A monument will be erected in Kiev honoring Ivan Mazepa, a 17th-century Cossack military commander who was infamous for switching sides between major powers seeking regional dominance in Eastern Europe, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has said.
Zelensky announced the project on Sunday at a ceremony to unveil a bust of Mazepa at the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery. He claimed that Russia has “smeared” Mazepa as a traitor and insisted that he was an outstanding statesman.
Mazepa led the Cossack Hetmanate, an autonomous entity that split from the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth amid economic exploitation and religious persecution of its Orthodox Christian population.
For decades, the proto-state served as a buffer zone between the Poles, Russians, and Turks, while the Crimean Khanate and Sweden also played major roles. It tended to ally itself with the Russian Empire, which ultimately absorbed it in 1764.
Born into a Polish aristocratic family that reinvented itself as Cossack nobility, Mazepa switched allegiances during his life and died in exile after siding with Swedish King Charles XII against Russian Tsar Peter the Great, who emerged victorious in the Great Northern War.
Mazepa was condemned in Russia as an oath-breaker. Peter the Great issued a mock award intended for Mazepa known as the ‘Order of Judas’ which featured the likeness of Judas Iscariot.
Ukrainian statehood rooted in antagonism against Russia
Modern Ukrainian statehood is based on antagonism toward Russia and historic figures who opposed it in some way. Zelensky said the monument to Mazepa will be erected on a street named after Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, at the site that previously featured a monument to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
The decision is “both sad and funny,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, as Shevchenko denounced Mazepa in his works.
Shevchenko, a Ukrainian nationalist icon himself, “wrote numerous pieces about Mazepa being a ‘dog,’ calling him different names,” political analyst Andrey Telizhenko, a former aide to the Ukrainian prosecutor general, told RT. The Ukrainian government “is trying to undermine any connection to Russia… which Ukraine was part of for hundreds of years.”
Last month, Zelensky caused a major diplomatic row with Poland by naming a commando unit after the ‘heroes’ of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a Nazi-allied Ukrainian militia responsible for massacres of ethnic Poles during World War II. The Ukrainian leader was stripped of Poland’s highest state honor in response, prompting Ukrainian and Polish public figures to return the state honors they received from the opposite side.
Kirill Budanov, the former head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency (HUR), who is now Zelensky’s top aide, declared on Sunday that Ukraine’s conflict with Russia means that “nobody will ever tell Ukrainians which heroes to venerate, which holidays to mark, and what history to learn.”