Many are asking how Ukrainians are managing to stay strong against the invasion by a self-proclaimed superpower, which proved to be a paper tiger, but still is a giant in terms of territory, population, and nuclear arsenal.
Those who go deeper in the history of Ukraine will find that it's just one more attempt to enslave our people and negate our culture. As a nation, we know this is the sort of threat that comes every now and then. Sometimes, it's hard to believe how we managed to exist after more than a millenium of intimidations.
Much of our strenght and our resilience can be atributed to our Viking heritage. The area of today's Ukraine started to be settled by people from Scandinavia following the fall of the West Roman Empire, when Vikings took advantage of the power vacuum to establish settlements and trade along the river systems in Eastern Europe.
Soon the state of Kyivan Rus was founded by the Varangian (Viking) prince Rurik, proceeding from Roslagen in Sweden's east coast (which is also one of the theories around the name "Rus"), emerging a multiethnic society which Slavs and Vikings cooperated to shape history. This society also encompassed a significant number of Baltic and Finn tribes. It is often argued that most of the Varangians who traveled and settled in the lands from the eastern Baltic lands to the Black Sea, came from the area of modern Sweden.
This ethnic mix strongly suggests that our cultures are intertwined with these peoples from a long time, making collaboration via NATO not a mere coincidence but an encounter with the history of Europe.
As early as the 12th century, when Kyiv had a reputation to be one the largest cities in the world, with a population exceeding 100,000, the civilization established in modern-day Ukraine has its first catastrophic experience with peoples from the north. Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal sacked Kyiv, leaving the old town and the prince's hall in ruins.
These events had a profound effect on the future of the city and on the East Slavic civilization, now a more sophisticated cultural entity after assimilating the Varangians, following the general decline of the Viking Age and the discontinuation of the influx of Scandinavians to Kyivan Rus by the same period.
This immediate effect was to renounce, from that time forward, any promise, or offering from our Slavic neighbors from the North. Many times they came with arguments about the union of the Slavic peoples, but their intention have always been only conquering, crushing, and subjulgating everything and everyone.
And so forth, two from our fundamental elements of our identity were crafted: from the Vikings, our heritage of courage, audacity, and determination towards our own destiny. From those from the north, our deepest skepticism, being them from Vladimir-Suzdal Principality or from that country ruled by the most shameful Vladimir of our times.