[The main points of Yevhen Hlibovytskyi’s speech at the Lviv Media Forum on May 18, 2024.]
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As we go into a third year of this completely avoidable big war, the Ukrainian society meets today’s moment at one of the lowest points of its spirit during wartime. Evidence of this is present in media discourse, changes in social media tone of voice, polling data. Strong vibrations of anxiety are in the air. Critical publications in Western media become a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating pessimistic echoes in partner governments, parliaments, and business circles.
The Ukrainian society is certainly more resilient than it seems to outsiders or even to many internal observers. The positive side of survival values is that they harden society, increasing its ability to withstand shocks. The roots of Ukrainians survival values are not only in this war.
Unhealed traumas accumulated over generations and decades, passed on through mothers’ milk, upbringing, and peer pressure, have their flip side.
This war has topped the experience of the Holodomor, World War II, [Stalinist] repressions, Chernobyl May Day parades, multiple economic crises, and has become another test on the scale of the last 100 years of Ukrainian history. The war is still frightening, but no longer fatal for the Ukrainian cultural or civic identity.
But this should not become the basis for misleading assumptions about derivative strategic resilience.
The lack of internationally agreed strategic discourse has led to a shortage of important discussions that would provide the stakeholders with coordinated responses to questions that could then be relied upon:
– What do we perceive as victory in the war? Is it a measure of territory and borders? Human capital? Cultural identity? Political agency? Economy? Geopolitics? Setting historical precedents? If making a full list come true is impossible, what are the priorities then?
– Likewise, what do we perceive as defeat? Can some form of victory also pose as defeat? What should a truce be like so it does not turn into defeat?
– Are there any conditions for compromise? What are the parameters of an acceptable compromise? Can some financial capital be exempt from the war effects? Can some trade compromises evade the rules and limitations? In nuclear energy for instance?
– Are we sure we understand the aggressor? Who and why makes certain decisions there? Who is undermining those making decisions? What are their assumptions? What are their limitations? What vulnerability do they have regarding the volatility of the human factor? What is their greatest fragility?
– How do we understand the motivation of our partners? How do the foreign administrations see us? Why do some still block strikes on Russia? Stow away ATACMS? Drag with F-16s? Close the perspective of rapid entry into NATO? How to stop being an object in the political game? How to reach out to voters overseas? How to bring the global capital markets on our side? Can the international defense industry be a leader in the process of forming political support for Ukraine? What if it’s not possible to restore trust in partnership with the USA?
– What’s missing for Europeans to accept a common security political logic quicker? How for Ukraine not to become the culprit of deteriorating the quality of life in the eyes of European voters? How to make sure that our Western neighbors don’t do something like a border blockade again? How to neutralize the anti-Ukrainian stance of radicals? How to eurointegrate without trading away strategic interests?
Ukraine finds itself not in a binary conflict of good and evil. Ukraine is in the adult world between those for whom Ukrainian agency is a target, and those for whom it is somewhere between a declarative value and a nuisance, with a few precious exceptions who stay true to their principles. The strongest Western powers are our important partners, but still not allies. And Ukraine’s success for them will not entirely be good news, because it will require a review of a significant part of old privileges, which will be hard to give up. These privileges are both in visibly irrevocable status of so-called great powers in maintaining some of the economic or political colonial advantages, and in how international relations themselves are conceptualized.
And, also, the questions about Ukraine itself remain.
Who in Ukraine has the ambition to provide answers to complex strategic questions?
Political parties? Business owners? Civil society? Think tanks? Academia? Churches? The Armed Forces? What mandate do they have for this? Do we live in days, months, and years, formative for something what will someday be called the “Ukrainian governance system”—uniquely suited to Ukrainian needs, a distribution of responsibility among institutions, which will define the fundamental level of influence, opportunities, and sources of institutional resilience—financial, human, political, etc. A high level of cooperation, integration among different sectors—this is the Ukrainian alternative to Russian despotism and virtually the only safeguard against the risks of sliding into dictatorship in Ukraine itself. But it is also a neural-network-like horizontal society, an alternative to overcomplexity of the European and national regulations which drastically fall behind the deadlines. Can this be part of Ukraine’s contribution to the world or is this a naive wishful thinking, along with all talks about values-based world order and other things that are as nice as they are rare in implementation?
