thank you very much, i'm sorry natalia pipa, people's deputy of ukraine, secretary of the verkhovna rada committee on education, science and innovation, thank you very much, we learned about the children, i also learned that we collected 26,000 from the beginning of the program in an hour and a half, well, hour 45 somewhere approximately, thank you for sending us money, not us, but the ukrainian army needs funds for drones and a charging station for the reconnaissance of the third special operations forces, these guys, who are right there in the temporal ravine in donetsk region, they would be there they eat muscovites and it's good making uavs will help improve the killing of muscovites and the defense of the lives of our defenders, sorry for the taftology, every donation will increase the effectiveness of actions against the enemy, you mean we need 890 00 uah, join, you see.

requisites on your screen, and i say goodbye to you, all is well, the fourth lecture of independence takes place thanks to the joint work of the institute of cultural strategy and our partner, the foundation for change, the foundation... he is with us from the beginning from the idea of ​​this event to today, we would also like to thank lvivska for its constant support city ​​council, and i invite mr. vitaly portnikov to the independence lecture. vitaly portnikov, publicist, journalist, analyst, political commentator. thank you, friends, i congratulate you on

the independence day of ukraine. and i want to first of all thank the organizers of this event for the opportunity for all of us to meet today under this blue lviv sky. moreover, i am sincerely grateful that you and i are meeting here at the memorial of the heavenly hundred. on the spot. in memory of the people who were the first in the recent history of ukraine to give their lives for ukraine to be free, sovereign, so that the ukrainian people have the right to choose their future, here, among these people, there are many of those with whom i communicated personally, whom i knew even before the maidan of 2013-24. 14-year-olds, with whom

i talked or corresponded at all, young people who could live and build the ukraine of our dreams, they disappeared on one cold day in 2014, and this is a grief, for someone who loses a reader or viewer, this is a real grief, it... cannot be compared to the grief of a mother who loses her child, it cannot be compared to the grief of children who will not see their parents, but this it's still sad, because we work so that the ukrainian audience can build this country, we work primarily for living people, not for... crosses in the cemetery, and

that's why every loss, loss of maidan times, loss of times of struggle for ukraine in the period of 2014-2022, every loss during this great war is a personal experience for me. when i see a person in military uniform approaching me, i only dream that this person will return from the front, so that i can continue to work for this person, because if this person is not there, for who will i be, for whom will i work, why was all this necessary at all, and this is my main emotion these days, these times, these years, i ask you to honor all those who

have been fighting for our freedom for these 10 years and independence. thank you. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the main communist newspaper, pravda newspaper, published an article by its correspondent in ukraine, entitled what kind of ukraine do they want? , the person who wrote this... text, she generally wanted to there was no ukraine so that our state would remain this moscow colony, which it was transformed into after the perayaslav council and after the bolshevik occupation of ukrainian lands in the first half of the 20th

century, but this is an important question, a question that we must answer and answer, which one. .. we want ukraine, and of course, each person answers this question for himself, but we need a general opinion, a common view of what kind of ukraine we want to see in the future, during the war and after the war, such a ukraine, which could survive, develop, which would be strong, self-confident. a country in the family of european nations, in the civilized world, ukraine, which we would all be proud of, and whose future we were sure of. so, what kind of ukraine do we really want?

first of all, we want a sovereign ukraine. ukraine, which would decide its own future. ukraine is a people who would choose his own path of development, his alliances, his opportunity to develop on this land on which he lives. if you think about it, the whole conflict in the epicenter of which we are, not even the last 10 years, or we can say the last centuries, since the times of mazepa, since the times of petlyura, since the times of bandera, this conflict is connected with the fact that the ukrainian people are not given the opportunity. to develop the way he wants to develop, that ukrainians are constantly trying to prove that their free choice interferes with someone, that in order to live peacefully, they do not have the right to their own civilizational and national voice, and this is

one of the most obvious manipulations with which the ukrainian people meet all the time. of this story, i'm sure ukrainians, and this is what this war is about, will prove their right to choose their own path in their future history, and will prove that what happened in the past was preparation for exactly the kind of free path that we want for ukraine, i would say ukrainian ukraine. this is also an important moment that we should never forget, ukraine for those who consider themselves ukrainians, and it is not about ethnicity and not about telling, it is about the civilizational choice that everyone who lives on this land

makes or refuses to make, yes the future ukraine should be a country of just that. of the ukrainian choice, we are constantly, and i hear this practically all my conscious life, branded as some kind of nationalists, and i do not really understand, first of all, why nationalists should be ashamed, why, if you are a nationalist in any other nation, then it is honorable, and nationalist parties win parliamentary elections in many countries of the world, and this is not an insult, our neighbors have always used the word nationalist as some kind of insult. about the views of the people who live on this earth, therefore that you should not be a nationalist in ukraine, it turns out that you can be a nationalist only somewhere in moscow, a person who wants to speak

