“No one in the world is able to fight against the Russian army the way we do"
From the state of Ukrainian society and the intellectual elite, it seems that we are on the verge of ruin. The state of affairs on the frontline, the depletion of resilience, adrenaline rush, decline in morale and a highly politicised, emotionally charged discourse. What is your sense of the situation?
We are far from ruin, I would not support this discourse. We are a bit shaky, and we cannot find a balance. In 2022, we mostly talked about the victory, but there was another side to the story - the losses, the deaths in many families. Many people felt this first-hand, and there was criticism of the Single Marathon as the Ukrainian version of a "victory lap". Now we have gone to another extreme - we are talking about our weakness and problems at the front, about retreating. This is true, but we forget the main thing - no one in the world is able to fight against the Russian army the way we do. Any other society would have fled long ago, would have disintegrated long ago.
If you look closely, our enemy has huge problems: despair over not achieving their goals, limited progress over the past year. But we also need to understand that there will be no Bakhchisaray tomorrow. Perhaps this is a war for decades, as I said back in 2022, both here and in the West. When I was asked in the West after the Kharkiv operation whether there would be a victory next year, I said to prepare for the 2030s and 2040s.
I have an analogy with Poland: if in the nineteenth century the question was whether the Poles would regain their independence, which they lost in the late eighteenth century, the twentieth century asked them whether they would preserve it. They went through different stages: restoration in puppet forms, then partition - finally, they restored the state. The question of the twentieth century was whether Ukrainians would gain independence, and we did, but the question of the twenty-first century is whether we will preserve it.
Can an average person think in terms of decades and centuries, living here and now, feeling a certain hopelessness?
Our alternative is not that Russia will conquer us and then there will be peace and prosperity - this has never happened. Every time Ukrainians have been conquered by Russia, starting from Cossack times, we have had to fight for them: against the Crimean Tatars in the eighteenth century, against the Poles, Napoleon, Hitler. In the Ukrainian language, particularly in Shevchenko's, the word “muscovite" means not only a Russian, but also a soldier. "Taken as a muscovite" meant that you would be taken into the imperial army, where you would die for something completely alien to you. This is our alternative, and we see it in the occupied territories - we will be part of another army, and this army will not spare anyone. We should soberly understand that we are facing an enemy who does not value human life at all, but rather considers death, destruction, and necrophilia to be tools of politics and management. Russians rule people through fear of death and violence. Ukrainians have never ruled people in this way, we just don't know how to do it, thank God. But if we find ourselves in this world, which is much more horrible, then death and the fear of imprisonment will be woven into our lives.
Ruin is a concept in our history associated with the division of Ukraine into left and right banks. The end of the seventeenth century, the post-Khmelnytsky era, different hetmans, distrust of each other, lack of a sense of centre within. I think this is one of our biggest threats. Yes, there is an external enemy, but if we allow internal splits to occur to the point where the country cannot be stitched together, we will lose ourselves - this has always been the case in our history. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the princely era reached a level of fragmentation when it could no longer defend itself. This was the case in the Cossack era, in the era of Ruin, and this is exactly what Kulish's classic work Black Rada and its alternative, the very underrated Marusya by Maria Wilinska-Markowicz. The same thing happened in the twentieth century: we lost to the Bolsheviks because, on the one hand, they were strong, and on the other hand, for a number of internal reasons. We were disunited, we had no centre of power, we had atamanship, where everyone fought against everyone, and there were some utopians who believed that the army was not needed at all.
Panteleimon Kulish had a moment of choice when it came to choosing partners: to swear an oath to the Czar of Moscow or to cooperate with the Poles. There was also the Ottoman Empire in our history. Ukraine, at a crossroads, tried to choose a strong partner who could help secure its interests. But for the partners themselves, Ukraine was just a territory of struggle. Is our choice of partners now final and can we put an end to history?
No, history never puts an end to anything - everything is connected to everything. History always has an ellipsis, a semicolon. For example, in 1975, the Soviet Union signed the final act of the Helsinki Accords, which actually legitimised the occupation of the Baltic states. The West guaranteed that it would not reconquer the Baltic states - the USSR was happy, Brezhnev was happy. But there was also a third basket of human rights, which gave rise to the Helsinki movement and grew into one of the elements that led to the collapse of the USSR. We need to understand that nothing is final, including the consolidation that took place in 2014 and then in 2022. We will always have the risk of Russian influence or strong neighbours. I would not have high hopes that Hungary or other EU countries will not want to have the same policy towards us as Russia.
In Ukrainian history, there is a naivety to rely on an external carrier and different views on what kind of carrier. For example, Yuriy Lypa from Odesa believed that the north-south vector was much more important for Ukrainian history than the east-west vector, so our Black Sea identity, our inclusion through the Black Sea into the Mediterranean world, was a priority.
For us to be able to formulate our own core, the help of partners is important. We will not win or lose this war if something happens to them. But if we depend only on that or on who is in power in Germany and France, we will lose sooner or later. If we depend on arms supplies, on finance, we will lose sooner or later. We cannot rely on external partners, and we have tried to do so many times: in the days of Mazepa, Khmelnytskyy, and the UPA.
