Thank you very much for giving me the floor. It is a great honour to address this important audience.
We are now in the fourth year of the full-scale invasion — an invasion that, according to both Russian and Western analysts, was supposed to end in four days. Ukraine has chosen to reject the role of the “perfect victim” and to resist. Ukrainians continue to fight for even the smallest chance for their children to live in a peaceful, democratic society — to have freedom, to live without fear of violence, and to have a long-term vision of the future. Because the quickest way to stop a war is to lose it. But then there will be no peace.
Putin launched the full-scale invasion not to seize another piece of Ukrainian land. It is naïve to think that Russia has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its soldiers merely to occupy Avdiyivka or Bakhmut. Putin started this war to occupy and destroy the whole of Ukraine. His logic is historical — he dreams of restoring the Russian Empire. That is why people in other European countries live in relative safety only because Ukrainians continue to hold back the advance of the Russian army.
Human nature does not change. When reality becomes frightening, people tend to deny it. They will find dozens of explanations and act accordingly. It was difficult for our international partners to imagine a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now it is difficult for them to imagine that Russia could attack Poland. I call this psychological defence mechanism a lack of imagination. As Orbán says, Ukraine is “a country with a very complicated fate,” and supposedly this has nothing to do with them. But the truth is that the outcome of this war will determine what Europe — and indeed the world — will look like. The decades of freedom that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall could easily be replaced by decades of mere survival.
So when I am asked how Ukrainians see the achievement of a just and lasting peace, I always ask to rephrase the question correctly. This is not only Ukraine’s problem when a permanent member of the UN Security Council violates the UN Charter, wages an aggressive war, and seeks to change internationally recognised borders by force. It is impossible to build paradise, even if you are an island, while part of the world continues to bleed. Many things are not limited by borders — and it is no coincidence that I will speak about one of them: the role of culture in achieving a just and lasting peace.
My first point: for Ukrainians, this war is genocidal. Putin openly says there is no Ukrainian nation, language, or culture. For years, we — as human rights defenders — have documented how these words turn into horrific practice. Russians physically eliminate active people in the occupied territories — mayors, journalists, children’s writers, priests, musicians, teachers, businesspeople. They ban the Ukrainian language and culture, loot and destroy our cultural heritage, conscript Ukrainian men into the Russian army, and deport Ukrainian children to so-called “re-education” camps. There, they are told that they are not Ukrainian but Russian children, that their parents have abandoned them, and they are given to Russian families who raise them as Russians.
Russia tries to present our resistance to occupation and the erasure of Ukrainian identity as actions that undermine peace. So we constantly have to explain things that are obvious to us but not obvious to the world. Peace does not come when the country that was attacked stops defending itself. That is not peace — it is occupation. And occupation is the same war in a different form. Occupation is not merely the replacement of one flag with another. It is violence, disappearances, rape, torture, forced adoption of children, denial of your identity, filtration camps and mass graves.
When Putin told Trump in Alaska that he would wage war until its root causes were removed, those “root causes” mean our very existence. Because to destroy a national group you do not need to kill every single member. You can forcibly erase their identity — and the entire nation will vanish.
The Russians deliberately apply violence at such an intensity that the only apparent way to survive is to submit. That triggers another psychological mechanism — identification with the aggressor: to survive, people convince themselves they are on the same side, because it seems better to be a perpetrator than a victim.
That is why we cannot stop resisting Russian aggression. If Russia occupies Ukraine — we will simply cease to exist. Nations that grow tired of asserting their identity eventually disappear.
My second point: this war is changing the world’s perception of Ukrainians. Every nation is a narrative — a story it tells about itself. But for centuries, Ukrainians lived in the shadow of the Russian Empire. An empire is not only about possessing land, resources and people — it is also about possessing knowledge, about controlling how we speak about one another. It is about the right to name things.
We entered the full-scale war as a society without context. People on other continents knew only one thing about our part of the world — that there is Russia here. Our history was not written by us. We are a country whose classics remain untranslated.
People still ask me whether it is true that the Ukrainian language is different from Russian.
In response, I often tell a story about a Edgar Degas painting in the Metropolitan Museum. It depicts girls in national dress, but the painting was long titled Russian Dancers. The girls, however, are wearing vyshyvankas (embroidered blouses) and flower wreaths — traditional Ukrainian attire. For many years, Ukrainian art historians asked to rename the painting or at least add a note of explanation, but no one paid attention. Only after the full-scale invasion did the Met change the title. Now it is called Ukrainian Dancers. Perhaps the museum administration still believes these are Russian dancers who simply put on Ukrainian clothes — but it is already a shift. Ukraine is beginning to appear on the mental map of the world — though at a very high price.
We are vivid proof that a country’s agency is not measured by its national income or nuclear arsenal, but by its citizens’ willingness to defend their freedom — the freedom to remain an independent state rather than a Russian colony; the freedom to preserve our own identity rather than have Ukrainian children “re-educated” as Russians; the freedom to make a democratic choice — to build a country where human rights are protected, authorities are accountable, courts are independent, and the police do not beat or disperse peaceful student protests.
