In ‘Strong Roots,’ Russia’s Invasions Can’t Kill Ukrainian Cooking

In 2025, after more than three years of war and occupation in Ukraine, this question is much better: Why do Ukrainians strongly resist Russia?

Many answers can be found in the wonderful new Olia Hercules notes, Powerful rootsWhich examines the modern history of Ukraine through the perspective of its relatives’ experiences.

Hercules is a famous London -based chef and a citizen of the Russian Jeresson region, and food plays a major role in Powerful roots. However, it is not a history of cooking, but a story focuses on a sense of vibrant and vibrant feeling of specific places, time points, rich tastes, lists of ingredients that read like poetry. Amazing prose details, from “optical patterns” for the famous Ukrainian sunflower to “thunder scratching her stomach” against the buildings of factories in Ukraine, which has “natural beauty” and it is a “industrial giant”, she writes.

Olaya Hercules shows her cooking skills during an interview with Hersha Patel during the Onblackheath Festival in London on September 10, 2016.Lauren Thompson/Redferns

The main topic of Powerful roots It is the same life, and the desire to live and continue, which stands in a flagrant contradiction with the celebration of the Russian state of glorious death and the horrific insistence of Russia, the hysterical that the world must bend to it, or die in an explosion of nuclear fire. (As an external policy analyst, I confirm that this is a trick, but he tells you something terrifying about Russia itself.)

Ukrainians, as Hercules will see you, are not like the Russians when it comes to their policies and ideology that leads the mentioned policy. They are also in love with life, even as Ukrainian life is still confused and the war machine is distorted in Russia.

In narrating her family’s history, Hercules draw a vivid picture of repression and deportation, and humans who were injured against the rocks of history on the whims of any mentally ill, from Nicholas II to Stalin, who controlled Moscow.

Notes are a group of tragedies, but they are never bitter. Hercules also tells the story of her mother grandmother, Liusia, she says: “If she gave an opportunity to live throughout her life again, and if there is no other way, you only repeat her as it was, she will do that.

Members of the Regional Defense Forces, a support force for the Ukrainian army, is consumed dinner after exercises near Boch, Ukraine, on July 13, 2022.Sergey SuPinsky/AFP via Getty Images

Liusia and her family suffered from forced exile and poverty, the collective famine of the Holudomor, and the terrorist terrorism. But she did not allow her to darken her heart, or her heart cooking – the actual Ukrainian cuisine, not the gentle drops imposed by the Soviets. Hercules also note, the Soviet Union stripped the local kitchen of its taste and taste in all fields, with strictly imposed rules for all components, including spices, and an indifferent approach to meet the individual’s food needs that limit the punishment.

As a birth of Ukraine myself, I found Hercules journey throughout her family’s history so much that she was Sweeini. Not only the date of what Stalin did at the time, and what Putin is doing today, it is the raw sadness and joy that accompanies the narration.

Like Hercules, I am haunted by nightmares and demons of sleep paralysis today, as Russia’s war continues to be angry. I tell people that I would have already dying. I am tired. I live thousands of miles away from my original ground, under a quiet Western sky, I am soaked in the guilt of the survivors.

But, like Hercules, I hope in an angry way. It is a hope that has been removed from the love of family and friends, our strange traditions, and our loud dinner parties. No one is really like the Ukrainians, in my experience.

Ukraine is a great place, the home of many different types of people. I am already from KyIV and I did not do a lot of knocking in the Jeresson region during the ladder time; My knowledge of it comes from the memories of my late father about the region, where he sometimes traveled to work, and his love for local watermelon. He insisted, loudly and frequently, that it was a beautiful part of the country, as the Soviets recorded their stupid policies – such as the destruction of natural habitats – and usually made people live in cheap buildings.

I repeated my father’s words in Powerful roots It made me get to know the issue of discontent that unites Ukrainian families from different parts of the country. Hercules devotes a large area of ​​the space to explain how Russian under the Soviet region is to the vibrant local traditions to the vicinity of existence and destroy the scene.

Putin, of course, is now trying to finish the mission. Its potential destruction of the Kakhfka Sad, which was narrated in the book, is just an example of the terrible nihilism that radiates from Moscow. How can one face a distorted enemy? With weapons, of course, but also with remembering who you are, and you are fighting of any love.

Powerful roots It is a beautiful exercise in memorization. Prose is a mixture of pain and angry, permanent affection; Whether it is describing the Porsche components that were made for its displaced parents or abandoning how the Ukrainian language is dealt with with the word “home”, Hercules is influential and exposed to challenges simultaneously.

“Why did I think that Ukrainian literature was hard and surrounding, but Russian literature was deep and important in the world?” Hercules ask at some point – a question that many of us asked in the diaspora, with shame and confusion in our hearts. “Why did we use the Ukrainian in a specific way?”

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Generations, the book explains, not only taught, but it is forced to do so. The wages of disobedience were violent death in the worst and exile of society’s margins at best. The same is the Russians in the occupied territories in Ukraine today.

The book asks, how do they dare? Also: Who cares about them, when we are? Pour another round and another story novel. End the darkness and stay yourself as much as you can.

There is a lesson here for anyone and everyone who thinks about dark times. These times call for extreme courage, yes, but also the intense land, a grip of history as harsh like any roots. The brother of Hercules Sasha, who volunteered in the war effort immediately after the comprehensive invasion, told her, “If we miss this moment, we will never close this circle.”