Last night, one of Ukraine’s current heroes, boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk, once again took center stage in the sporting world when he defeated his British opponent Tyson Fury, dashing Fury’s hopes of revenge for his loss to the Ukrainian six months earlier in a world title fight.
What we saw was a brilliant boxer skillfully taking on a towering giant of an opponent who is characteristically very full of himself. Not exactly David and Goliath, but something to suggest it. Usyk’s concentration, determination, courage and tactics made the difference and earned him another famous victory.
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But apart from Usyk – the legendary boxer - we also saw a Ukrainian patriot promoting Ukraine, its history and its cause in the ring in his own original and flamboyant way.
The boxer used the opportunity of the fight, which was broadcast worldwide, to proudly remind people that Ukraine’s fight for freedom continues, but also to raise spirits in his country, which has been defiantly resisting Russia’s predatory invasion and genocidal policies for almost three years.
As a native of Simferopol in Crimea, Usyk knows only too well that the open aggression began more than ten years ago when Russia seized Crimea and part of the eastern Ukrainian Donbas.
Usyk himself took up arms to defend Ukraine and visited frontline positions to boost morale. This time he entered the ring as a Ukrainian Cossack hetman, or leader, from the 17th and 18th centuries, evoking national pride and a defiant, complex, if sometimes glorious, past.
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At the end of the fight, when his triumph had been confirmed, he made a particularly strong symbolic gesture, the significance of which must be duly appreciated.
The proud Ukrainian warrior showed the sporting world the saber of Ivan Mazepa, a famous Cossack leader who tried unsuccessfully to liberate Ukraine from Russian rule at the beginning of the 18th century by siding with the Swedes.
Mazepa was a great patron of Ukrainian religious and cultural institutions. Legends about his early years were later to inspire Byron and other European literary and artistic figures associated with Romanticism.
Mazepa was initially loyal to the Muscovite Tsar Peter I and supplied Ukrainian Cossacks for his campaigns against the Turks and for the construction of his new capital St. Petersburg. However, the progressive restriction of Ukrainian autonomy and the exploitation of its resources prompted the aging hetman to switch sides as soon as a promising opportunity presented itself.
“Muscovy, that is, the Great Russian nation, has always been hated by our Little Russian [the name given by the Russians to Ukrainians at this time] nation; in its malicious intentions it has long set out to drive our nation to ruin,” he wrote.
Mazepa’s attempt to throw off Muscovite domination by siding with the Swedish King Charles XII ended in disaster. Peter’s victory over the Swedes and their Ukrainian allies at Poltava in 1709 sealed the fate of Ukraine and confirmed the emergence of Muscovy, or Russia or the Russian Empire, as it was henceforth to be known, as a major European power.
Peter was furious about Mazepa’s “separatism” and not only staged a mock public execution of the hetman, but also ordered the Russian Orthodox Church to impose an anathema on him. Ukrainian patriots were branded “Mazepists” and persecuted.
Ukraine’s fight for freedom during the Cossack period did not go unnoticed in Europe. For example, the famous modern French European Voltaire wrote favorably about Mazepa and the Ukrainian cause in his first book, the History of Charles XII, in 1731. “Ukraine has always aspired to be free”, he wrote, and was of the opinion that, as part of the Russian Empire, it was ruled by Peter I “in slavery”
In the first quarter of the 18th century, the figure of Mazepa inspired not only the Ukrainians, but also some Russian liberals, such as the Decembrist poet Kondraty Ryleev, who portrayed Mazepa’s “separatist” actions as a national liberation struggle. At the end of 1825, he was arrested and hanged as one of the leaders of the failed Decembrist uprising.
The leading Russian poet of the time, Alexander Pushkin, followed the tsarist line and in 1828 published a poem entitled “Poltava” in which he denounced Mazepa. Significantly, however, his younger Ukrainian colleague Mykola Hohol, who became famous under his Russian name Nikolai Gogol, secretly held a different view.
In his unpublished notebooks from the early 1830s, this “loyalist” of the Russian Empire reflected on the decision that Mazepa had to make.
The hetman had seen that “his people, humiliated by slavery and [despotism], submitted, albeit grumbling….... A people so different from the Russians, who breathed freedom and [cultivated] a bold Cossack spirit, who wanted to live their own lives … It was threatened with the loss of nationality, with a greater or lesser degree of being reduced to the level of the Russian autocrat’s own people.
In short, Mazepa remained anathema to the Russian imperialists, whether in the Tsarist, Soviet or Putinist era. Not so among Ukrainians. His portrait appeared on the country’s banknotes soon after Ukraine gained independence in 1991.
So, while Putin wants to achieve what his despotic predecessors were unable to do – to destroy Ukraine once and for all and to terrorize the world into putting up with Russia’s despotic imperialism, Usyk did not pull his punches as the representative of his embattled nation.
His unexpected final sharp blow with the saber of Mazepa will have been felt in the Kremlin and throughout the current Russian imperialistic world. “Ukrainians are not afraid and will continue to fight for their freedom through the good and the bad,” was the champion’s message.
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