From time to time, some politicians, overly rapt about Europeanization, attack the main property of our land – the Orthodoxy and the Cyrillic alphabet.  It seems to them that these two factors mess Ukraine from becoming European.

It's amazing how everything is mixed up in the heads of professional "patriots". On the one hand, they very love to remember the majestic era of Kievan Rus and the glorious times of the Zaporozhian Host, on the other hand, they attack what was the most important for both the ancient ruthenians and the cossacks.

We have to hear the sentences that Ukraine is so poor and therefore cannot be Europeanized, because, unlike the "developed European countries", we have a different faith and a different alphabet. What could be more ridiculous? The same Kievan Rus, which consciously chose Byzantine Christianity instead of Western Latin, was the strongest and most cultured state in Europe with due time. The educational level of the ancient Russians was much higher than the education of many modern Europeans. Did the Cyrillic alphabet bother this? Did Orthodoxy bother this? I think that for any person who is remotely familiar with history, these are rhetorical questions.

In the same way, during the time of the Cossacks, the Cossacks defended their right to faith and language from the Polish-Catholic expansion. What would Bohdan Khmelnitsky say if he was told that his future compatriots honor his memory and at the same time want to give up what he defended? I think the Hetman would be quite surprised.

When someone starts lamenting about the current economic and political problems of Ukraine and blaming Orthodoxy and the Cyrillic alphabet for this, he should seriously ask himself: is Orthodoxy to blame for total corruption? Or, perhaps, the switch to the Latin alphabet will stop the growth of utility prices? Or will the rejection of Orthodoxy facilitatetheincreasing in pensions?

Of course, no. All these stupid fantasies are similar to what we heard before the creation of the so-called OCU. They say that this will stop the church schism. It didn't stop. Same here.

Recorded by Natalia Goroshkova