![Serafyma 'Sima' Borovska: 'Legend has it that [Nikita] Khruschev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in a night of drinking. The truth is not so simple.' Photograph: Lara Marlowe](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/OTZZENWTAZDEBOMM3VIKBYMSUI.jpg?auth=6a9c187cce1edb9b27dc43142149e76295e4da1bae6d85530b87d09dd8a089b8&smart=true&width=1024&height=768)
Serafyma “Sima” Borovska wept when she learned that Donald Trump intends to recognise Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, the autonomous region of Ukraine where she was born in 1999. “I will never see my Crimea again,” she says.
Borovska’s paternal grandparents lived in Kurakhove, Donetsk, where she spent her childhood holidays. She remembers round loaves of crusty bread, cut into chunks, and the pincered beetles that proliferated in summer. Russian troops seized Kurakhove at the beginning of this year, completing the loss of her places of childhood memory.
Borovska is a psychiatrist at Superhumans, the NGO which provides prosthetic limbs for Ukraine’s war amputees. Her husband, Ruslan Borovskiy, owns a start-up drone factory. The couple are the sort of Ukrainians who give you hope for Ukraine. They have known loss, but their story is one of resilience and ingenuity, faith, courage and love.
Borovska was in high school in 2014 when president Viktor Yanukovych, widely regarded as a puppet of Vladimir Putin, was overthrown by the Maidan revolution. Realising that he was losing control of Ukraine, Putin seized Crimea.
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Until then, Borovska had intended to study at Simferopol University. With her parents’ support, she applied instead to universities on the mainland. She had to earn two diplomas – a Russian one at her local high school and a Ukrainian certificate online.
Relations between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian Crimeans were tense from the beginning of the occupation. “It was better to hide pro-Ukrainian views,” Borovska says. “My father was a stage and film actor. He had to stop because of problems with pro-Russian politicians. When they played the Russian anthem in school, I shouted the Ukrainian anthem. I would be in serious trouble if I did that today.”
During her last two years in Crimea, from 2014 to 2016, Borovska found herself arguing with those around her, especially teachers who were pleased with higher pay received from the Russian administration. “When I heard people say pro-Russian things I became angry. As a teenager I couldn’t hold back my feelings. I sang in a Ukrainian choir and that became very precious to me.”
The priest at Borovska’s Orthodox church prayed for the death of Ukrainian soldiers, and she stopped attending Mass. She won a government scholarship to medical school in Kharkiv, near the Russian border in northeast Ukraine. As a university student, she visited her parents in Simferopol until after her father’s death in 2021. She entered Crimea on a Ukrainian passport, but when Russian border guards found in their database that she held an expired Russian passport, they charged a fine of several thousand roubles and told her she could not leave without first obtaining a new Russian passport in Simferopol.
“Every time I visited, I would say goodbye to the sea and my city, because I never knew if I would be able to return,” Borovska says.
At medical school in Kharkiv, Borovska also encountered anti-Ukrainian sentiment. An employee in the dean’s office learned she was from Crimea and asked “So why did you come here?” A Ukrainian-speaking friend overheard other students refer to her as a westerner.
Following the full-scale invasion in early 2022, tension grew markedly. Borovska’s mother is a paediatric anaesthetist. “Some of her colleagues were fired for having posted pro-Ukrainian songs and statements years earlier. The FSB [Russian intelligence] went through all the employees’ messengers, including my mother’s. She was scared and we kept telling her ‘It’s time to leave.’ She came to our wedding in Lviv in 2023 with just a few belongings, and never returned.”
Borovska had begun attending services at the Ukrainian Reformed Church in Kharkiv. When Russian forces attacked Kharkiv on February 24th, 2022, she fled in a car with six friends and her cat.
She met her husband at the Reformed Church in Lviv. Both say it was love at first sight. “We share our love of God and we both like helping people,” she says. “We share our love of Ukraine and we live in the real world; we don’t avoid reality.”
For her birthday last year, Borovskiy gave Borovska a black and white kitten sent from the front by Ukrainian soldiers. They named the kitten Dolya, meaning fate.
Even Europeans who support Ukraine often say that Crimea is a different case from the other occupied Ukrainian territories – that, for instance, it was “always Russian”.
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“Legend has it that [Nikita] Khruschev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in a night of drinking. The truth is not so simple,” says Borovska. “Russia has imposed its culture and engaged in demographic engineering in Ukraine for centuries.”
Catherine II seized Crimea from the Ottomans in 1783. Greeks and Tatars were expelled to Donetsk, which is why there are Crimean place names there. Borovska’s paternal great grandparents in Donetsk were of Greek-Crimean origin.
After the second World War, Stalin deported the Tatars and moved hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians to Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, to strengthen the grip of the Soviet Union. Putin is now practising a similar form of genetic engineering, by abducting fair-skinned children from the occupied territories to shore up the falling demography of white Russia.
