The Future

It is striking that all commentators showed a quiet confidence in the future, although they provided sober and restrained forecasts. The focus in each case was on something different.

Yaroslav Hrytsak described a slow process of reform: “Ukraine will have to live by managing a continual crisis, but it is not in danger of fall­ing apart. It will gradually organize itself by conducting a slow reform process. If it becomes better organized, it will do well.” Zabuzhko was more interested in Russia’s eventual collapse:

Many delayed-action bombs have been planted in this country. Some have still to go off. Russia has invested lots of money in the extreme right and extreme left. This money is being used. So-called “local” conflicts—Georgia, Ukraine, Syria—are being directed by Russia and will continue; as one conflict ends, another will be revived. This will

The Euromaidan, Revolution, and War With Russia 157 last for a while. But the genie is out of the bottle. It is now clear that the Russian state is led by special security forces and Putin has enlisted the entire nation. In other respects the Russian state is com­pletely dysfunctional. It is a resource-based empire and is dying. It will fall apart. Let us hope it enjoys a soft landing, a dismantling, and that the Western community awakens to the dangers. Putting the brakes to this process is a mistake, because appeasement will lead to greater sacrifices in the long term.

(Zabuzhko)

Marko Shevchenko’s focus was on the need for the West to expose Rus­sian disinformation:

The Soviet Union lost the Cold War when the West consolidated its position and developed a strategy, one that involved ideological pres­sure and the mass media. At the present time the West is not putting money into the battle of ideas through the BBC, the Voice of Amer­ica, the German media. Much of the work that the Western media used to do in the Russian language has ended.

He also stressed the need to change general opinion in Russia, particularly the view that Russia is at war with everyone, an attitude that strengthens resistance among Russians who feel they are under attack. Humanitarian gestures by the West will provide Russians with examples of how one ought to live: “Putin today merely personifies the psychological condition of Russians, who fail to understand that they are not a great country but only a petrol station. Now they are beginning to realize this.”

Leonid Finberh stressed that the conflict can only be stopped by the international community, because Ukraine is dealing with a Russia that has more powerful arms, including atomic weapons. For obvious reasons, the world community does not want to intervene in a direct mili­tary confrontation, but gradual help for Ukraine from Europe, the USA, Canada, and other countries is growing. If, he felt, enough strength is provided to keep nurturing the shoots of democracy (the struggle against corruption, the renewal of civilized forms of law, etc.), Ukraine would be the victor. He stated: “I am almost certain that in the twenty-first century the victory will belong to the civilized European or European-American model, not to corrupt schemes, closed systems.”

Finberh concluded with a credo:

I believe that there are laws of truth which win out, because everyone works for the truth—researchers, journalists, any moral person—but only a limited number of people work for the lie. These are paid,

and their lies can only be supported by force. I believe that although today’s Russia has oil and gas, these resources no longer control the world, and will be even less important in the future. In this sense the historical perspective lies with the civilized, Euro-American choice.

Zhadan’s focus was on the will to endure and defend one’s country:

Things will be hard, I think, but probably less hard than today.

Yevhen Zakharov expressed the view that Putin had no way of win­ning in Ukraine:

For his point of view, a victory would mean Ukraine’s return to the Russian imperial fold. This will never happen, nor will he force Ukraine to do his bidding through controlling the Donbas. He lacks the strength for this. He only has enough strength to continually rekindle this conflict, to prevent Ukraine from developing, to make it waste an enormous amount of energy, resources and people on this military conflict. He is trying to exhaust and weaken Ukraine, so that her integration into Europe does not appear an attractive or even viable proposition. This struggle could last a long time, as long as he does not want it to end. He has enough money and strength for this, and people could get used to this situation, just as they have gotten used to the existence of Transdnistria. However, one should also bear in mind that Russia is becoming progressively weaker over the course of this conflict, which will end badly for her, because the West is dissatisfied and has grasped that it is not just a con­flict between Ukraine and Russia, but also between a Western and a Byzantine civilization, personified in the given case by Russia. The West understands that if Russia is successful the next countries to be threatened will be the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic and so on.

