The War Columbia Forgot
As Ukraine surpasses its 1,000th day under attack, Columbia students continue to turn a blind eye.
When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started on February 24, 2022, Dmytro Prosiannikov, CC ’28, was 16 years old. On March 8, he and part of his family fled across the border into Poland.
Prosiannikov's hometown of Vinnytsia is no stranger to war—tens of thousands were massacred in Stalin's purges and during Nazi occupation. This time, the city is far enough west to have been spared a ground invasion by Russia. Yet, Vinnytsia has suffered regular missile bombardments that have destroyed schools and energy infrastructure. An attack in July 2022 killed 28 people and injured over 100.
Prosiannikov had to finish high school in Germany, while his younger brother went to Portugal. “He's seven, and it's just impossible to live in the country where you go to school and you just spend the whole time in the [bomb] shelter,” he told Sundial.
When Prosiannikov arrived in Poland, he saw Polish citizens waving Ukrainian flags and marching in the street for Ukraine. He felt that solidarity was in the air, and there was no question that the people of Poland were moved by Ukrainians’ suffering.
But at Columbia, Prosiannikov and other Ukrainian students tell me that the University community has largely forgotten about the war.
‘I Am F—ing Fed Up’: Ignored by Columbia’s Activists
One million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded in the war, the Wall Street Journal reported, and in the first half of 2024, there were three times as many deaths than births in Ukraine. Nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children (and possibly hundreds of thousands more) have been kidnapped by Russia, with many being forced into “re-education” camps.
Several of Ukraine’s cities have been utterly decimated. In Mariupol, only about 100,000 of its 430,000 prewar inhabitants remain. Bakhmut, which had a prewar population of over 70,000, has also been obliterated, and over 90 percent of its residents have fled.
Despite these horrors, Columbia’s activists are almost exclusively concerned with the war in the Middle East.
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment was established in April, just a few months after the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Students protested primarily against Israeli military operations in Gaza and Columbia’s investments in Israel, but the movement also roped in a myriad of other issues: U.S. foreign policy, the NYPD, even feminism and gentrification in Harlem. Russian imperialism didn't make the list.
“I walked by the encampment so many times thinking that I wish I could go there with a Ukrainian flag, stand there, and say: ‘I am f—ing fed up,’” Gabriela Sartan, SEAS ’25, said.
For Sartan, the war has also impacted her academic life. Just before one of her final exams in the spring of 2022, her grandfather passed away from COVID-related complications—he was still in Dnipro, Ukraine, and blackouts meant that he couldn’t get medical care in time. Needing time to grieve, Sartan asked one of her professors if he could reschedule the final for a later date. He demanded a death certificate as proof, even though obtaining one would be near impossible in a country ravaged by war.
Absent From Campus Conversations
According to the Ukrainian students I spoke with, campus activists seem unwilling to acknowledge that Ukrainian students, like Palestinian students, have also been personally affected by the devastation in their homeland. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) even released a newsletter in October that referred to Stalin’s “great victories.” They neglected to acknowledge his leading role in starving five million Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor, a human-made famine from 1932 to 1933 (Stalin also supported the creation of Israel).
CUAD did not respond to a request for comment.
“I see a lot of people here who fall victim to [Russian propaganda],” said Elyse Demkiw, GS ’26, who returned to her hometown of Kyiv this past summer. She told me how Russia had bombed a children's hospital about 500 meters from where she was staying. At Columbia, Demkiw has noticed that many students are ignorant about such war crimes and Ukraine’s history.
“The other day I heard someone say that it's sad that Ukraine wants to break its past with Russia—a past marked by genocide, occupation, and repression,” she said. Demkiw also believes that many students erroneously view the Palestinian and Ukrainian causes as “mutually incompatible.”
Yevheniia Yefymova, GS ’26, says that some Columbia students’ admiration for Russia biases their understanding of the conflict. They have an interest in the Russian language and see Russia—and the legacy of the Soviet Union—as simultaneously “picturesque” and “depressing,” Yefymova said.
“I really don't think, at least from what I see, that Columbia students are really engaging and looking into history and considering Russia as one of the imperialist states, as they call Israel,” she added.
Another reason Ukraine has been absent from campus conversations is that there are not consistent, visible protests like the ones surrounding the war in the Middle East. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, there has been only one large campus protest for Ukraine—it occurred on February 25, 2022, the day after the invasion began.
“The fact that I'm Ukrainian does not necessarily mean that I want to be arranging all of those events and just printing photos of people murdered during the war just to raise awareness,” Prosiannikov said.
