Today in September 28, 2016: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary Ukraine's Independence.

Today in September 28, 2016: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary Ukraine's Independence.

It is a great honor to be here with you today in my hometown having just arrived from my home - Kyiv. It is a privilege to celebrate with you 25 years of Ukrainian independence and more importantly, more than 1000 years of our statehood and our battle for freedom.

What are we celebrating?

What do we have to celebrate?

We are celebrating the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual free and proud Ukrainian nation. We are celebrating an unbreakable nation. And today, more than ever, we are celebrating a united nation. 

We are celebrating a strong nation.

Think back 25 years.  Be honest.  How many of us sitting here could have predicted a peaceful end to the Soviet Union?

  We feared that Soviet communism would continue to deprive our nation of its right to exist, its language, its history, its culture, its right to freedom and prosperity.  We feared it would break our DNA and snuff out our unique freedom-loving identity.

But we are a strong nation. 

We broke those chains without violence, in peace on August 24, 1991 with the vote of the Ukrainian Republic Parliament that declared Ukraine independent.  

On December 1, 1991, over 90% of the Ukrainian population voted in favor of independence in every region of the country, including Crimea, by a majority vote.

We are a strong nation.

A U.S. President had warned “pursuit of independence is a form of suicidal nationalism.”  Some feared the worst. 

 Yet our strong nation began a long journey, a historic journey, of building our nation state, its democratic institutions, its civil society and its market economy.

Has it been easy?  How could it possibly be easy

100 years ago we were divided between empires

80 years ago we were starved to death by Stalin’s man-made famine-genocide

70 years ago we were decimated by World War II on our soil – with the highest civilian casualties of any nation in Europe

30 years ago we suffered one of the worst known nuclear power disasters

And just 2 years ago we were attacked by the largest standing army in Europe, the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea, occupying some 7% of our territory representing nearly 20% of our GDP.

And yet, as Cardinal Lyubomyr Husar recently wrote: “We never stopped being Ukrainians, sons and daughters of our nation, not when forbidden to use our native language and not when we had to fight for our right to exist.”

We are a strong nation.

We have a strong desire to be free, to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, to build a state that values human dignity and international law. So we press forward against all odds, regardless of the odds.

Building our state has not and cannot be easy.  One can be frustrated with the speed of change, but one cannot deny the change.  

Our Orange Revolution reawakened the national spirit and without it I am certain the Revolution of Dignity could not have been possible.

The Revolution of Dignity almost three years ago now clearly marked a new era. Ukrainians paid with their lives to ensure this path to freedom was not taken away from them. 

Since the Revolution of Dignity, we have seen remarkable changes, too numerous to outline, so I will name just a few:

First and foremost, we now enjoy a vibrant, active and demanding civil society –the best checks and balances possible -- an active society that knows it wishes to create a society based on rule of law, a level playing field, European values and principles.  

Together with the advent of technology, civil society now acts to ensure transparency, support real reform, question decisions and more. It is civil society, volunteers, who came to defend against the aggressors in eastern Ukraine when our military was yet unable. 

 It is civil society, volunteers, who developed the new e-procurement system that fights corruption in state purchases and is responsible for saving much-needed funding.  

It is civil society who serves as “angels of war” treating the wounded at the front and evacuating them from the heart of the battlefield.

  It is civil society that provided the first supply chains to feed and clothe our military when the war began and the treasury was empty as a result of the last regime. 

 It is civil society that created GoCamps to teach Ukrainians to speak English. I could go on and on and on.  This is the true lasting legacy of the Revolution of Dignity.  

We are a strong nation.

Second, we enjoy religious freedom and tolerance for all faiths. Compare this to many of our neighbors….I had the honor of being in The Hague this spring when representatives of a broad spectrum of faiths and beliefs were visiting to jointly and in unison declare Ukraine’s commitment to European values and principles. 

I took great pride in hearing from Dutch parliamentarians how positively in awe they were to see a Ukrainian delegation made up of representatives of the Kyivan Patriarchate Orthodox Christian, Ukrainian Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim faiths – all speaking in one tongue of the future and promise of Ukraine.  