My thesis is that we underestimate Ukrainian subjectivity, we say that we are controlled by someone, we are dependent on someone. In fact, our recent history is about subjectivity, where we went against the will of Russia, the will of the European Union, and the will of America. Bush gives his Chicken Kyiv Speech - we do what he says, Russia tries to destroy us from within - it fails, he installs Yanukovych - we throw him out, he starts a war - we fight: three years of a major war and 11 years since the beginning. If you compare the flow of troops in the Second World War and now, it is an incredible resistance, a miracle made by Ukrainian citizens.
Europe never wanted us to join them. In general, I believe that the Ukrainian oligarchy is a consequence of the political decision Europe made in 1989-1991: The Union is breaking up, but let Russia dominate anyway. Balcerowicz's economic miracle in Poland was the result of reforms and a very rapid entry of European capital and investment, which we did not have. Instead, it was decided that Texas should be robbed by Texans, and this is how the Ukrainian oligarchy was born: through party leaders, red directors, Komsomol members, and bandits. Ukraine remained Russia on the mental map of many of our partners. Therefore, they are partly to blame for the birth of the Ukrainian oligarchy and should not absolve themselves of responsibility. Now the West is trying to resolve Ukrainian issues for itself, taking our answers as a basis. The Europeans already accept our answer that we want to be part of Europe, so they are opening negotiations on joining the EU.
I see a substantive discourse about the West's fault in today's events: they provided us with the wrong amount of weapons at the wrong time, in the wrong volume, and therefore we were unable to defend ourselves. There is some truth in this, but if we talk only about them and nothing about ourselves, we are definitely denying ourselves subjectivity.
"Over the past decades, Ukraine has always performed better than expected"
You travel a lot to the contact line, raising money for vehicles for the military, and this is a remarkable activity. In the third year of the invasion, it's hard, many people have given up and don't have the emotional strength to ask for money from the audience. The soldiers are keeping going on adrenaline, but their states are changing. How would you describe these states now?
I don't feel I have the moral right to assess the state of the military, although my wife and I go to the frontline several times a month. We have bought and brought dozens of vehicles, including pick-ups, jeeps and trucks. But I would not consider myself entitled to speak about the military. We meet with certain people who describe specific situations, but it would be a generalisation to say that the army has this attitude and the home front has that attitude. Of course, I see fatigue, I hear talk of not having enough people, but I don't see despair or a desire to give up. As a civilian, even if I am often on the frontline, I believe that the military should speak about themselves, because they are much more realistic about their situation.
Over the past decades, Ukraine has always shown better results than expected, in contrast to the West, which has been showing worse results. And we are showing better and better results in terms of democracy, resilience, and solidarity - a strange existential sport. We can say that we are very disappointed, but we see this disappointment mostly on social media. This is basically a sphere of stratification: in wealthy and stable societies, social media has completely stratified people - total polarisation in America, where there is no external threat, total polarisation in Germany, where society and public events are absolutely boring. Virtual reality is polarising because we don't see our interlocutor, we have a lower level of empathy: we are ready to ignore people at the very least, and at the very most, to insult them and wish them ill. From your research, we don't see the kind of polarisation that is felt on social media.
We all need to understand that the way of life that Ukrainians live involves a very strong sense of freedom, a very strong sense of the unpredictability of life, and therefore its interest and sometimes, of course, its tragedy. We won't have all this in other societies if we emigrate to a stable, calm Europe, where, by the way, I don't see people who feel happy. I look around my small circle and I see a paradoxical thing: moving leads to the breakdown of families and relationships that were here. I don't want to generalise, but my message to people abroad is very simple: if you have the opportunity, come back, Ukraine needs you very much. We need people to rebuild and defend us, and your home is here. And if you can't come back or if you see that you are fulfilled there, then work, don't sit on social security, get involved in social life, help Ukraine from there. I say this all the time when I go abroad for a short time and talk to the Ukrainian diaspora.
Despite the stereotype, the Ukrainian diaspora is mostly passive, and I don't want to generalise and offend anyone, but Ukrainians could be more active there. But first of all, Ukrainians are needed here, because if Russia comes here, our life will be gone, people will serve in the Russian army and die for Russian imperial interests. The Russians seriously consider this century to be the century of great wars, and they have spelled out at whose expense they will fight, including at our expense.
For Europeans, it is not obvious that conditionally North Koreans and Ukrainians mobilised from the occupied territories will be enough to cause serious problems within the new branch of aggression. The miscalculations are simple: Lithuania can be invaded in 10 days and fully occupied. Other Baltic states could also face major problems. Not to mention the sociology, according to which approximately 80% of Germans plan to flee and not resist.
Recently in Germany, I heard an opinion that one of the reasons why people in the east of the country vote for Sarah Wagenknecht or Alternative for Germany is not love for Russia, but fear of it. Their perception of a totalitarian society makes them feel that there is no point in fighting Russia because they will lose anyway, so it is better to negotiate with Russia and give it to Ukraine. This is the paradox of democracy and consumer society: the welfare state immerses you in a security environment and creates fear of going beyond the comfort zone. I think cowardice is one of the elements of the modern European world. Ukraine is different in this regard. Of course, everyone has fear - both military and civilians - but we learn to live despite it, within it, overcoming it. The ancient Greeks called this "virtue" or "glory". It is no coincidence that our greetings "Glory to Ukraine!" and "Glory to the Heroes!" contain this word. Because glory is the result of an act when you fight against something that is stronger than you. Glory lasts longer than your life: you can lose your life when you fight against something stronger. There can be no glory where there is no risk. The USSR was an absolute fake, saying "Glory to the CPSU!". But the party or executioners cannot have glory - they are not in danger when they chop off heads.