At the same time, we see that global interest in our country is gradually fading — and that is natural. This war is far from the only hotspot on the planet. A humanitarian crisis and war have raged in Sudan for over twenty years. Millions of women in Afghanistan are forbidden to speak in the presence of men. A third of all imprisoned writers in the world are in Chinese prisons. And right now, in many corners of the world, people are fighting for their freedom and human dignity.
Only a few stories make it to the front pages of global media. If Ukraine is seen solely through the lens of Russian crimes and Russia through the prism of its “great culture,” we will lose. Images of bodies on the streets of Bucha or the destroyed drama theatre in Mariupol can easily be replaced by images of other victims. Yet we can be compelling beyond our pain and suffering. People may grow weary of sympathy, but they must never tire of inspiration.
My third point: culture legitimises the state. Culture as an autonomous phenomenon emerged relatively recently. Before that, it was part of religious life or served monarchs, supporting and strengthening their power. The process of separating culture from authority unfolded over several centuries.
Somehow today, “art beyond politics” has come to be understood as art that is removed from anything unpleasant or that urges decisive action. Yet previously, it meant that art no longer served the ruling elites.
Our theme for the coming years is the question of war and peace. If we speak only about anything else, we will be out of step with the reality of our time. Culture is also about the connection of experiences between the present and the past. And this experience has often been violently disrupted. It is our responsibility to repair these ruptures and to give voice to those whom the empire erased from history.
The destruction of the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchysarai is not merely an act of barbarism, but a deliberate policy. The archaeological monuments of Crimea are silent witnesses that Russian power does not originate in antiquity — they compel us to understand that this power is temporary.
Culture is not only about works of art or mass-produced products; it is about meanings passed from generation to generation, shaping established patterns of behaviour within society. For a long time, the problem in our society was the inability to call evil by its name. We lived in a country where streets bore the names of the executioners of Ukrainians, monuments were erected to these executioners, and no one cared.
This war has a moral dimension. It is not a war between two countries, but a war between two systems – authoritarianism and democracy. And each of them is defined by its own set of values.
The established relationships between people reflect a society’s vision of what political power can be — and what place that power assigns to human freedom and to violence against human beings. We fight not only because we are not like them, but because we stand for values incompatible with the Russian way of life.
Fourth thesis: culture creates and advances meaning. Like many others in Ukraine, I was born from the ruins of the Soviet Union. But in this struggle, we have become Europeans. Because Europe is not about geography — it is about values. Ukrainians are rethinking the meaning of freedom and security, which Western societies have long taken for granted.
First of all, for us, freedom is not a value of self-expression, but—paradoxically—a value of survival. We would not have survived or emerged as a nation if, through all these centuries, we had not stubbornly strived for freedom.
Secondly, we do not oppose freedom and security. We need freedom for security and security for freedom. Because once we lose one, we inevitably lose the other.
Thirdly, for us, the state is not merely a set of services, but an environment of existence — something that preserves our identity. You can love what is not perfect, and that is why even the imperfect must be defended and preserved.
Fourthly, we believe that all efforts of ordinary people have meaning. We have never had the luxury of relying on effective state institutions, so self-organisation and grassroots agency are our vital strength.
This raises the question: how do we speak about all of this? Reproach, intimidation, or hysteria do not work. I often use the “mirror test,” reminding myself how Ukrainian society behaved before the full-scale invasion. The only correct tone of voice is dignity.
I recorded the testimony of the Ukrainian philosopher Ihor Kozlovskyy, who many in this room knew and admired. He spent 700 days in Russian captivity. Before that, I had interviewed hundreds of people who told me how they were beaten, raped, packed into wooden boxes, had limbs amputated, or had electric current applied to their genitals. One woman told me how her eye was gouged out with a spoon. So very little could shock me. But Ihor recalled a detail that seemed insignificant for the evidentiary record — and it struck me.
He described his daily life in a solitary cell: it was a basement space that, during Soviet times, had held death row prisoners. The cell had no windows, no sunlight reached inside, air was scarce, and breathing was difficult. Sewage ran across the filthy floor, and rats crawled out of the sewer openings. And this nationally renowned scholar told me how he would give lectures in philosophy to these rats, just to hear the sound of a human voice.
Ihor Kozlovskyy was a victim in the legal sense: he was abducted, held in inhumane conditions, and tortured to the point where he had to relearn how to walk. Yet he always stressed that his entire experience did not give him reason to see himself or live himself as a victim. Because the foundation of our existence is dignity, not victimhood. And dignity is close to us.
It is not only about feeling responsible for everything that happens, but also about doing the right things to change it. Dignity gives the strength to fight even in unbearable circumstances. We are not hostages of circumstances — we are participants in this historical process. And the honest answer regarding a just and lasting peace is that it is too early to draw final conclusions. But even today, we need to define clearly what peace means for us, and what victory in this war means for us.
Reaching the state borders is not victory — it is the restoration of international law. Victory is the achievement of our historical goals: a definitive break with the “Russkiy Mir” (Russian world) and a return to the European civilizational space with all its meanings.
And those who plan for the long term are the ones who will win.