While Romania debated its future in its recent presidential election, Romanians in Ukraine’s Chernivtsi Oblast just across the border continued to wrestle with war, mobilization, and the loss of their pre-war lives.
Romania’s tight election race at the end of May kept many in Europe on the edge of their seats as candidates with starkly different visions for the country’s future vied to take office in the EU member state.
Pro-European liberal Nicusor Dan, who supported aid to Ukraine in fighting off Russia’s invasion, defeated his opponent George Simion, a far-right Eurosceptic candidate who opposed supporting Ukraine and was banned from entering the country over his "systematic anti-Ukrainian activities."
In the west, Ukraine’s historically diverse population includes sizable communities of ethnic Romanians, Poles, and Hungarians. Their ancestors lived with Ukrainians in the areas that became Ukrainian after the borders took their current shape in the First and Second World Wars.
”My grandma is a Romanian, my grandpa is a Romanian, father is a Romanian. I am (also) a Romanian,” said Oleksandr, 58, a resident of Ukraine and one of only 431 people who cast votes for a Romanian election in Ukraine, according to the turnout numbers provided by the Romanian Special Telecommunications Service. He declined to provide his last name.
"We were good neighbors to each other and have to remain good neighbors."
Chernivtsi Oblast remains the main hub of ethnic Romanians among the three Ukrainian oblasts bordering Romania. It hosts an estimated more than 100,000 ethnic Romanians, some of whom live in almost entirely Romanian villages, study in Romanian-speaking schools, and organize cultural festivals.
Before the war, many Ukrainians with Romanian roots from the area routinely went to Romania for work or studies, strengthening cultural diplomacy between the countries and fueling the local economy.
“We were good neighbors to each other and have to remain good neighbors (with Romania),” said Ihor, a silver-haired local man who came to the Romanian voting station in Chernivtsi on May 18 with his wife. Ihor did not want to give his last name.
But now in Chernivtsi, far away from most of the Russian attacks on the front and major cities, the war has unsettled the balance that once let the Romanian community move easily between both countries — and cultures.
Military-aged men are not allowed to leave the country and can no longer work abroad. Despite many holding dual Romanian-Ukrainian citizenship, Ukrainian law only recognizes them as Ukrainian citizens. With the oblast’s economy weakened by the loss of income from abroad, local job opportunities are limited. Many men fear being drafted from the streets. Funerals of Ukrainian fighters in Chernivtsi Oblast took place almost daily in May.
A wave of patriotic fervor, which mobilized Ukrainians in response to Russia’s invasion, has bolstered the Ukrainian language's role as the state language. But in Chernivtsi, the ethnic Romanian minority hopes that their opportunities to live, study, and pray in the Romanian language in Ukraine won’t be affected by Ukraine’s pushback against centuries of Russification.
Getting a Romanian passport to work abroad
Residents and Romanian activists say the majority of dual citizens in Chernivtsi Oblast obtained Romanian citizenship for economic, not identity-based reasons. Romanian law grants the right to citizenship to any Ukrainian who can prove their descent from people who lived in Chernivtsi Oblast during Romanian rule from the late 1910s to the 1940s.
“Mainly, (people got dual citizenship) to have access to European countries.”
“In our Ukraine, there is no job, and nothing to live on,” said ethnic Romanian Vasyl Bota, 74, whose five children left to work abroad before the full-scale invasion.
“Mainly, (people got dual citizenship) to have access to European countries,” said Vasyl Byku, an ethnic Romanian activist and the head of the Romanian Culture Society named after Mihai Eminescu, a Romanian romantic poet and novelist.
“The situation was different before, there was a visa regime (with the European Union),” Byku told the Kyiv Independent. “Visas were very expensive. People went to Europe, were caught there, returned, and deported. (With a Romanian passport), they got an opportunity to go and do some work.”
People from Chernivtsi and other western oblasts would direct their earnings from abroad to renovating their family houses in Ukraine, said Lavrentii, a driver with dual Ukrainian-Romanian citizenship who often transports people across the Romanian border.
“It also gave work in construction to people living here. The chain has been interrupted. It affects everything,” Lavrentii added.