This is exactly what Raymond Aron wrote about in his classic book Peace and War Among Nations, published in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis: we have reduced everything to the concept of interests or power, but there are also old, important values, like fame, when you enter a high-risk situation. And the welfare state, whether European or American, has narrowed this risk as much as possible. It's very difficult for a person to accept the idea that you can be in a risky situation. And there is a very serious gap here, because the Russians are building a completely different concept. Dugin wrote a lot about it, referring to Carl Schmitt, a famous German philosopher close to Nazism, and the Russians are reviving his ideas. Schmitt is becoming a key thinker for both Russia and China, but he is completely forgotten in Europe. For a European, "Nazi" means "bad", but to understand how your enemy thinks, you have to study it. Schmitt says that a sovereign is not afraid of risks and increases them both for himself and for others. And European society is built on reducing risks. So we have a conflict. Who will win the battle between those who increase and those who decrease risks? Of course, the former, because the latter will constantly retreat. It seems to me that Ukrainians are not in the logic of reduction at all, we are ready to take risks. We saw it on Maidan, we see it now - it is a great force that brings us closer to the ancient world.
"A healthy society is an agora surrounded by walls"
If we have a vision of a common future, it is easier for us to realise our historical role. But this is very difficult without a culture of dialogue. How do we make this culture sustainable?
I keep saying that a healthy society is an agora surrounded by walls. An agora is an ancient Greek square where people exchange goods, thoughts, emotions - a society within a polis. The fate of modern cities can be clearly seen in Vienna, where the Ringstrasse used to have city walls, but in the 19th century they were destroyed, and now it is a promenade. The danger of city sieges has disappeared, and Vienna knows very well what a Turkish siege is. The metaphor of the wall has disappeared, everyone started saying "bridges instead of walls", and this is a certain naivety. We see now that bridges sometimes need to be blown up. We travel around the frontline cities and see the bridges we have blown up. Thank God we did it, because otherwise the enemy would have got through. We need to understand where we need bridges and where we need walls: with the Russians, obviously, we need walls, but within the country, we need as many bridges as possible between the different experiences. Because the main difference now is not ideological or even linguistic and cultural, but rather experiential: what you have experienced, what you have risked, what you have lost.
We had dialogues with our communities in the UK, and the question "What connects you to Ukrainians inside the country?" was answered: "Experiences". It went on to say that their experiences of grief and misery are incomparable to those of people on the frontline or those under occupation. We also heard the thesis "I don't want to be understood, otherwise they will have to go through the same thing". Can experiences be gained not through practice, but simply through listening and joint reflection, empathy, love?
This requires culture, because culture is an effort to translate experiences. But we should not have the illusion that this is one hundred per cent possible. Someone who has been under fire cannot pass on this experience to others, someone who has not lost loved ones cannot say, "I understand you." But you can always listen - culture will help you do that through various practices: poetry, prose, theatre, cinema. That's why culture, including literature, is so important for the military - it creates a situation of listening.
Culture does not heal. According to Aristotle, it leads to catharsis. The function of drama is to allow the viewer to join those emotions that are not happening to him or her, or perhaps they happened once and he or she has forgotten them. Through the experience of these emotions, catharsis occurs, that is, purification, the ability to open the windows of one's life to another, which, after all, makes us human. The big question is whether people who have lived through these experiences and those who have not will be able to open up. This requires special delicacy. Because the first reaction when you encounter a person who has gone through a serious experience - war, frontline or otherwise - is fear of talking to them, because you always have a sense of guilt. I think this fear needs to be overcome.
In different countries, including Europe, conservatives and populists are coming to power. What motivates people to support such political groups? How would you describe this trend?
It is a search for freedom from freedom. It's very popular in our country to criticise Francis Fukuyama, and I do it too, but few people have read his book The End of History. There are wonderful concepts of "thymos" and "megalothymia" there. For the Greeks, "thymos" is a part of the soul, localised in the heart, very emotional, aggressive, the kind of anger that Homer describes. His Iliad is a poem about Achilles' anger and what it leads to.
Anger is actually the driving force of society, and there is an interesting book about this by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Anger and Time. Liberal democracy has forgotten that people are sometimes angry, that they are very often irrational. Fukuyama describes this, he says that there will be an end to history - people will think that everything is agreed, that ideologically everyone will have a place, but in fact it is not - people will get tired of peace. This is the great utopian promise of liberal democracy, that there is a place for everyone. In reality, the number of places is limited, and people are fighting for them. The feeling that you are being squeezed out of your place, that you have less freedom and less dignity, because dignity is a sense of your topos in existence, generates different reactions. For some, it is a reaction to imposed political correctness, for others - to migrants. I am saying that Western liberalism has now completely forgotten about the key issues without which we as a human community cannot exist. This is, in particular, the issue of group identity, because we all have a sense of belonging to a tribe, a group, a nation, fans of a football club or the Red Hot Chili Peppers - that is, we have different group identities. The second issue is demography. The demographic problem cannot be solved by migration alone, as Europe has tried to do, because then the core of the community is eroded, it loses its identity, and when this happens, it becomes schizophrenic, just like a person when they lose their identity. Liberalism has completely missed all this and is now facing problems.