We are a strong nation.

Third, we have broken the chains of our dependence on Russian natural gas.  During the last year and heating season, we imported no natural gas from Russia, instead importing from Europe via reverse flow. 

 Our reforms in this sector over the past two years have eliminated all the intermediaries in the import of gas, which was the fuel of the largest corruption in our country the past 20 years.  

We have stopped subsidizing a non-transparent state-owned oil and gas company, instead uniting market prices, encouraging energy efficiency, and supporting those in need in our population directly.  

We are a strong nation.

Fourth, we have stabilized the economy after an unprecedented economic crisis and have returned to the path of economic growth, job creation, lower inflation and a stronger banking system.  We built an international coalition with the support of the USA, EU, IMF, World Bank, and raised $25 billion in 2015. 

 We restructured our debt, saving USD 3.8 billion and postponing principal payments for four years while we regain economic and financial strength.  

In one year, we reduced the public finance deficit by some 80% from over 10% of GDP to just 2.1% of GDP in 2015.  After three years of recession, our GDP started to recover in the third quarter of 2015 and estimates for 2016 are of 1-1.5% growth. 

 We have done this while resettling some 1.8 million internally displaced people from Crimea and Donbas in our communities.  As a result of this progress and our promise, we have seen renewed foreign investment flows from Cargill, Fujikura, Ericsson, to name just a few.

We are a strong nation.

Fifth, we have implemented a broad diplomatic and information campaign to build support, inform and educate the world to the horrors of this unethical and unprovoked war, to the plight of our citizens taken as prisoners of war and conscience. 

Let me take a moment to welcome yesterday’s return home of two of those prisoners, Volodymyr Zhemchugov and Yuriy Suprun.  

One year ago, Volodymyr Zhemchugov was taken prisoner by the Russian-financed terrorists in Luhansk and left prison yesterday mutilated without limbs and almost blind saying: 

 “Don’t look at me and see a wounded person –war is war.  And always after war comes victory.” As he left his captors, he told them:  “Ukraine doesn’t abandon its own.”

We are a strong nation.

And finally, and perhaps most critically, we have not only built our military from scratch, we have stopped the aggressor in his tracks, returning some 60% of previously occupied territory to our control.

  We have devoted 5% of our GDP to defense and security, which was robbed, infiltrated and ruined by the previous regime.  We started with nothing in 2014, literally. And today, our military proudly defends not only Ukraine, but all of Europe.

We are a strong nation.

The Kremlin knows and has always feared that we are a strong nation.  And thus, after seeing the strength of the Ukrainian nation again, it attacked us with this hybrid war – military, information, trade, and cyber.  They attacked our peaceful nation for no reason other than because

We are a strong nation.

Yet, they cannot win. In the words of our “nail that will not bend” Ukrainian filmmaker jailed four years ago for 20 years by the Kremlin because of his stance against the illegal annexation of Crimea Oleh Sentsov: 

“Each enemy has different goals. But we are on paths different from the ones they’re taking. I know who will win. The desire for freedom and progress is unstoppable.”  

We are a strong nation.

So I stand here today proud of our strong nation and ask you to be an integral part of it and celebrate it.  Each and every one of you has a role to play.  Each and every one of you can make a difference on our historic journey. 

 You should urge Washington to continue and expand its support for Ukrainian reform, for the Ukrainian heroic military, for Ukrainian success in improving education and healthcare.

  You should establish links with parishes in the villages of Ukraine, and support local communities with information, exchanges, financial and moral support.  You should visit Ukraine and support the economy with historic, cultural and nature tourism.  

You should make the world aware of the strength, perseverance, culture and intellect of the Ukrainian nation, of our ancestors who married monarchs and ruled throughout Europe to our young IT geniuses who are responsible for the creation of What’s App, Skype, and so much more.  You can do so very much.  You have a lot to celebrate.

And all this is possible because we are a strong nation.

In conclusion, on the 160th anniversary of the birth of one of Ukraine’s great poets - Ivan Franko, I will echo his words: