Why does Ukraine fight? So it can exist, Zelensky says.
Ukraine already celebrates Independence Day, on Aug. 24, to mark the country’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991. But officials have said the government felt the need to create the new holiday last summer after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, fomented rebellion in the east and threatened further aggression.

In contrast to Independence Day, Statehood Day is meant to address a more existential question by stretching back a millennium to demonstrate that Ukraine has its own history and culture independent of Russia.

Questions of history — and how to interpret that history — might have once been the subject of nuanced discussion in university lecture halls. But they were weaponized in the run-up to the war in Ukraine as President Vladimir V. Putin sought to justify his unprovoked invasion of a neighbor that shared deep cultural and historical ties.

Only three days before launching the first missiles at targets across Ukraine on Feb. 24, Mr. Putin declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. He argued that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction and that it had been a mistake to endow Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it autonomy within the newly created Soviet state.