On May 25, 1926, Symon Petliura was assassinated in Paris by Samuil Schwartzbard.

Symon Petliura remains one of the most complex figures in Ukrainian history. For Ukraine, he symbolizes statehood, armed resistance and the struggle against Moscow. For Israel, his name opens a painful conversation about Jewish pogroms, Sholem Schwarzbard, Soviet propaganda and historical responsibility.

Symon Petliura was killed almost a century ago, yet his name has returned to Ukraine’s public conversation not as a distant historical reference, but as a living question of war, statehood and survival.

Ukraine is again fighting Moscow.

Again, it is being forced to prove that it is not a borderland, not a buffer zone, not a temporary political accident, and not a province of someone else’s empire. It is a nation with its own army, language, memory, diplomacy and right to exist.

That is why Petliura’s phrase, “Do not forget the sword,” sounds different today.

It no longer feels like an old political metaphor. It sounds like a warning.

For many Ukrainians, Petliura is associated with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the struggle for independence after the collapse of the Russian Empire, the army, exile and the unfinished fight against Moscow. He was Chairman of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Chief Otaman of its forces. He belonged to a generation that tried to build a Ukrainian state when empires were falling and armies were moving across Eastern Europe like storms.

But for Israel, this history cannot be told only through the Ukrainian lens.

Here, Petliura’s name immediately opens another, much more painful layer: Jewish pogroms, Sholem Schwarzbard, Paris, the 1927 trial, Soviet propaganda, and the still unresolved question of where personal guilt ends and political responsibility begins.

That is why this story cannot be reduced to a slogan.

Petliura should not be turned into a saint.

But he also should not be left inside the flat Soviet caricature that tried to make Ukrainian independence itself look morally criminal.

And that is exactly why it matters.

Ukraine, Petliura and the meaning of the sword

The Ukrainian People’s Republic did not survive.

That is the brutal fact.

But it did something no empire could erase: it proved that Ukraine existed as a political nation. Not as folklore. Not as a regional color inside Russia. Not as a peasant dialect with songs and embroidery, but as a state project with a government, army, diplomacy, institutions and a claim to international recognition.

Petliura became one of the faces of that attempt.

He was not a flawless leader. No serious historian should pretend otherwise. Around his name there are defeats, tragedies, arguments, compromises and wounds that remain open.

Yet in one sense he was strikingly modern: he understood that independence cannot be defended by declarations alone.

Paper does not stop an army.

Diplomatic language does not shoot down missiles.

Foreign sympathy does not replace the ability to hold the front.

Ukraine learned this again after February 24, 2022. When Russian troops moved toward Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and southern Ukraine, everything depended not on abstract formulas but on people with weapons, command structures, logistics, drones, artillery, air defense and the will of society not to surrender.

Petliura spoke about the sword in another century.

But the meaning survived.

A state that wants to live must be able to defend itself.

Israel understands this logic

An Israeli reader does not need a long lecture to understand why force can become not a choice, but a condition of existence.

Israel was built on the understanding that a people threatened with destruction cannot place its survival entirely in the hands of others. Diplomacy matters. Alliances matter. International law matters.

But when a state has no power of its own, other people begin discussing whether it has the right to live.

Ukraine is now........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)