(Zakharov)

Perhaps the most optimistic, and emotional, comments came from Olena Stiazhkina, who felt that attitudes in the Donbas were changing and that Putin had reached a dead end:

These people [from the Donbas] with a paternalistic mindset now feel that things are not going well, that life was better for them in Ukraine, that they were better cared for, that things were more peace­ful, nicer, and it was easier to breathe.

Moreover, the separatist idea has to at least be constant. In March 2014 the slogan was federalization. In April it was for Yanukovych’s return. In May both federalization and Yanukovych were forgotten and instead there was a referendum on creating the DNR. Then in June-July of 2014 all the talk was of Novorossiia. In August- September it was about a South Federal region of Russia. Then all this was forgotten and the talk was of elections and uniting the DNR and LNR. In December we learned that they would not unite. Then in January they began to speak of autonomy within Ukraine. Well, shouldn’t you at least decide what you want? What are you fighting for?

(Stiazhkina) Stiazhkina’s view, echoed by most of those interviewed, was that Putin had been improvising all along to a large degree, and that he now requires a Donbas that is within Ukraine, which he does not have to feed but which he can use to influence Kyiv by exerting a veto on deci­sions made in the capital. The interviewees considered that Russia had gained some territory by using military force and breaking international agreements, but in other respects, Putin’s policies toward Ukraine had been an enormous failure. They had not forced Kyiv to become a vas­sal state, but instead had strengthened opposition to Moscow within the population; they had led to the condemnation and political isola­tion of Putin’s administration within the international community, and they had generated economically damaging sanctions that would lead to increasing dissatisfaction and disturbances within Russia itself. To a degree the next three years proved these predictions, made in 2015, to have been essentially correct.

Concerning civil society, in many respects, the views of interviewees have been confirmed by a recent collection of essays edited by Natalia Shapovalova and Olga Burlyuk, who argue that civil society in today’s Ukraine is vibrant, that the Euromaidan as a revolutionary moment pro­vided the initial drive for what has proven to be significant evolutionary change, and that both civil society’s relationship to the state and the tis­sue of civil society itself have undergone transformations. It remains to be seen how the election of Volodymyr Zelensky to the presidency will influence further developments.

Notes

1. Most interviews were held in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv in August and early September of 2015. Among the twenty people interviewed were the writers Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, and Andrii (Andrei) Kurkov, the director of a research institute, Yevhen Holovakha, the writer and former university administrator, Elena (Olena) Stiazhkina, the scholars Yaroslav Hrytsak and Volodymyr Kulyk, the journal editors Leonid Finberh and Taras Vozniak, the director of a human rights organization Yevhen Zakharov, and the diplomat Marko Shevchenko, who stressed that his comments represented only his per­sonal opinion. These individuals are of different backgrounds (Ukrainian, Rus­sian, Jewish) and live in different parts of Ukraine.

2. For accounts by Western scholars, see Wilson (2014); Bertelsen (2016); Mar­ples and Mills (2015); Shore (2017). For a discussion of how civil society has developed since that time, see Shapovalova and Burlyuk (2018). For the way public discourse developed in Ukraine, Poland and Russia at the time of the Euromaidan, see Horbyk (2017).

3. For a blow-by-blow account of events written by Ukrainian participants, see Kurkov (2015). The English translation published in the United Kingdom omitted certain sections out of fear of offending Putin (see Kurkov 2014). For other accounts by participants, see Koshkina (2015); Vozniak (2015). For blogs, posts, poems, and other statements during the events, see Zabuzhko and Teren (2014); Vynnychuk et al.

4. For Zabuzhko’s previous public statements on this theme, see Zabuzhko and Teren (2014, 143-144, 173-176).

5. For his analysis of the importance played by these institutional changes, see Kulyk (2015).

6. Holovakha is one of the directors of the Institute of Sociology in Kyiv, which analyzes sociological trends in the country. For an example of its work, see Golovakha et al. (2011).

References

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Golovakha, Evhen, Natalya Panina and Olena Parakhonska. 2011. Ukrainian Society 1992-2010: Sociological Monitoring. Kyiv: National Academy of Sci­ences of Ukraine, Institute of Sociology.

Horbyk, Roman. 2017. Mediated Europes: Discourse and Power in Ukraine, Rus­sia and Poland during Euromaidan. Elanders, Stockholm: Sodertorn University.

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Wilson, Andrew. 2014. Ukraine Crisis: What it means for the West? New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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