Freedom cannot be a warm bath, something that is given to you. Freedom is actually an exception, we are not fully sure whether we are free beings. It's very popular now to quote neurophysiologists who talk about determinism and that we are all deterministic. But no philosopher, except perhaps Sartre, has ever said that freedom is a fact. Freedom is a dream, something you want to win. It is never a fact, but a great exception. In Christian theology, freedom is a consequence of the curse - we have been expelled from paradise, we no longer know who we are, and we spend our lives trying to find it.
“No one in the world is able to fight against the Russian army the way we do"
From the state of Ukrainian society and the intellectual elite, it seems that we are on the verge of ruin. The state of affairs on the frontline, the depletion of resilience, adrenaline rush, decline in morale and a highly politicised, emotionally charged discourse. What is your sense of the situation?
We are far from ruin, I would not support this discourse. We are a bit shaky, and we cannot find a balance. In 2022, we mostly talked about the victory, but there was another side to the story - the losses, the deaths in many families. Many people felt this first-hand, and there was criticism of the Single Marathon as the Ukrainian version of a "victory lap". Now we have gone to another extreme - we are talking about our weakness and problems at the front, about retreating. This is true, but we forget the main thing - no one in the world is able to fight against the Russian army the way we do. Any other society would have fled long ago, would have disintegrated long ago.
If you look closely, our enemy has huge problems: despair over not achieving their goals, limited progress over the past year. But we also need to understand that there will be no Bakhchisaray tomorrow. Perhaps this is a war for decades, as I said back in 2022, both here and in the West. When I was asked in the West after the Kharkiv operation whether there would be a victory next year, I said to prepare for the 2030s and 2040s.
I have an analogy with Poland: if in the nineteenth century the question was whether the Poles would regain their independence, which they lost in the late eighteenth century, the twentieth century asked them whether they would preserve it. They went through different stages: restoration in puppet forms, then partition - finally, they restored the state. The question of the twentieth century was whether Ukrainians would gain independence, and we did, but the question of the twenty-first century is whether we will preserve it.
Can an average person think in terms of decades and centuries, living here and now, feeling a certain hopelessness?
Our alternative is not that Russia will conquer us and then there will be peace and prosperity - this has never happened. Every time Ukrainians have been conquered by Russia, starting from Cossack times, we have had to fight for them: against the Crimean Tatars in the eighteenth century, against the Poles, Napoleon, Hitler. In the Ukrainian language, particularly in Shevchenko's, the word “muscovite" means not only a Russian, but also a soldier. "Taken as a muscovite" meant that you would be taken into the imperial army, where you would die for something completely alien to you. This is our alternative, and we see it in the occupied territories - we will be part of another army, and this army will not spare anyone. We should soberly understand that we are facing an enemy who does not value human life at all, but rather considers death, destruction, and necrophilia to be tools of politics and management. Russians rule people through fear of death and violence. Ukrainians have never ruled people in this way, we just don't know how to do it, thank God. But if we find ourselves in this world, which is much more horrible, then death and the fear of imprisonment will be woven into our lives.
Ruin is a concept in our history associated with the division of Ukraine into left and right banks. The end of the seventeenth century, the post-Khmelnytsky era, different hetmans, distrust of each other, lack of a sense of centre within. I think this is one of our biggest threats. Yes, there is an external enemy, but if we allow internal splits to occur to the point where the country cannot be stitched together, we will lose ourselves - this has always been the case in our history. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the princely era reached a level of fragmentation when it could no longer defend itself. This was the case in the Cossack era, in the era of Ruin, and this is exactly what Kulish's classic work Black Rada and its alternative, the very underrated Marusya by Maria Wilinska-Markowicz. The same thing happened in the twentieth century: we lost to the Bolsheviks because, on the one hand, they were strong, and on the other hand, for a number of internal reasons. We were disunited, we had no centre of power, we had atamanship, where everyone fought against everyone, and there were some utopians who believed that the army was not needed at all.
Panteleimon Kulish had a moment of choice when it came to choosing partners: to swear an oath to the Czar of Moscow or to cooperate with the Poles. There was also the Ottoman Empire in our history. Ukraine, at a crossroads, tried to choose a strong partner who could help secure its interests. But for the partners themselves, Ukraine was just a territory of struggle. Is our choice of partners now final and can we put an end to history?
No, history never puts an end to anything - everything is connected to everything. History always has an ellipsis, a semicolon. For example, in 1975, the Soviet Union signed the final act of the Helsinki Accords, which actually legitimised the occupation of the Baltic states. The West guaranteed that it would not reconquer the Baltic states - the USSR was happy, Brezhnev was happy. But there was also a third basket of human rights, which gave rise to the Helsinki movement and grew into one of the elements that led to the collapse of the USSR. We need to understand that nothing is final, including the consolidation that took place in 2014 and then in 2022. We will always have the risk of Russian influence or strong neighbours. I would not have high hopes that Hungary or other EU countries will not want to have the same policy towards us as Russia.
