Dmytro Kukharchuk said that the leadership of Mohyla did not allow a front-line soldier to attend the lecture because he was “too right”
For the fourth year, Ukraine is in a hellish struggle for its own existence. Soldiers maintain defense on the front lines, risk their lives, experience shelling, losses, fire and cold, often alone with war. They return home not for benefits or fame, but to share experiences, meanings, and truth. To speak to society directly, without filters. But what happens when educational institutions — those that should be a space for dialogue and memory — close their doors to them? The case about which reported The commander of the second assault battalion of the Third Separate Assault Brigade, Dmytro Kuharchuk, is not alone.
Dmytro Kukharchuk spoke harshly about the ban on the speech of combat officer, front-line soldier Yevgeny Vryadnyk, known as friend Zhekus, within the walls of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He reminded that Mohylyanka is not just an educational institution, but an institution with history, which since 1632 has been the bearer of Ukrainian identity, the center of the culture of resistance, the center of strength and spirit.
Kukharchuk emphasized that it was under this symbolic building — the “Cultural and Art Center of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences” — that the students gathered. They were standing outside because the door was closed. The military man’s lecture was canceled by the decision of the so-called “ethics committee” because the speaker was, they say, “too right-wing.”
Vyyskovy said that the topic of the lecture – “Heroic breed: from old Ukraine to the Third Liberation Struggle” is absolutely natural and relevant for the warring nation, and the lecturer himself is not a theoretician, not an official, but a person who passed through the hottest points of the front. He emphasized: Yevhen Vryadnyk is a fighter who defended Kyiv, but now he cannot speak in Kyiv itself, in an audience where people like him should be respected.
Kuharchuk noted that he personally addressed the representatives of the leadership of Mohylyanka – Dmytro Mazin and Vladyslava Osmak, and in a conversation with them on behalf of the command of the 3rd Army Corps, he urged them not to allow the country’s defenders to be humiliated. But these appeals, he said, were ignored.
He emphasized that modern Mohylianka increasingly resembles a “regime facility” where administrative pressure and closedness prevail, rather than a space of free thought. And he added: this model is more similar to the university of the Yanukovych era than to the free academy that Mohylyanka always considered itself to be.
Dmytro Kukharchuk emphasized that the situation with the refusal of the lecture is not an isolated case, but a question of the general attitude towards the military. He called this situation the surrealism of the fourth year of a full-scale war and asked: why should people who risked their lives for independence feel like strangers in Ukrainian universities today?
The military called for maximum public disclosure of such a situation, and also appealed to the military and educational community to give an assessment of such manifestations. He emphasized that now it is not about one lecture, but about a fundamental question: does a military man have the right to be heard in the state for which he fought?
Kuharchuk posed tough questions to the leadership of the academy: why are these people still participating in the educational process? What do they teach students? Despise the army? To hate those who defended Kyiv and the state with weapons in their hands? Avoid the truth if it does not fit into a convenient liberal scheme?
So, in a number of educational institutions that call themselves cultural, humanitarian, and liberal, a new uncomfortable tradition is evidently forming: the displacement of the frontline voice from the educational space. The voice of those who, risking everything, defend the state, turns out to be too “radical”, “right” or simply “unwanted”.
