This is The Guardian.

On the 25th of February 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates

about Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Amid the shock and bouts of crying and doom scrolling, I seemingly trivial yet intimately

unsettling thought entered my mind.

I realized that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities for a book

I was working on, I no longer knew how to think or talk about Borsch, a beat soup that Ukraine

in Russia claimed as their own.

I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating Borsch, Borschen Cyrillic, no tea at the end, that's

a Yiddish edition, at least twice a week.

After we emigrated in 1974, it signified for me the complicated difficult home we had left.

Hearing Queen's New York where I live, a big pot made by my mother usually sat in my fridge.

But who did have the right to claim it as heritage?

That tangled question of cultural ownership I'd been reflecting on for so long had landed

on my table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally personal.

Back in Moscow in the politically stagnant 1970s, I never regarded Borsch as any people's

national dish.

It was just there, a piece of our shared Soviet reality like the brown winter snow or the

buses filled with hangover breath or my scratchy wool school uniform.

Our socialist Borsch came in different guises.

Institutional Borsch with its wreak of stale cabbage was to be endured at kindergarten's

hospitals and workers' canteens across the 11 time zones of our vast union of Soviet

...