In Ukrainian history, there is a naivety to rely on an external carrier and different views on what kind of carrier. For example, Yuriy Lypa from Odesa believed that the north-south vector was much more important for Ukrainian history than the east-west vector, so our Black Sea identity, our inclusion through the Black Sea into the Mediterranean world, was a priority.
For us to be able to formulate our own core, the help of partners is important. We will not win or lose this war if something happens to them. But if we depend only on that or on who is in power in Germany and France, we will lose sooner or later. If we depend on arms supplies, on finance, we will lose sooner or later. We cannot rely on external partners, and we have tried to do so many times: in the days of Mazepa, Khmelnytskyy, and the UPA.
My thesis is that we underestimate Ukrainian subjectivity, we say that we are controlled by someone, we are dependent on someone. In fact, our recent history is about subjectivity, where we went against the will of Russia, the will of the European Union, and the will of America. Bush gives his Chicken Kyiv Speech - we do what he says, Russia tries to destroy us from within - it fails, he installs Yanukovych - we throw him out, he starts a war - we fight: three years of a major war and 11 years since the beginning. If you compare the flow of troops in the Second World War and now, it is an incredible resistance, a miracle made by Ukrainian citizens.
Europe never wanted us to join them. In general, I believe that the Ukrainian oligarchy is a consequence of the political decision Europe made in 1989-1991: The Union is breaking up, but let Russia dominate anyway. Balcerowicz's economic miracle in Poland was the result of reforms and a very rapid entry of European capital and investment, which we did not have. Instead, it was decided that Texas should be robbed by Texans, and this is how the Ukrainian oligarchy was born: through party leaders, red directors, Komsomol members, and bandits. Ukraine remained Russia on the mental map of many of our partners. Therefore, they are partly to blame for the birth of the Ukrainian oligarchy and should not absolve themselves of responsibility. Now the West is trying to resolve Ukrainian issues for itself, taking our answers as a basis. The Europeans already accept our answer that we want to be part of Europe, so they are opening negotiations on joining the EU.
I see a substantive discourse about the West's fault in today's events: they provided us with the wrong amount of weapons at the wrong time, in the wrong volume, and therefore we were unable to defend ourselves. There is some truth in this, but if we talk only about them and nothing about ourselves, we are definitely denying ourselves subjectivity.
"Over the past decades, Ukraine has always performed better than expected"
You travel a lot to the contact line, raising money for vehicles for the military, and this is a remarkable activity. In the third year of the invasion, it's hard, many people have given up and don't have the emotional strength to ask for money from the audience. The soldiers are keeping going on adrenaline, but their states are changing. How would you describe these states now?
I don't feel I have the moral right to assess the state of the military, although my wife and I go to the frontline several times a month. We have bought and brought dozens of vehicles, including pick-ups, jeeps and trucks. But I would not consider myself entitled to speak about the military. We meet with certain people who describe specific situations, but it would be a generalisation to say that the army has this attitude and the home front has that attitude. Of course, I see fatigue, I hear talk of not having enough people, but I don't see despair or a desire to give up. As a civilian, even if I am often on the frontline, I believe that the military should speak about themselves, because they are much more realistic about their situation.
Over the past decades, Ukraine has always shown better results than expected, in contrast to the West, which has been showing worse results. And we are showing better and better results in terms of democracy, resilience, and solidarity - a strange existential sport. We can say that we are very disappointed, but we see this disappointment mostly on social media. This is basically a sphere of stratification: in wealthy and stable societies, social media has completely stratified people - total polarisation in America, where there is no external threat, total polarisation in Germany, where society and public events are absolutely boring. Virtual reality is polarising because we don't see our interlocutor, we have a lower level of empathy: we are ready to ignore people at the very least, and at the very most, to insult them and wish them ill. From your research, we don't see the kind of polarisation that is felt on social media.
We all need to understand that the way of life that Ukrainians live involves a very strong sense of freedom, a very strong sense of the unpredictability of life, and therefore its interest and sometimes, of course, its tragedy. We won't have all this in other societies if we emigrate to a stable, calm Europe, where, by the way, I don't see people who feel happy. I look around my small circle and I see a paradoxical thing: moving leads to the breakdown of families and relationships that were here. I don't want to generalise, but my message to people abroad is very simple: if you have the opportunity, come back, Ukraine needs you very much. We need people to rebuild and defend us, and your home is here. And if you can't come back or if you see that you are fulfilled there, then work, don't sit on social security, get involved in social life, help Ukraine from there. I say this all the time when I go abroad for a short time and talk to the Ukrainian diaspora.
Despite the stereotype, the Ukrainian diaspora is mostly passive, and I don't want to generalise and offend anyone, but Ukrainians could be more active there. But first of all, Ukrainians are needed here, because if Russia comes here, our life will be gone, people will serve in the Russian army and die for Russian imperial interests. The Russians seriously consider this century to be the century of great wars, and they have spelled out at whose expense they will fight, including at our expense.
