In Kyiv’s 1500 year history, invaders have come and gone
Today is Kyiv Day. And once again, the city greets the occasion not in peacetime finery, but under the long shadow of war. Air raid sirens still interrupt the morning, the night is not always quiet, and the metro shelters more than passengers. Yet Kyiv endures.
Founded in the year 482, Kyiv is not merely old. It is ancient, in the way only cities shaped by rivers and blood can be. It did not rise with Russia, but long before it. When the place now called Moscow was little more than a wooded swamp, Kyiv’s golden domes already caught the sun, and its princes governed lands stretching from the Carpathians to the north.
It was here that the baptism of Volodymyr the Great birthed the Eastern Slavic Christian tradition. It was here that Yaroslav the Wise codified law while his daughters married into the courts of Europe. Kyiv was not a provincial outpost. It was the cradle—the cultural and spiritual center of a civilization.
And because it shone, it was attacked.
In 1240 came the Mongols. Kyiv burned and bled, but the city did not vanish. Then came the Lithuanians, the Poles, the tsars. And much later, the Soviets—whose gifts were famines, deportations, and the quiet terror of midnight knocks. Through each age, each banner raised on its hilltops, Kyiv remained Kyiv. Conquered in body, never in soul.
Today, we mark this continuity not with triumphalism, but with certainty. For Russia’s war against Ukraine, and against Kyiv specifically, is not a battle of two equal claims. It is one more failed attempt to undo history.
In 2022, Russia arrived at Kyiv’s gates as if time could be reversed by tanks. The plan was crude, imperial: decapitate the government, subdue the capital, extinguish the national will. But as so often before, the invader misjudged not the might of Kyiv, but the myth of it—the unbreakable inheritance passed down from prince to partisan to president. The Russian army came with maps and missiles and propaganda. It left with losses, retreat orders, and the silent stare of a city that had seen worse.
For Kyiv does not simply resist. It outlasts. It outlives.
Russia, meanwhile, behaves as a fading empire always does—by turning on its neighbors, rewriting history, and masking decline in the language of destiny. It declares Ukraine an invention, Kyiv a province, and this war a necessity. But such fictions rot upon contact with Kyiv’s stone and memory. One cannot erase the foundational city of Eastern Europe with lies printed in Moscow. The bones beneath St. Sophia speak louder.
On this Kyiv Day, the celebration is not adorned with fireworks or fanfare. Instead, it is lived in the quiet acts of resistance: children going to school, trains still running, cafés filled with conversation even as the windows shake from distant blasts. It is lived in the repair of windows, in the guarding of archives, in the digging of trenches and the printing of books. It is lived in the conviction that Ukraine is not passing through this fire, but forging itself within it.
If the 20th century tried to drown Kyiv in collectivism, and the 21st tried to bomb it into submission, both efforts will share the same epitaph: failure.
Because Kyiv is not simply defended—it defends. It defends dignity, independence, and the right to endure. It is the mother of Eastern cities, and mothers do not bow.
So let the invader rage. Let him speak of brotherhood with a rifle in hand. Kyiv knows him. Kyiv has buried his kind before.
And it will again.
