In the prevailing narratives of the AALA (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) countries’ decolonization and postcolonial development, the presence of Ukrainian scientists often remains invisible, absorbed into the broader shadow of Soviet internationalism (framed as the USSR's moral and historical duty to support oppressed peoples and bring about a world socialist revolution still being an instrument for control).
Yet a closer examination reveals a list of Ukrainians who shaped local institutions and epistemic frameworks across countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
One of the most prominent figures in this landscape is Borys Balinsky (1905-1997), a Kyiv-born embryologist who would become a foundational figure in South African science.
Trained at the university of Ivan Schmalhausen in interwar Kyiv, Balinsky rose quickly through academic ranks and by 1933 had become professor of zoology. However, Stalinist purges and the devastation of the World War II uprooted his career.
After surviving repression and eventual evacuation from the USSR, Balinsky settled in Johannesburg in 1949 and joined the University of the Witwatersrand, where he would redefine the field of developmental biology on the continent.
At Witwatersrand, Balinsky not only led the Department of Zoology (1954-1973) and served as Dean of Science (1965-1967), but also established a pioneering school of experimental embryology and electron microscopy.
His comparative approach to amphibian development - studying not only classical lab species like Xenopus laevis, but also diverse African amphibians - positioned South African embryology on the global map well before these models became standard in Western labs.
His seminal textbook, An Introduction to Embryology (1960), became a tablebook across continents, translated into at least 5 languages and reprinted in over 100,000 copies.
It transformed complex developmental phenomena into accessible knowledge for generations of researchers in AALA countries, many of whom studied under his direct mentorship.
In resisting the isolation of apartheid-era science, he maintained scientific correspondence, mentored students of color despite systemic segregation, and quietly carried the ethical residues of a Ukrainian scientific humanism formed in the interwar republics.
In 2024, the University of the Witwatersrand, in collaboration with the Ukrainian Embassy, hosted a symposium in his honor - restoring his name as both a Ukrainian and South African figure of knowledge, whose work transcended borders and ideological blocks.
Another trailblazer is Volodymyr Lypsky (1863-1937), a Ukrainian botanist whose expeditions through North Africa and Southeast Asia left marks on global plant science.
Born in Volhynia and trained at Kyiv University, Lypsky served as director of the Odesa Botanical Garden and led the Department of Botany at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. From the early 1900s, his expeditions took him to Tunisia, Algeria, Indonesia, and Central Asia, where he collected, classified, and described over 220 new species of plants - 45 of which would eventually bear his name.
Lypsky’s work was not limited to specimen collection. He developed a systematic classification of the flora of North Africa, and in 1904 published Botanical Institutions and Gardens in Southern Europe and North Africa, an encyclopedic account of botanical infrastructures across the Mediterranean.
His efforts helped lay the groundwork for indigenous botanical research in regions where colonial extraction had dominated scientific agendas.
Moving from science to infrastructure, the story of Mykhailo Chmykhov, a Ukrainian flight instructor in post-independence Mozambique, highlights another axis of influence.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, following Mozambique’s liberation from Portuguese colonial rule, the country faced the urgent task of building its own military and civil aviation. As part of Soviet technical assistance programs, Ukrainian specialists - including Chmykhov - arrived to help establish a national air force.
Chmykhov’s role was not merely technical. He taught the country’s first generation of Mozambican pilots how to fly, maintain, and coordinate aircraft in a context of limited infrastructure and external pressure.
His training programs covered both theoretical knowledge and practical skills - takeoffs, reconnaissance, aerial mapping, and emergency navigation. His students, between 1979 and 1982, would become foundational cadres of the Mozambican Air Force.
Though operating within a Soviet framework, Chmykhov brought with him a distinctly Ukrainian tradition of aviation training, forged in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, and adapted it to the challenges of an African frontline state.
Finally, the work of Sofia Yablonska (1907-1971) exemplifies a different kind of engagement with AALA countries - one rooted in cultural representation, travel writing, and anti-colonial imagination. Born in Western Ukraine under Habsburg rule, Yablonska left for Paris in the 1920s and became one of the first Ukrainian female travel journalists and filmmakers.
Between 1928 and 1932, she traveled extensively through Morocco, where she lived for several months, later documenting her experiences in The Charm of Morocco - a travelogue written in the form of a diary, illustrated with her own photographs.
Unlike many of her French contemporaries, Yablonska avoided exoticizing tropes. Her writing about Morocco, Indochina, and China - further elaborated in From the Land of Rice and Opium (1936) and Distant Horizons (1939) - combined personal narrative, ethnographic observation, and subtle critiques of imperial dominance.
Working with Société Indochine Films et Cinéma, she captured everyday life in mentioned AALA countries with empathy and realism.
As a Ukrainian woman navigating the colonial world from the margins of Europe, Yablonska offered an alternative gaze - neither imperial, nor entirely Western - giving voice to subjects who were otherwise objectified in mainstream colonial literature.
Together, these lives sketch a lesser-known history of Ukrainian presence in AALA countries - a presence that was not colonial but collaborative, not extractive but generative.
Whether in laboratories, airfields, botanical gardens, or camera reels, these individuals contributed to the making of postcolonial infrastructures and epistemologies. They brought with them not only skills and knowledge but also the burdens and insights of a nation itself long denied sovereignty.
Their work reminds us that the story of global development is not a dialogue of so-called West and Rest. It is one in which Ukraine and AALA countries have built the worlds we inhabit today.
This article was produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, Ukraine's major cultural and public diplomacy institution, and NGO Cultural Diplomacy Foundation.