his native language, and wants that on the land where he lives, to speak this language, which has flourished here, you can say for centuries , she is not... a nationalist, she is just an ordinary normal person, so in all countries, in poland they speak polish, in russia, russian, in france, french, in italy, italian, but why these... only in our country we do not we have the right for the ukrainian language to be heard by everyone streets of cities and towns of this country. why do we constantly have to prove that this is the normal state of affairs? why are we criticized for being nationalists, when we create a percentage norm for performing works in ukrainian on our own television or radio broadcasts, because in reality everything should be in... on the contrary, the norm should be for artistic works in other languages, languages ​​of foreigners, this

happens in all civilized countries, they create special quotas for the languages ​​of national minorities so that these minorities can develop freely in countries where there are the national and linguistic majority, and only in ukraine , quotas were introduced for the national and linguistic majority, and we considered this a huge achievement. ukrainian ukraine is not easy. a country in which people speak ukrainian is a country in which people first of all remember what ukrainian history is. for centuries, ukrainians were convinced that their history does not exist at all, that their history is part of the history of other peoples and other states. it got to the point that a neighboring country simply stole our history before stealing it. ukrainian lands, and ukrainian children in their

schools were forced to teach not the history of ukraine, stolen from ukraine, the history of russia, this is how we lived for many decades, how many people who are now in this audience, they taught exactly such history, and precisely that is why it is so difficult for us to return to the real ukraine. especially in those territories that were part of the russian empire for centuries, where everything ukrainian was deliberately forbidden. what kind of ukraine do we want? we want a democratic ukraine. but democracy is not just an opportunity to vote. this is a free media that is not controlled by the super-rich, but by those who really are. considers honest information of his compatriots to be his vocation and

his business, and not an element of protection of those enterprises and resources that they accumulated during the first decade of ukrainian independence. without honest media, there can be no democracy, because then the citizen does not vote for the one he really chooses as his leader, but for the one offered to him by the oligarchs. and in ukrainian history , there were already many testimonies of how it prevailed the majority of the population made a suicidal choice not because it was properly informed, but because it was processed in the right way for those who tried to illegally maintain power and influence in this state. democracy is also a competition in concept, not just an effort. vote for who you like, who looks nice on a campaign

poster, who can make promises that will never, ever be fulfilled, but for this kind of democracy to really begin to exist, you and i need a society of responsible citizens, that is , citizens who really invest money in this country, citizens who are interested in their own... development in this country, not because they are part of this post-soviet-type economic infrastructure that was built here and which gave the opportunity to manage in this country not those who work in the branches of our economy, those who privatized these branches in the 90s of the last century. democracy always rests on those in charge. owners, and i really hope that it is

ukraine will be, because we want a european ukraine, and these are completely different standards of behavior, and the behavior of our own structures, and the behavior of those who are engaged in business, and the behavior of those who work in the economy, european society, as you well know, is a society . honest taxpayers, this is not a society of people trying to solve something so that their lives are different from the lives of their compatriots, this is first of all. before the society of solidarity, you and i quite often see how our compatriots demonstrate this solidarity in a moment of crisis, and we can only be proud of our volunteer activity, our willingness to collect money for all the needs of our army, our willingness

to help people, but if we were a country with a civilized economy and a country in which taxes would be distributed fairly , all this would not be done by society, but by the state itself, and quite often ukrainians remind me of people who themselves created ships with many holes, and then constantly try to somehow plug these holes either with their own money, or with our own bodies, you and i need a whole ship of ukraine, you understand, whole and... which will never sink again, in which we will feel safe, and this is the most important moment in which you and i must be sure, and this and there should be an obvious result of this war, in which we are now with you, and may be, unfortunately,

for a long time, but this time should also be used so that you and i realize what the ukrainian state should be, as it should function, how should it develop, how should it be close to everyone who is its citizen, and you and i must realize a rather important thing that ukraine and ukrainian is a choice, it has always been so, not only in the times of this... this war, people who were involved in ukrainian culture, they always chose ukrainian, because they always had another choice in front of their eyes, when they tell me about the multilingualism and multiculturalism of ukrainian lands, i

have nothing to object: there were always people on ukrainian lands who worked for... for russians and poles, for hungarians and germans , for anyone but the one who worked for ukrainians, always knew that if he works for some other environment in the near future, primarily for a russian-speaking one, he will have a much more comfortable life, he will not have big problems, and he will have a much... wider environment and geographically , both culturally and politically, than the ukrainian environment on which he could count. and i always remind you of this when we talk about the ukrainian world that we have to build. each of

those we are proud of today in history could have done something completely different. civilizational choice and live a much more comfortable life. taras shevchenko could simply be an outstanding russian artist and publish russian works in the leading periodicals of the empire at that time. surely he would not have joined the army, surely he would have lived a longer life. probably his portraits are now possible. would be seen in russian art academies, but what would happen to ukrainians if taras shevchenko made such a comfortable choice, it turned out that his willingness to create a ukrainian soul, it was by and large a journey to calvary, but he made this choice,