For Europeans, it is not obvious that conditionally North Koreans and Ukrainians mobilised from the occupied territories will be enough to cause serious problems within the new branch of aggression. The miscalculations are simple: Lithuania can be invaded in 10 days and fully occupied. Other Baltic states could also face major problems. Not to mention the sociology, according to which approximately 80% of Germans plan to flee and not resist.
Recently in Germany, I heard an opinion that one of the reasons why people in the east of the country vote for Sarah Wagenknecht or Alternative for Germany is not love for Russia, but fear of it. Their perception of a totalitarian society makes them feel that there is no point in fighting Russia because they will lose anyway, so it is better to negotiate with Russia and give it to Ukraine. This is the paradox of democracy and consumer society: the welfare state immerses you in a security environment and creates fear of going beyond the comfort zone. I think cowardice is one of the elements of the modern European world. Ukraine is different in this regard. Of course, everyone has fear - both military and civilians - but we learn to live despite it, within it, overcoming it. The ancient Greeks called this "virtue" or "glory". It is no coincidence that our greetings "Glory to Ukraine!" and "Glory to the Heroes!" contain this word. Because glory is the result of an act when you fight against something that is stronger than you. Glory lasts longer than your life: you can lose your life when you fight against something stronger. There can be no glory where there is no risk. The USSR was an absolute fake, saying "Glory to the CPSU!". But the party or executioners cannot have glory - they are not in danger when they chop off heads.
This is exactly what Raymond Aron wrote about in his classic book Peace and War Among Nations, published in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis: we have reduced everything to the concept of interests or power, but there are also old, important values, like fame, when you enter a high-risk situation. And the welfare state, whether European or American, has narrowed this risk as much as possible. It's very difficult for a person to accept the idea that you can be in a risky situation. And there is a very serious gap here, because the Russians are building a completely different concept. Dugin wrote a lot about it, referring to Carl Schmitt, a famous German philosopher close to Nazism, and the Russians are reviving his ideas. Schmitt is becoming a key thinker for both Russia and China, but he is completely forgotten in Europe. For a European, "Nazi" means "bad", but to understand how your enemy thinks, you have to study it. Schmitt says that a sovereign is not afraid of risks and increases them both for himself and for others. And European society is built on reducing risks. So we have a conflict. Who will win the battle between those who increase and those who decrease risks? Of course, the former, because the latter will constantly retreat. It seems to me that Ukrainians are not in the logic of reduction at all, we are ready to take risks. We saw it on Maidan, we see it now - it is a great force that brings us closer to the ancient world.
"A healthy society is an agora surrounded by walls"
If we have a vision of a common future, it is easier for us to realise our historical role. But this is very difficult without a culture of dialogue. How do we make this culture sustainable?
I keep saying that a healthy society is an agora surrounded by walls. An agora is an ancient Greek square where people exchange goods, thoughts, emotions - a society within a polis. The fate of modern cities can be clearly seen in Vienna, where the Ringstrasse used to have city walls, but in the 19th century they were destroyed, and now it is a promenade. The danger of city sieges has disappeared, and Vienna knows very well what a Turkish siege is. The metaphor of the wall has disappeared, everyone started saying "bridges instead of walls", and this is a certain naivety. We see now that bridges sometimes need to be blown up. We travel around the frontline cities and see the bridges we have blown up. Thank God we did it, because otherwise the enemy would have got through. We need to understand where we need bridges and where we need walls: with the Russians, obviously, we need walls, but within the country, we need as many bridges as possible between the different experiences. Because the main difference now is not ideological or even linguistic and cultural, but rather experiential: what you have experienced, what you have risked, what you have lost.
We had dialogues with our communities in the UK, and the question "What connects you to Ukrainians inside the country?" was answered: "Experiences". It went on to say that their experiences of grief and misery are incomparable to those of people on the frontline or those under occupation. We also heard the thesis "I don't want to be understood, otherwise they will have to go through the same thing". Can experiences be gained not through practice, but simply through listening and joint reflection, empathy, love?
This requires culture, because culture is an effort to translate experiences. But we should not have the illusion that this is one hundred per cent possible. Someone who has been under fire cannot pass on this experience to others, someone who has not lost loved ones cannot say, "I understand you." But you can always listen - culture will help you do that through various practices: poetry, prose, theatre, cinema. That's why culture, including literature, is so important for the military - it creates a situation of listening.
Culture does not heal. According to Aristotle, it leads to catharsis. The function of drama is to allow the viewer to join those emotions that are not happening to him or her, or perhaps they happened once and he or she has forgotten them. Through the experience of these emotions, catharsis occurs, that is, purification, the ability to open the windows of one's life to another, which, after all, makes us human. The big question is whether people who have lived through these experiences and those who have not will be able to open up. This requires special delicacy. Because the first reaction when you encounter a person who has gone through a serious experience - war, frontline or otherwise - is fear of talking to them, because you always have a sense of guilt. I think this fear needs to be overcome.
"It is easy to talk about individual freedom if your community is not threatened"
In different countries, including Europe, conservatives and populists are coming to power. What motivates people to support such political groups? How would you describe this trend?