However young and unfinished setup of Ukraine’s institutions is, it is hard to tell if Ukraine is really as dysfunctional as our adversaries like to stress or is it perhaps an emerging new, more horizontal model of governance, the Ukrainian innovation for the XXI century, built on hundreds of years of experience of self-reliance and self-governance, as professor Timothy Snyder suggested in one of his publications, when the surprise of Ukraine’s initial survival has peaked after the fourth day of the Russian full scale invasion.
Ukrainian society, probably as part of the fight against totalitarian legacy, has invented a unique way of controlling weakly accountable institutions. A way that is not fully acknowledged by political, business, and other elites. This method consists of controlling the level of institutional trust. Institutional trust is the trust of citizens in impersonal structures, in functions, which determines the level of influence of a particular institution in society.
Trust does not mean popularity.
You can have trust without popularity, such as moral authorities, who likely would lose elections but would have significant strategic influence. Or popularity without trust, as mostly happens in the political sector, where ratings do not mean authoritativeness and the ability to persuade with one’s arguments.
The attempt of society to keep the state on a starvation diet of institutional trust is both logical and counterproductive. State organs, not re-founded from the Soviet period, mostly continue to be carriers of Soviet tradition with totalitarian inclinations. No, they no longer kill millions of their own citizens, this softening occurred during the Khrushchev thaw and Gorbachev perestroika in the USSR, and its extension into a post-Soviet Ukraine’s statehood. But the state still can turn a citizen’s life into a Kafkaesque hell and not make a problem of it. Recent attacks on the homes of prominent journalists, illegal surveillance of investigative reporters by SBU, political attacks on Public Broadcaster—they all have the same origin of impunity which killed journalist Georgiy Gongadze 24 years ago.
It is the culture of unaccountable and politically controlled law enforcement agencies. A state that looks at its citizens as a resource, that sees no problem in humiliating its citizens, is a state that proclaims its exit from the current social contract. This has already happened several times in recent history, for example, when Yanukovych tried through the so-called dictatorship laws of January 16 to regain control of the situation. When he declared himself the winner of rigged elections in 2004. When the last days Soviet coup leaders decided that they would flex muscle and threaten its citizens with a return to totalitarianism. In all cases, the state lost, and society won, although each time at a higher price.
Each victory of society established a renewed social contract. From the paternalistic contract, where citizens gave up their rights in exchange for social guarantees from the state. To the contract of corruption consensus, where citizens do not ask difficult questions about corruption of the state, and the state turns a blind eye to the shortcuts by citizens. To the social contract of dignity, where for the first time citizens and the state recognize that they have something in common and something valuable—their own independent agency. And for the sake of this achievement, it is worth trying for the first time not to mutually fight each other, but to try to form a win-win strategy.
The positive-sum game has one precondition. It requires the availability of security. The game theory is very clear about it: without security, relations will inevitably degrade to a zero-sum game. Security was a scarce commodity even before the great war, the full-scale attack made it even less reliably accessible. The temptation to return to paternalistic philosophy, restrictions on freedoms both physical movement and informational, for example, in the form of a TV marathon, further deconstruction of checks and balances systems—these are all steps that may even be justified by the circumstances of the war. But they also negate the social contract, pushing citizens back to prioritize personal survival strategies over common ones. In such a confrontation, the street-smart citizen with a corruption tool as an instrument of survival will be a clear winner over the state. But the entire Ukrainian society would suffer a strategic defeat. And a history of a lost independence a century ago should serve as a reminder.
Spring 2022 became a point of unprecedented unity between society and the state. Institutional trust indicators were record-breaking. From society, this was a loan of trust to an imperfect state, without which the protection of life and freedom, without which there is no dignity, is impossible. However, the administration treated the new trust as a given, an assessment of the correctness of its actions. As a result—a decrease in trust indicators in 2023 and even greater slippage in 2024. The country’s political leadership and actors from different sectors have two paths: either maintaining the ability to listen and hear each other, continuing reforms, increasing accountability, reviving the democratic process even without elections, maintaining or restoring trust, and preserving the social contract. Or transitioning into the counterrevolution of dignity, delegitimizing state institutions, and shifting all subjects into the “every man for himself” mode.
“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”
