Two recent deaths in Ukraine are immeasurable losses for the Ukrainian nation. Ivan Drach, who died on June 19 after a serious illness, and Lev Lukianenko, who passed away on July 7 after a long illness, were both recipients of Ukraine’s highest honor, the Hero of Ukraine award. And for good reason.
A leading member of the “Shestydesiatnyky,” the writers of the 1960s who became the voice of Ukraine at a time when it was still under Soviet domination, Ivan Drach was an active participant of the Ukrainian dissident movement. He later became the first leader of Rukh, the National Movement of Ukraine. Mr. Drach was recognized in 2006 as a Hero of Ukraine for his “selfless service to the Ukrainian people, which he performed through poetry, standing for the ideas of freedom and democracy.”
The Ukrainian World Congress remembered Mr. Drach as “a strong Ukrainian patriot who, with his passionate, poetic words and tireless work fought for Ukraine’s independence and contributed to its development as a democratic, independent European state.” President Petro Poroshenko called him “a thinker, philosopher, poet, soul of our people” and said “his greatest and most valuable work… was called The Independence of Ukraine.”
Perhaps it was fate that Levko Lukianenko’s birthday was August 24 – he was born in the Chernihiv region village of Khrypivka on August 24, 1928. Sixty-three years later, on August 24, 1991, this jurist became one of the authors of the historic Act of Declaration of the Independence of Ukraine. But Mr. Lukianenko’s battle for Ukraine’s independence had begun long before that. In 1959 he was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Union of Workers and Peasants, an underground party that espoused Ukraine’s right to secede from the USSR. In 1976 he became one of the founding members of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords (known for short as the Ukrainian Helsinki Group), which defended human and national rights. Mr. Lukianenko paid dearly for his membership in both groups, serving 27 years in Soviet prisons, camps and exile.
Mr. Lukianenko was proclaimed a Hero of Ukraine in 2005 in recognition of “his civic valor, selfless dedication in championing the ideals of freedom and democracy, and meritorious contribution to the building and development of the Ukrainian state.” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman underscored in a post on Facebook that Mr. Lukianenko “spent his whole life serving Ukraine, fighting for freedom and independence.” Also on Facebook, President Petro Poroshenko described him as “a living symbol of the invincibility of the Ukrainian spirit and one of those who gained us independence in the 20th century.”
The deaths of these two exceptional Ukrainian patriots, who both continued their service to Ukraine as national deputies in the Verkhovna Rada and had strong ties to the Ukrainian diaspora – Mr. Drach as the first leader of the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council and Mr. Lukianenko as Ukraine’s first ambassador to Canada – mark the passing of an era and a generation that dreamed of and worked for an independent Ukraine. Their loss will be felt deeply not only in Ukraine, but throughout the global Ukrainian community. “Vichnaya pamiat.”