Windmills and Don Quixote. Ukrainian Truth 25

How the great war that no one believed in began – a reconstruction of the three longest days of February 2022. How Ukraine lost and regained Zmiiniy Island, and the Ukrainian “Neptune” destroyed the flagship of the Russian fleet – the cruiser “Moscow”. How a GUR special forces officer sailed for 14 hours in the open sea. How fishermen from Straholissye saved two thousand people from hunger and occupation. How a simple grandmother Polina Rayko from Oleshki became a star of naive art, and Paraska Plytka-Gorytsvit from Kryvorivna overcame the Gulag.

These are just a few of 30 stories about a country that took on the battle with unimaginable windmills and very real dragons.

The book “Windmills and Don Quixote. Ukrainian Truth 25” is a journey that lasts a quarter of a century. Through turbulence, the bitterness of defeats and the warmth of hope. Through revolutions and war. Through ups and downs. From despair and infantile “but somehow it will be” and “what can I change” to the awareness of oneself and one’s own strength.

This journey began with a one-room apartment, which became the first office of the editorial office of “Ukrainian Pravda”. With five people. Without money. Without guarantees. In a country that got entangled in “multi-vectorism” and was rapidly sliding towards autocracy. It was then, in the spring of 2000, that Georgy Gongadze chose as the symbol and logo of the Ukrainian Truth a hero from a Cervantes novel and a Picasso engraving. A freak with a spear in his hand, who sees what others turn a blind eye to.

This is a story that we have all been writing together for a quarter of a century – every day at a speed of ten news items per hour.

The book contains only a few dozen of the hundreds of thousands of texts that appeared on the pages of the site in different years. This is an attempt not to lose the meanings that make us who we are in the flow of time and the kaleidoscope of news.

Several dozen names, reconstructions of historical events, portraits of modern Don Quixotes, reports from those places that are now destroyed, are left to continue only in our memory and the texts of the authors of the UP.

Many names remain in parentheses, but those that managed to fit into several hundred pages contain a common truth that testifies to us all.

The book also includes an author's print by illustrator Serhiy Maydukov, which was created especially for the publication "Windmills and Don Quixote. Ukrainian Pravda 25".