Ukraine’s most recognisable celebrity chef spearheaded what would become an unlikely cultural victory over Russia
Don’t tell Ievgen Klopotenko that borsch is just food. For him, that bowl of beet-and-meat soup is the embodiment of everything Ukraine is fighting for.
“Food is a powerful social instrument by which you can unite or divide a nation,” said Klopotenko, Ukraine’s most recognisable celebrity chef spearheaded what would become an unlikely cultural victory over Russia.
“It’s our symbol,” Klopotenko said. “Borsch is our leader.” If that seems hyperbolic, you underestimate how intrinsic borsch (the preferred Ukrainian spelling) is to this country’s soul. More than a meal, it represents history, family and centuries of tradition.
And now, at the one-year mark of the war with Russia, Klopotenko uses the dish as a rallying call for preserving Ukrainian identity.
It’s an act of culinary defiance against one of Moscow’s widely discredited justifications of the war — that Ukraine is culturally indistinct from Russia.
Thanks to a lobbying effort that Klopotenko helped lead, Unesco issued a fast-track decision last July declaring Ukrainian borsch an asset of “intangible cultural heritage” in need of preservation.
Although the declaration noted borsch is consumed elsewhere in the region, and that no exclusivity was implied, the move infuriated Russia.
A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson accused Ukraine of appropriating the dish and called the move an act of xenophobia and Nazism.
But in Ukraine, where until a year ago Russian was widely spoken, the declaration legitimised a notion that many had struggled to express.
