“Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and solidarity with Poland will forever remain in our books. Because right now we are writing the history of our future,” said the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Ruslan Stefanchuk, opening the International Book Fair in Warsaw.
“In every Ukrainian home, we definitely have Kobzar. We have books that have shaped us and are shaping us,” stressed Ruslan Stefanchuk, noting that books preserve history, culture and traditions: “And it is in the book that we can get our knowledge about Rus’-Ukraine and St.Sophia Cathedral.”
During the opening, the Speaker of the Parliament of Ukraine stressed that the Ukrainian book also remembers the names of tyrants: those who committed the Holodomor, who banned the Ukrainian language, who persecuted the Ukrainian nation.
“Books also capture in the memory of the whole world the current events taking place in Ukraine,” said Ruslan Stefanchuk, stressing that when someone starts telling Ukrainians that russians have a great russian culture, they reply, “they are bombing Ukrainian cities not with volumes of books by pushkin and dostoevskyi, but with concrete missiles, killing civilians in Ukraine.”
He said that over the course of the war, approximately 300 libraries have been bombed in Ukraine, and many literary, cultural and historical monuments have been destroyed: “But Ukraine is standing, will stand and will win this war.”
“Together we will write many more pages of our common history. A history that our children will be proud of, a history that will be retold as a story of great resistance, a great victory of great fraternal peoples,” said the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Ruslan Stefanchuk at the opening of the International Book Fair in Warsaw.