Independence for the Far East is a topic that raises debate, questions, and doubts. We published the Program of the Movement for the Independence of Zelenyi Klyn — and immediately received a wave of reactions. Skeptics, neutral observers, and supporters — everyone sees the same document differently. We have gathered the ten most pressing questions and answer them directly, without dodging them.

For more than a century of Ukrainian settlement in the Far East, the territory we know today as Zelenyi Klyn has gone by several different names. “Green Ukraine,” “New Ukraine,” “Far Eastern Ukraine,” and “Zakytayshchyna” are not different regions, but different names for the same phenomenon: the mass settlement of Ukrainians in the southern Far East and the formation there of a stable national community that numbered hundreds of thousands of people and had its own self-gover