ukrainian to...

CONTENT WARNING: This episode deals with mental health and mental illness. For mental health resources, visit the episode footnotes below. Please, take care.   Ukrainians are fighting more than just the invaders from Moscovia. We’re also in the midst of a mental health crisis, and the casualties are mounting. Studies found that up to 60% of internally displaced individuals and...

As long as there have been Ukrainians, there have been forces – russian, Muscovite – who have sought to erase us: through famine, forced assimilation, annexation, and all manner of colonial and imperial violence. They view our Ukrainianness as a threat – as well they should, because our Ukrainianness is a source of immense strength and sustenance. Alas, for many diaspora Ukrainians who’ve lost the...

Ukrainians love to laugh. We laugh when we’re grieving, when there’s danger, in the darkness, and in the face of war. Ukrainian humour is self-deprecating, very dry, and dark. This proclivity for dark humour is not new, but it’s been front and centre since the terrorist state next door invaded Ukraine in 2022. We are the people who told a russian warship to go fuck itself, and then immortalized th...

Words – and language in general – are at once a tool in this war, a front in this war, and a barometer for how the war is going. Language can sway hearts and minds, stave off disinformation, and also harm us through propaganda. And if we listen close enough, language can tell us where we are in this war and, perhaps, help us achieve our goals. For this wildly fascinating episode of the Ukrainian R...

We might be biased, but we stand firm in the belief that Ukrainian is the most beautiful, lyrical, clever, and nuanced language on Planet Earth. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the first things that diaspora Ukrainians lost when mass migration swept them far from Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century. This is especially evident in Canada, where there are more than 1.3 million Ukrainians bu...

Putin’s war in Ukraine has wreaked havoc on all aspects of life for Ukrainians, including the very notion of home. Since February 2022, an estimated 3.7 million Ukrainians have been displaced internally, while an additional 6.9 million have sought refuge outside of the country. Whether internally or externally displaced, to be displaced is to feel like you’ve been quite literally knocked out of pl...