The Foreign Service Journal, March 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2020 33 nian, Volodomyr) has stood since 1853 on a historic bluff high above the Dnipro River. St. Volodomyr is celebrated by the Ukrai- nian people as the Grand Prince of Kyiv, the father of the Ukrai- nian nation. They point to the creation of Kyiv and other cities in the region during the 11th century—long before Moscow U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and members of the U.S. delegation at a U.S.-Russia bilateral meeting in Moscow on April 12, 2017. Right to left: U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Tefft, interpreter Marina Gross, Secretary Tillerson, Chief of Staff Margaret Peterlin, and senior advisers Brian Hook and R.C. Hammond. v The process of emerging Russian and Ukrainian national identities was aptly characterized by New York Times correspon- dent Neil MacFarquhar as “the statue wars” in a Nov. 4, 2016, article. On that day, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveile d a nearly 60-foot-high statue of his namesake, Prince Vladimir the Great, in Borovitskaya Square just outside the Kremlin Walls in Moscow. Russian Patriarch Kirill stood by his side. In light of Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and military incursion in eastern Ukraine, the unveiling was viewed by many analysts as a sym- bolic reassertion of Russia’s nationalist claim not only to empire, but also to being the political and religious heir of the Kievan Rus, the loose confederation of East Slavic and Finnic peoples who inhabited the region from the ninth to the 13th centuries. Vladimir is celebrated not only as a great political leader of the Kievan Rus, but as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His baptism in Crimea around 988 brought Christianity to the Slavic peoples of the region and is used by Moscow to justify its claims to Crimea. In Kyiv, meanwhile, another statue of St. Vladimir (in Ukrai- U.S.DEPARTMENTOFSTATE