It is a search for freedom from freedom. It's very popular in our country to criticise Francis Fukuyama, and I do it too, but few people have read his book The End of History. There are wonderful concepts of "thymos" and "megalothymia" there. For the Greeks, "thymos" is a part of the soul, localised in the heart, very emotional, aggressive, the kind of anger that Homer describes. His Iliad is a poem about Achilles' anger and what it leads to.
Anger is actually the driving force of society, and there is an interesting book about this by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Anger and Time. Liberal democracy has forgotten that people are sometimes angry, that they are very often irrational. Fukuyama describes this, he says that there will be an end to history - people will think that everything is agreed, that ideologically everyone will have a place, but in fact it is not - people will get tired of peace. This is the great utopian promise of liberal democracy, that there is a place for everyone. In reality, the number of places is limited, and people are fighting for them. The feeling that you are being squeezed out of your place, that you have less freedom and less dignity, because dignity is a sense of your topos in existence, generates different reactions. For some, it is a reaction to imposed political correctness, for others - to migrants. I am saying that Western liberalism has now completely forgotten about the key issues without which we as a human community cannot exist. This is, in particular, the issue of group identity, because we all have a sense of belonging to a tribe, a group, a nation, fans of a football club or the Red Hot Chili Peppers - that is, we have different group identities. The second issue is demography. The demographic problem cannot be solved by migration alone, as Europe has tried to do, because then the core of the community is eroded, it loses its identity, and when this happens, it becomes schizophrenic, just like a person when they lose their identity. Liberalism has completely missed all this and is now facing problems.
Freedom cannot be a warm bath, something that is given to you. Freedom is actually an exception, we are not fully sure whether we are free beings. It's very popular now to quote neurophysiologists who talk about determinism and that we are all deterministic. But no philosopher, except perhaps Sartre, has ever said that freedom is a fact. Freedom is a dream, something you want to win. It is never a fact, but a great exception. In Christian theology, freedom is a consequence of the curse - we have been expelled from paradise, we no longer know who we are, and we spend our lives trying to find it.
I am convinced that this search is possible if you think that you are in this world to realise certain values. For me, this key value is thinking, trying to look deeper into things. For many other people, it is courage, protection, family, justice, etc. But if we do not see our own life as a realisation of our value, we start to worry about some small things. As the late Volodymyr Morenets, head of the Department of Literary Studies at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, used to say, if you don't have big things and big goals worth fighting for, then every small goal in front of you will seem big.
That's why freedom is always somewhere on the horizon, it's always lacking, it's always gone, and you have to fight for it all the time. And Europeans thought that this is basic, that we are all born free, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, so we can relax. But you can never relax. When they felt that they could relax, that liberalism had become mainstream, forces appeared that wanted to overthrow this liberalism in the name of freedom.
The state is an organisation in which a person is somehow deprived of unlimited freedoms because his or her rights are limited by the rights of another citizen. Where is the limit of freedom and the desire to preserve the statehood for which we are all fighting together now, if not physically, then mentally?
I keep saying that Lesya Ukrainka is our greatest writer and thinker. Each of her dramas is a question of how to reconcile values that are not consistent. A good drama is always a philosophical question about the conflict between values: in Shakespeare's case, pagan and Christian, in Lesya Ukrainka's case, it is even more complicated, it is a conflict between an individual and a community. This is exactly what the drama Lawyer Marcian is about: if your community is threatened, it should be defended, but at the same time, the threat oppresses or restricts the freedom of the individual. Then your community says that you will not be free, because the priority is the community, not you.
I keep telling Europeans that it is easy to talk about individual freedom if your community is not threatened. Of course, you can talk about individual rights, but when you find yourself in a dilemma like this, you have to reconcile patriotism and liberalism.
If we do not seek to reconcile interests and values, we will disappear as a community: either we will be a totalitarian country where the individual means nothing, or an anarchic wilderness where we will be conquered, and then there will be no individual human rights here either. The question of how to reconcile the individual and the community is an extremely complex one, and Lesia raises it in every one of her dramas. Even in The Forest Song, Lukash and Mavka are part of different communities - the forest and the human world - which come into conflict. In the end, it all ends tragically, but this does not mean that it will always be like this.
"New tyrannies will give people fake, virtual freedom"
We see social media without any restrictions. For example, Meta, which used to regulate and fact-check, is already abandoning these policies. Such freedom of speech leads to the power of promoters of authoritarian regimes - China and Russia take advantage of this. How do you explain the general trend of making the desire for freedoms, such as freedom of speech, an absolute?
There is no such thing as absolute freedom. This is the lie of radical liberalism and the lie of libertarianism. If there is absolute freedom, then we find ourselves in a situation where the strongest wins. In Eros and Psyche, in my essay about Lesya Ukrainka, I write that Lesia died in 1913, but she somehow foresees that in 1914, with the First World War, a new era will begin, which can be called Nietzschean. It was already happening in Lesia's time, and Lesia felt it very well-when the desire for freedom turns into the desire for absolute freedom, and therefore absolute power.
Let's look at the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio, who uses the aesthetics of flirting with the theme of death, dying, Eros and Thanatos. And then he actually becomes the creator of Italian fascism, because Mussolini was already copying what d'Annunzio did after the First World War. In modern times, this is the figure of Musk, a classic Übermensch, just like Trump. If you have absolute freedom, sooner or later you will want to subdue everyone, because everyone cannot have absolute freedom, only one can have it.