Columbia’s Ukrainian Club hosts fundraisers and discussion panels, but campus protests or demonstrations, however, haven't been a strategy for the club. Because of the small number of Ukrainian students at Columbia, the club attempts to do as much outreach as possible to students who are not Ukrainian. “We plaster our event posters all over campus and we try to communicate that we're a very inclusive and very open club,” said Dara Lesniak, GS ’25, who runs the club.
Students who attend events hosted by the Columbia University Ukrainian Club may not always be aware of what is happening in Ukraine, but Lesniak says that after attending the club's events, they begin to realize how the situation in Ukraine is connected to their own interests. For example, after attending a club event about environmental destruction in Ukraine, one student realized that there was a strong connection between the conflict and her academic interest in sustainable development.
Connecting the Two Wars
Ukraine's positions on Israel and Palestine are complex. Historically, Ukraine has sided with Palestine—there is a Palestinian embassy in Ukraine, and Ukraine has voted in favor of the United Nations’ resolutions criticizing Israel's actions in the West Bank. Yet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been clear that he believes both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist and has called for an end to the conflict. The Ukrainian government has even provided food aid to Gaza, even though Ukraine itself is suffering.
Ukrainian students’ positions are just as nuanced. Sartan is perplexed by CUAD's statement praising Stalin and Mao. “It makes no sense that people who are driven by the loss of lives and the genocide of a people to give praise to someone like Stalin, like Mao, because that entire praise lies in the discarding of human life,” she said. At the same time, Sartan, who is also Jewish, sympathizes with Palestine. “I, as a Ukrainian, am the first one to say Palestine should and can exist,” she said.
Yefymova supports Palestine as well but has complicated feelings about the amount of attention it receives. “I do think that the issue of Gaza and Palestine is a little trendy for a left university population, and it's very much this colonial and post-colonial thing that people at Columbia like to talk about,” she said. “They're very interested and it's good that people are interested in it and they take action. I do think that because of that, Ukraine receives less attention.”
That attention might be more important to have than ever. Russia has recently made gains in the east of Ukraine, and after months of insufficient munitions shipments from Western allies, Ukrainian soldiers are struggling with morale.
For some Ukrainian students, a classmate reaching out might make all the difference. “I cannot just bring up the topic because it stops bringing up joy. I would not bring it up from my own initiative, but I would like people to ask me to talk about it,” Prosiannikov said.
If the carnage in Gaza can garner the sympathies of students and spurn them into action, the mass destruction in Ukraine should warrant the same outrage. For many nights in October, students sat by the Alma Mater and read the names of those killed in Gaza. One wonders if students will ever do the same for those killed in Mariupol, Bucha, or Bakhmut.
Mr. Ward is a staff writer. He is a senior at the School of General Studies majoring in political science and is a Saltzman Institute Student Scholar.
 | A guest post by
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If we look objectively at the facts, a curious commonality between Ukraine and Israel emerges that helps explain why the pro-Hamas crowd at Columbia has no particular interest in protesting against Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine.
Russia does not acknowledge Ukraine’s right to be sovereign in any part of its historical homeland - the Palestinians take the same view of Israel.
Russia rejects, ignores or rewrites Ukraine’s documented history - the Palestinians do the same with Jewish history.
Russia seeks Ukraine’s destruction and absorption - the Palestinians have the same goal for Israel.
Russia attacked Ukraine unprovoked and conducted massacres of Ukrainian civilians - the Palestinians did the same to Israel and Israelis on October 7, 2023.
The international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris is what makes Crimea and the Donbas legally part of Ukraine - it is the same doctrine that makes the disputed territories a/k/a “Occupied Palestinian Territory” legally part of Israel.
Russia’s war of aggression has caused untold suffering, death and destruction as has the Palestinian decision to break a permanent ceasefire and invade attack Israel.
There is another truism at work: if Russia and the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. If Ukraine or Israel laid down their arms, there would be neither Ukraine nor Israel.
Given all this, if you support Hamas then it makes it that much more likely that you also support Russia.
That Ukraine had a history of antisemitism so severe that the few Jewish survivors of the Holocaust saw the Ukrainians as worse than Nazis only places a far greater moral obligation on Ukraine toward Israel than the other way around. It is dealing with this past at a glacial rate - with President Zelinskyy’s statement to the Knesset that Ukraine protected its Jews against the Nazis showing either a willful ignorance of history though more likely the effects of a Soviet revisionist history of consistent “antifascism”. Either way, his comment was a gross affront to historical trust and so a (to be charitable) unintended insult to Jews worldwide.
And, of course, the pro-Hamas crowd is not only suffused with antisemitism but seems to gory in dreading it.