PUBLIC SERVICE: "What Vladimir Putin misunderstood about Ukrainians"

«I was born in Kyiv in 1977 to Ukrainian parents. My family was exiled from the Soviet Union when I was nine months old, after my father, a poet, was arrested by the KGB for the heinous crime of distributing copies of books by Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov to friends. 

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That history of violence and humiliation has led Ukrainians to think conspiratorially. Over two-thirds of people we talked to for our study reckoned that “secret organisations” greatly influence political decisions. Such attitudes are understandable but damaging. Even in the days leading up to February 24th, many members of the Ukrainian elite thought that American warnings of an imminent Russian invasion were secretly a means to push the country into making concessions. They didn’t take Putin’s intentions seriously until the last minute.

Because rulers have historically been colonising powers, Ukrainians have little trust in government. Zelenksy’s popularity began to drain from the moment he came to power (before the war his approval rating was just 30%). This lack of respect for authority means that Ukrainians can energetically overthrow rulers, as they did in 2004 and 2014. But it also makes it hard to build an effective bureaucracy. The state is seen as something that needs to be avoided or that can be used for personal gain. Corruption is the grease that makes things work. Courts are captured by anyone who can pay. This attitude infuriates reformers and western donors like the EU. Even when the government does manage to build new infrastructure, people talk about these achievements as though they happened almost magically. Ukrainians simply can’t conceive of the state doing anything successfully.

The Russian secret services seem to have thought this mindset was a fatal weakness: according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank, the Kremlin based its invasion plans on surveys that predicted Ukrainian support for the government would collapse after an invasion. But there is a flipside to all this distrust. People have learnt to rely on each other. Ukrainians pride themselves on resilience and cunning. They have always found ways to self-organise. Trust in civil society, in local churches and small-business associations is high. There are also less savoury associations: football hooligans, petty gangsters and far-right militias who formed regiments to fight in the Donbas after 2014. Calamity has forced people to club together. “Disaster and grief unite us,” people would say when we asked. Many of our interviewees spoke about how, in 2014, activists took it upon themselves to feed, clothe and provide transport for Ukraine’s decrepit army.

Ukrainian myths of national identity coalesce around a collective: the Cossacks, bands of self-governing warriors who roamed the steppe. A recent successful film told the story of how Ukrainian Jews and Crimean Tatars created underground networks to help each other in the second world war, to fight first the Nazis and then the kgb. One of the most popular Christmas films in Ukraine is “Home Alone”, which has a narrative that resonates with Ukraine’s story: a small country abandoned by the world’s parents, always attacked by bigger powers and having to improvise self-defence with anything that comes to hand.

In this war, Ukrainians are showing that they can resist one of their most frequent and violent abusers, the Kremlin. Among the friends I speak to there’s a sense that they are fighting not just against this invasion, but for all the other times Ukraine has been violated. Putin himself referred to the invasion as a rape: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway,” he told a stunned press pack during a session with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. In Lviv today you see posters of a woman in Ukrainian folk costume pushing a gun into Putin’s mouth: “I’m not your beauty,” she says.

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At the time I thought this yearning was essentially about identity, a desire to be known. In Zabuzhko’s “Fieldwork of Ukrainian Sex”, the heroine travels from one international literary seminar to the next, impelled to prove that Ukrainian is a living language, and exhausted by the need to constantly answer the question “Ukraine? Where’s that?” Now I realise this desire to be seen is not just about identity; it’s also about security. Being seen by the world means that there is less chance that you will get killed.■

Peter Pomerantsev directs the Arena project at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality”. (1843 Magazine)