You don’t know me. My voice reaches you from Kyiv, the capital of a country that often appears in the news — but only briefly, between other events. You’ve heard about the bombs, the destruction, the war. That’s probably all you know. Ukraine is a distant place where people are dying. And that is a harsh truth.
But today, I want to tell you a different story. Not about death, but about survival. Not about what divides us, but what unites us.
In your state, Utah, there is a flower — delicate and resilient, the sego lily. Your ancestors, pioneer settlers, survived in the arid lands thanks to its bulbs. It became a symbol of life’s strength, a gift from the earth in the most desperate times. It is a story of survival carried in every valley, across every field.
In Ukraine, we also have a plant of survival: loboda, also known as lamb’s quarters. In 1932–1933, the Soviet authorities artificially created famine, confiscating the entire harvest and condemning millions to death. Over 4 million people died in the Holodomor. But many were saved by loboda. It was made into simple stews and flatbreads. This plant became the last hope for those unwilling to give up. Like your sego lily, loboda is a symbol of resilience, the will to live and memory.
I grew up in the Carpathian Mountains of the Ivano-Frankivsk region. When I look at your Wasatch and Uinta Mountains, their cliffs reaching for the sky, I feel a familiar grandeur and calm. Mountains teach us perspective: pain and tragedy are temporary, and life goes on. My Carpathians now shelter thousands of displaced Ukrainians, offering refuge and peace.
You are a farming people; your land feeds you just as it fed your ancestors. My country has always been famous for its fertile black soil, capable of feeding the world. Farming for us is not just work; it is a connection to the land, to the cycle of life and harvest.
But now that life-giving land is wounded. As of March 2025, 52,089 hectares of Ukrainian farmland are contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance. These are not just statistics. These are fields meant to give life, turned into hazards. Every hectare is a lost harvest, a wound to the heart of our nation.
That is why your sego lily and our loboda are more than flowers. They are symbols of our shared humanity. They remind us that when famine, suffering or destruction comes, we find strength in the earth that sustains us. Survival often comes in the simplest forms — in a root that endured, a seed that sprouts, a tiny plant that gives hope.
I am not asking you to understand all the complexities of our politics. I am asking you to look at your mountains and remember mine. To look at your flower of survival and remember ours. To feel that connection.
War is not only about loss. It is also about finding the roots of hope. Our roots are in the memory of how nations survived, in the land that will one day again yield a peaceful harvest. And in the understanding that even peoples separated by thousands of miles can find what is most profound in common: the desire to live, feed their families and be free on their own land.
And remember: freedom and life do not fall from the sky. They grow in our hands, in our hearts, in the land we protect. Every day, every harvest, every small flower is our choice to live and fight for the future.