because such a choice is made only out of love, maybe it's not even a choice, maybe it's a calling that you can't refuse. but in any case, we know that each of these people i'm talking about had their own option. ivan franko could have been an outstanding polish publicist or an austrian politician, as was the case with many of his contemporaries in the then lviv, in the then galicia, they became deputies and presidents of cities, they wrote polish-language works, but what would have happened to... if ivan franko made such a choice as modern galicia and modern ukraine would look like if we didn't have shevchenko and frank. olga kobylyanska could become german. she is a writer, but her choice of ukrainian literature created the image of bukovyna that we all know very well. mykola

lysenko could write operas to russian-language libretti, but it was offered to him by composers who are now much more famous in the world than he is, because if he had made this choice, his operas would have been staged in his... theaters of st. petersburg and moscow but if lysenko had made such a choice, we would not have the ukrainian opera. this list can go on and on and on for hours. therefore, i always ask to appreciate those who chose ukraine. he chose the ukrainian world as his civilizational reference point, he gave us all an opportunity. to develop and be proud of, gave us the opportunity to understand that this country exists not just as

a territory, but as a civilizational project, as a real land whose inhabitants share common public, national, and cultural interests. in the end... i want to remind you that there were enough people who perceived ukraine exclusively as a place to build prosperity in pre-soviet, soviet, and post-soviet times. franko wrote about this: you love russia like bread and a piece of lard, simply as a territory where you can get rich , where it is convenient to get rich, where you can solve problems, a territory where

it is convenient to deceive people, but ukraine, she not about that, in every country people want to live better, in every country welfare is an absolutely normal moment of development of citizens who they live everywhere. the united states or canada and to european countries, but above all people are united by common values, people who left great britain and sailed from plymouth to the shores of unknown america on a rickety ship, they were in a hurry to sam... for religious freedom, by the right to believe as they saw fit. if the main thing for them was just

to get some more piece of land where there were vague expanses of the future united states, then i want to ask you, who would we then now would help, who would supply us with weapons, who would stop russia? yes, maybe not at the rate we wanted it to be, obviously, but he was still willing to spend his own taxpayers money to keep you and me alive. if it was just about wealth, about another skyscraper, about another house with a car, would... american society be as we know it? no, it wasn't, the same with european countries, people were ready to sacrifice themselves and their future, for

the sake of their countries rising from the ashes, even when it would seem that nothing could revive them from history, our neighbors, the poles, rose up in rebellion even when their ... was divided between several empires, and these empires together were ready to fight their national contests, and that there was something wrong with the ukrainians themselves, that there were many uprisings in this territory that seemed hopeless, but carved out the ukrainian spirit, and that these uprisings were solely for the land, for the opportunity to get rich, for the opportunity to build more prosperous ones. the future, no, it was primarily about dignity, and dignity is also the opportunity to remain ukrainian, when it would seem that the whole world is against it, the whole... world

denies you this. when did it start? in one of the annals of ancient russia 1000 years ago, when they reported the death of one of the pereyaslav princes, they wrote that the whole of ukraine was mourning him, this is the first memory of the word u... country in the history of our future state. 1000 years ago, the land that was kyiv, that was pereyaslyv, that was chernihiv, was already perceived by contemporaries as ukraine. and why? and because unlike all the surrounding lands, it was a country. it was the center of statehood. it was the center, the deck...

the future nation happened, so long ago that we don't even imagine it, and so long ago that it always came from us, and our neighbors always explained that what you want, ukraine, is simple, because this is our neighborhood, no, sorry, you are our neighborhood, and this is the center, was, is and will be, and why is it the center, but because it was a land in which... the culture of discussions has always been a part of development in kyiv and veliky novgorod, not yet destroyed by moscow, in chernihiv and pereyaslov, people gathered forever and were ready to express their opinion to the princes at a time when this tradition had long been lost and replaced throughout medieval europe.

full right of the sovereign, we remember the english charter of freedom as the highest achievement of civilization, as an agreement between the nobles and the king, which limited the arbitrariness of the royal power, but this was already after ancient russia itself, which later became ukraine, began to lose its age-old tradition, that's why this... tradition gave the opportunity for the lands of the ancient movement to develop, that is why later statehood appeared on these lands, in which ukrainians were participants and which also meant the exchange of opinions and positions between those who cared about this statehood, the statehood of the grand duchy of lithuania and even the statehood of the crown have always

been those... states in which there were opportunities for discussion between society and the government, between the sovereign and those who determined the future development of the country. and what happened to those of our neighbors who are now trying to destroy us. from the first days of the colonization of the north russia, from the first days of the creation of the volodymyr-suzal principality. which later became the moscow principality, and later became the moscow kingdom, and later became the russian empire, and later became the soviet union, and later became the russian federation, that from the first years of the development of this land there was a dictatorship, a person who essentially created the statehood of vladimir suzdal,

which means... moscow, which was a border fortress in this principality, andrei bogolyubsky was a dictator, killed by his own subjects, who were tired of his dictatorship, and who threw his body simply for the dogs to eat, and only because... some random person from kyiv was living in this principality, that prince was decently buried, because this kyivan, as the ancient chronicles also tell, believed that it was necessary to treat the institutions of power with respect, and there in these lands it was very simple, as long as you are the master, we obey you,