I don’t know if it was the lyrics, or the melody that left a powerful impression on me – probably both, but one of the songs we sang at Ukrainian Plast scout camps growing up in the 1960s and ’70s was “Vid Synioho Donu.”

Here’s a rough English translation  of the poem’s first stanza:

From the blue river Don to the grey Carpathians,
A single indivisible family,
No slavery, no serfdom, no brutality, no betrayals,
A free, independent Ukraine!