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Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
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Mar 8 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Hey everyone,

I’ve gathered up a thread of threads with some of the highlights of @uaexplainers and my personal threads that I believe deserve a read.

I will keep updating it from time to time.
The story of my family transforming from Ukr-speaking farmers to Ru-speaking Kyivites throughout the XX century.

My story is not unique – it reflects the cross-generational russification of millions of Ukrainian families in the last hundred years.
Part 2 of that thread, 6 months later.

How and why my family has gone back to speaking only Ukrainian at home in the last year. An emotional journey that started somewhere around 2004 and seems complete now following Russia’s full-scale invasion:
I was an 18-year-old sociology student when Maidan started in November 2013. I’ve been there from the first days of peaceful student protests to the February bloodbath unleashed by Yanukovych's regime.

This is my account of the Revolution of Dignity.
Probably the most personal story I’ve told so far is about my grandma Vira.

I think her life story illustrates how the lives of Ukrainians were shaped by #RussianColonialism and its unpunished crimes, big and small.
The first issue of @uaexplainers was published during the third week of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Like many Ukrainians, we knew Russia’s true genocidal intent even before the world saw the horrors of Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, and Kherson:
How did Ukrainians know it was genocide from day one?

I shared some thoughts in this thread:
9 things people consistently fail to grasp about Ukraine:
Quite unsurprisingly, this explainer on the “Nazi Ukraine” myth gets often shared in discussions on Twitter:
A mini-guide on Russian imperialism:
Something that top western journalists and media outlets keep getting wrong over and over again is the language question in Ukraine.

That's why we have a mini-guide on the history of Ukrainian and Russian languages in Ukraine:
Also, a Ukraine Explainers megathread – all of our issues in one thread – is now available here:

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More from @TheStanislawski

Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Feb 24
On this day, I remembered that Ukrainians knew this was genocide from day one.

We knew that "special military operation," "sphere of influence," and "war for disputed lands" were just a facade for genocide.

How did we know it?
Why did nobody listen to us?

1/20
Ukrainians were exposed to Russian narratives, media discourse, and personal conversations with Russian friends and relatives. We know their language.

We all felt the insane amount of hatred toward Ukrainians pumped up in Russia since 2014. And it's not just about state TV.
2/
When you live beside an empire that already tried to destroy you a couple of times, you just know.

You know about the deep chauvinism, about unequal treatment of all non-Russian subalterns, about the amount of disrespect for human life that the Russian empire runs on.

3/
Read 20 tweets
Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Feb 14
Every time I tweet about Russian opposition leaders I truly want it to be my last tweet on the topic. I really do.

But then a couple of days pass by and I see another hypocritical comment that blows my mind.

So this will be my last thread on the topic for quite some time.
So a couple of days ago @TIME published an opinion piece by Ilya Yashin that he wrote from his prison cell.

Yashin is one of the prominent regime victims. He was sentenced to 8.5 years for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

He’s in the position to be heard by the west.
What amazed me was that Yashin, while having a chance to speak about anything from the prison cell decided to whitewash Russian society from everything Russia is doing in Ukraine.

Not to call for specific help, not to tell how to stop Putin, but to say “But not all Russians!”
Read 14 tweets
Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jan 30
You might have seen my April thread where I told the story of how my family got Russified throughout the XX century. I mentioned that my family started speaking more Ukrainian at home.

9 months later, we are all Ukrainian-only speakers.
Let me share what it feels like.

A 🧵
First of all, if you haven't read that thread, I urge you to go and read it first since it gives a lot of historical and political context of languages in Ukraine.

The story of my family's linguistic journey is common in Ukraine, but it's still one of many stories.
Now, back in April, I wrote this about my family's switch to Ukrainian:
Read 22 tweets
Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jan 10
Alright folks, since there is no proper urban dictionary for the word “rusnia” (русня), I think it’s time for a short vocabulary lesson.

I recently saw another wave of Russians complaining on Twitter that they are offended by this word, claiming it is “racist”.

This is false.
“Rusnia” is a new word. It was coined by Ukrainians at some point after 2014, popularized on Twitter and went mainstream this year for obvious reasons.

In other words, it doesn’t have any weight of history or systemic oppression behind it — unlike most of actual ethnic slurs.
Now, “Rusnia” is made of the root “Russian” with a dirty sounding ending “nia”, similar to the ending in the Russian swear word “khuynia” (bullshit).

In the end, it sounds like a disrespective way to say “Russian.”

The term is not used as an ethnic marker. Let me explain.
Read 14 tweets
Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Dec 12, 2022
Thinking about my grandma a lot lately: how she should be sitting on her porch, drinking cezve-brewed coffee and tending her garden of herbs and veggies.

Things would've been so different if there wasn't an empire seeking to submit and destroy Ukraine.

A 🧵on personal history.
I think her story illustrates how the lives of Ukrainians were shaped by #RussianColonialism and its unpunished crimes, big and small.

Let me show you why we are seeking justice in this war – not some "negotiated ceasefire" – by telling you the story of grandma Vira from Kyiv.
Grandma was born in 1946 and comes from a family of farmers living in a village near Kyiv.

In 1929-1930, like millions of Ukrainians at the time, her family had their land and home taken away by Soviet collectivization policy.

Her parents and their firstborn were homeless.
Read 33 tweets
Stas Olenchenko 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Nov 21, 2022
Exactly 9 years ago today, I was in a pub with my uni pals when we heard the news that then-president Yanukovych would not sign the association agreement with the EU, crushing Ukraine's European hopes and locking us to Russia.

We were not buying it.

Here's what happened next 🧵
In 2013, we were second-year social & political science students – we were young and angry, and we definitely were not ready to spend our adult lives in a post-Soviet dictatorship.

So the next day, we went to Maidan Square in Kyiv with thousands of others fed up with Yanukovych.
Thousands grew into tens of thousands as Yanukovych ignored our demands.

Here's a photo from a 50,000-strong protest in late November. Still peaceful, still hopeful.

The thumbs-up kid on the left is me.
Read 17 tweets

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