For example, Timothy Snyder sees freedom as a meta-value, the highest value, and I say that it should be coordinated with other values: solidarity, coexistence with others. If you are together with people - starting with your family and ending with the army - then, of course, your freedom is limited in various aspects. For Snyder, freedom is a condition for the possibility of other values: if I am free, I can choose values and realise them. If you want freedom to realise something more, you take on a lot of obligations and responsibilities, and this is the dilemma. And we are now entering the period of the so-called Übermensch, who primarily want freedom to impose their will on others. So Musk is a classic character in this regard.
It used to be said that democracies are developed economies, but now China and a number of other countries are proving that it is possible to live differently from these rules and subordinate the world order to their own. Are there any safeguards against this? Are democracies and liberal systems capable of resisting?
I am more of a supporter of the word "republic" than "democracy". I believe that democracy does not exist in principle, because if we understand democracy as the rule of the demos, where does it exist in its purest form? Classical political philosophy has been telling us since Aristotle that the best polity is a mixture of different principles of governance: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. If we look at more or less successful models, and until recently the British model was such a model, it was this that shaped it. Both our model and the American model are always a compromise, because the demos, that is, all of us as a people, cannot make decisions on a daily basis. There is the vertical of presidential power, and there is the parliament as a kind of personification of the power of the few. According to Aristotle, the power of the one is monarchy, the power of the few is aristocracy, and the power of the many is democracy. I am simplifying - he did not say "democracy", but "politeia", because for Aristotle, democracy was the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Thus, every political formation is a certain balance. But we have not started a discussion about what kind of balance we need. We are an anarchic society where the demos play a very important role, while in Russia it is completely different - there are no demos, no people, in Russia.
To what extent do we need a highly centralised vertical? Should we create a parliamentary republic with no president, only parliament? It seems to me that this would be the downfall of Ukraine, because our element is anarchically democratic in nature, and we have to balance it with something.
The republic is a common cause. This is what Lipinsky wanted to instil in us. We have not yet appreciated what he was trying to do. Conventionally, we have two lines of Ukrainian conservatism: the leading one with its supporters Dontsov and Bandera, where there should be a higher caste, an iron hand, and the inclusive one, which says that society is plural: there are warriors, farmers, aristocrats, passive and active people, and somehow this needs to be moulded together. A strong society can always balance a grassroots democratic, aristocratic element (the question arises whether we have this element now) and a very strong centralised element that can be embodied in the presidential power. The concept of a republic will be used to compare tyrannies, monarchies and empires.
We lived through the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st with the idea that republics and democracies had won. This is not the case and it is always a cycle - democracies are in crisis, just like empires. The crisis of democracy is that people begin to perceive freedom not as a goal or a dream that you fight for, but as a given, as a commodity, as something that you abuse and manipulate. Everyone is trying to pull it to their side, and then Fukuyama comes along and writes a book about identity, where he says that we are all mired in the topic of identity: what we should see as an element of universal rights, such as minority rights or sexual orientation rights, is beginning to be seen as a unique right of a certain group that they will fight for, even if other groups do not accept it. This fine line, where you start fighting only for the rights of your small group, is the moment when splits begin.
The need for freedom is one of the greatest. But now new tyrannies will give people fake, virtual freedom. This is what Anne Applebaum writes about in her new book on autocracies, which is a very subtle understanding of what is happening in the world right now. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese say: "We are taking away your freedom". On the contrary, if you want to be a blogger, here's TikTok, here's a microphone, say what you want. If you want consumer freedom, China produces a lot of goods. There seems to be a lot of room for freedom. This is how we enter the theme of the matrix, where there is an illusion of freedom, where we become bodies in the virtual world. And we don't know what to do with it yet. So it's not the classic tyrannies that take away your freedom, and it's not the classic totalitarianisms that say to give up your freedom for the sake of a great law, class, race. No - enjoy yourself, have sexual and gastronomic freedom, travel wherever you want, but you will not influence serious decisions. And then there is a great risk that a new generation of consumers of fake freedom will emerge. Where will the fight for real freedom come from if we all live in a matrix?
Researchers and journalists who have visited North Korea say that there is no sense that these people need freedom because they do not have the relevant experience, and for them, the norm is non-freedom. If we live not just in the illusion of freedom, but in a state where the real experience of influencing society and the state disappears, will it simply disappear as an atavism?
Europe is now increasingly becoming a small republic surrounded by and colonised by great empires. From a repentant empire, it is becoming a colony - primarily of China, Arab money and Russian influence. I tell Europeans that we are now in the same boat with them, and the sooner they wake up and realise that we are in the minority, the better.
In this sense, Ukraine is at the forefront of this world, because the other world does not suit us, and we have a strong enemy. It's not just Russia - we don't know how long the trend towards neo-authoritarianism will last. It seems to me that in the 21st century, republics and democracies will be in the minority and everyone will resemble Ukraine, which is fighting against a stronger totalitarian enemy. Whether we win or lose depends on many factors, but we should, of course, believe and work to win.