Kiev (AFP)

Popular chef in Ukraine, Yevguen Klopotenko is today at the heart of a war with Russia, "the borscht war" which he started by claiming the famous soup made from beet and cabbage as Kiev's cultural heritage.

"I don't really like to call it a war for borscht, but in fact it is what it is", assures AFP Mr. Klopotenko, 33, curly hair and a diploma from the French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu in the pocket, in his restaurant serving Ukrainian cuisine in the center of Kiev.

Star of social networks, he brought in October a casserole of borscht to a meeting of the Ministry of Culture to convince him to propose this dish for the list of the intangible world heritage of UNESCO which already includes the French gastronomy, the Neapolitan pizza. or wine from Georgia.

The ministry could not resist and announced that it was preparing the Ukrainian dossier for UNESCO, which will close the reception of applications in March 2021.

Russia, whose relations with Kiev are at their lowest for seven years, has been stung.

“Borscht is a national food of many countries, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova and Lithuania,” the Russian Embassy in the United States wrote on Twitter.

Soon after, the Russian government called borscht "one of the most famous and beloved Russian dishes" on its official Twitter account.

According to the Ukrainians, however, a dish bearing this name was first mentioned in 1548 in the diary of a European traveler who bought a portion of it at a market in Kiev.

And this soup did not arrive in Russia until much later via Ukrainian settlers, says Kiev.

Once part of the Russian Empire, then of the USSR, Ukraine, of which a good part of the population speaks Russian, has largely remained in the zone of political but also cultural influence of its powerful neighbor even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

- Quest for identity -

But Russia's 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula and the war in the east of the country with pro-Russian Kremlin-sponsored separatists turned the game around causing a rise in patriotism and a quest for national identity. in the country.

After centuries of Russian domination, "our nation lacks an identity, we have nothing that would be ours, they took everything from us," said Mr. Klopotenko.

“When I started to study Ukrainian food and cuisine, I realized that Ukrainian cuisine did not exist. Everything is Soviet,” says the young chef.

The USSR "swallowed" Ukraine, "chewed it up and spat it out (...) We don't know who we are or what we are," he says.

Olena Chtcherban, a 40-year-old Ukrainian ethnologist and historian, ticks when she sees this dish called "Russian soup" abroad where it is often associated with Russia.

"We have different languages, culture and food," said the young woman, dressed in a national costume at the small borscht museum that she just opened in Opichnia, in central Ukraine, after there to have organized for seven years a festival dedicated to this soup.

"Borscht is the second dish I ate after my mother's milk," she says.

Unlike the French or Italians who "pride themselves on their cuisine", the Ukrainians do not know their history "well" and "lack pride" for their gastronomy, notes the ethnographer.

For Mr. Klopotenko, love for borscht is one of the few things that Ukrainians share, divided on many subjects ranging from history to geopolitics.

“Even if I hate someone, when he comes home, and I come home, we each eat borscht,” he explains.

"Borscht is what unites us".

© 2020 AFP