Mobilization
Locals say it’s widely known in Chernivtsi that a routine document check done by draft office patrols can result in being drafted right off the streets.
In Chernivtsi, Oleksii Rusetskyi was drafted on New Year’s Eve at the train station as he was arriving from Kyiv, his sister, Olena Mishakova, told the Kyiv Independent on May 18 at a rally in the city’s downtown area for missing and captured soldiers.
Mishakova held up a large Ukrainian flag with her brother’s picture, along with another hundred silent women, children, and men lined up with flags and pictures of their family members.
“We were born here as Romanians, but this does not mean that we are not citizens of Ukraine. We are citizens of Ukraine in the first place.”
Her brother went missing in Donetsk Oblast on Dec. 25, a year into his service.
The fear of being drafted has also changed daily life for men in Chernivtsi. Ivan, a taxi driver who declined to give his last name, regularly checked a chat on Viber with over 33,000 members where people shared updates on the draft office patrols around the city. He told the Kyiv Independent that he avoided trips outside Chernivtsi, afraid he could be conscripted at any one of the checkpoints encircling it.
“All the young people took their families and left to Romania, to Europe, because they don't see a future here,” said Yurii Levchyk, a Chernivtsi district council member and the director of the Bukovyna art center for revival and promotion of Romanian culture.
“For one, this is no longer a state here, it's a police system,” Levchyk told the Kyiv Independent as he walked from the voting station to his art center on May 18.
“People are being grabbed on the streets. There are still plenty of (ethnic Romanian) people here, but they are hiding,” he added.
Many ethnic Romanians in Chernivtsi Oblast have also volunteered to fight for their homeland, Ukraine, Byku said.
“In every (ethnic Romanian) village, our national flags for fallen soldiers stand in the cemeteries,” Byku said. “We were born here as Romanians, but this does not mean that we are not citizens of Ukraine. We are citizens of Ukraine first and foremost.”
Romanian minority rights
Simion’s position on the Russian war in Ukraine fueled old tensions between Romania and Ukraine concerning Romanian minority rights.
“Maybe the war deepened all our problems,” Levchyk said, referring to government corruption, the lack of accountability for the authorities, and cases of potentially unlawful mobilization.
“We didn't feel any major problems (before the full-scale war). Sometimes we thought that we were being wronged, but we would bring it up and discuss, and put things right,” Levchyk said, describing his frustration with the problems in the country that were not specific to Romanians.
"The war deepened all the problems."
Beyond the frustrations many Ukrainians share about the government, Byku said that ethnic Romanians in Ukraine do not experience ethnic conflict or discrimination.
Earlier, Byku opposed a 2017 law that would have switched about a hundred Romanian-speaking schools around the country to studies in the Ukrainian language. But according to Byku, the schools continue to operate in Romanian as the law was “put on hold."
“We just want to be citizens of Ukraine. But we don't want to lose our identity. This is very important to us,” Byku added.
Despite this, Russian propaganda actively uses narratives of alleged abuses of minority groups in Ukraine to raise anti-Ukrainian sentiments in Romania.
According to Roman Hryshchuk, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest from the ethnic Romanian village of Hlyboke, the rumors about persecution of the faith and Orthodoxy by Ukrainian authorities are spread in Romania by Romanian-speaking priests from Russian-linked churches, which still dominate Chernivtsi Oblast.
As Ukrainian communities and activists vote to switch their own parishes to the Ukrainian church and leave behind the persistent religious domination of Moscow, Hryshchuk said the priests of Russian-linked churches “lie to their parish” that the Ukrainian church will force them to hold services exclusively in Ukrainian.
However, in 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church founded its Romanian vicariate to accommodate Romanian speakers who wish to hold services in the Romanian language.
“This, in fact, caused a wave of anti-Ukrainian outrage in Romania. And Simion built his (presidential candidate’s) work around this wave,” Hryshchuk added.
Note from the author:
Hello, this is Natalia Yermak. I reported this story for you. In a far western Chernivtsi Oblast, removed from the front and the Kyiv Independent's headquarters in Kyiv, Russian propaganda around alleged ethnic and religious persecution in Ukraine could grow unnoticed until it threatens the long-standing relationship between allies.
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