“In memory of Mykola Gaevy, a Ukrainian historian, a volunteer of the 95th ODSHBr of the Armed Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Last winter, in order to speed up the passage of time at least a little in the endless night shifts in the frozen trench near Kupyansk, I came up with a game for myself.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
In memory of Mykola Gaevy,
Ukrainian historian,
a volunteer of the 95th ODSHBr of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
The winter before last, in order to speed up the passage of time at least a little during the endless night shifts in the frozen trench near Kupyansk, I came up with a game for myself. Its simple essence is to try to look at the headlines of some recent news through the eyes of, say, ten years ago – from the point of view of an average citizen of Ukraine in 2013.
It is worth remembering the context: Bankova is owned by the all-powerful Yanukovych, whose regime seems to outlast all opponents, future collaborator Dmytro Tabachnyk heads the Ministry of Education and Science, and none other than Vladimir Putin together with his pocket patriarch are praying for the “unification of the souls of our peoples” on Volodymyrska hills above the Dnieper – in the very heart of Kyiv.
And now:
“This time without controversy”: Ukraine is the country of the year according to The Economist”;
“The US Congress gave a standing ovation to the President of Ukraine”;
“The defeat of the Russian army in Ukraine: the losses of the Russian Federation have reached a historical anti-record”;
“Ukraine has officially started negotiations on joining the EU”;
“Ukraine is in fourth place in the ranking of the most powerful armies in Europe.”
And finally, my favorite from a relatively recent one: “Ukraine created the first military command post on the territory of the Kursk region under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
Such a thought experiment is valuable not only as a visual illustration of the thesis that there is nothing less predictable than history. First of all, it allows you to understand how impressive the Ukrainian society has come in eleven years – not so much considering the scale of changes in and around the country.
Various things happened along the way. In some places, as if in Hermes sandals, we flew forward on all steam. Sometimes they wove like turtles. Sometimes they wandered in three pines, and then they got lost on the way. However, it is really important that at one time, finding ourselves at a crossroads that could not be bypassed, we did choose the only correct direction of movement – and were brave enough to follow it to the end.
Sooner or later, every nation faces what philosophers call a “borderline situation.” It is a point of bifurcation, a defining moment in the historical process, when a community is faced with a brutal alternative: to try to jump out of the impasse to the next stage of development – using all available resources, but with no guarantees – or perish.
In the best case, condemn yourself to a long and painful decline, which with a high probability will become irreversible. If a nation is strong enough to overcome such an existential challenge, it is reborn, building its own renewed identity around what it has just experienced. This is how Event appears with a capital letter.
Nation and EventIt is not difficult to guess that most often the culmination of a national Event coincides in time and space with the act of proclamation and/or restoration of the respective state. A classic example is the American Revolution of 1775–1783, also known as the American War of Independence from the British Empire.
The liberation of the numerous peoples of Hindustan from the British Empire in 1947 led to the establishment of two new states: India and Pakistan.
At least two projects of modern national statehood competed in the vast expanses of China throughout the first half of the 20th century. After the victory of the Communists in the civil war on the mainland, one of them became the center of Beijing, and the other was forced to evacuate to the island of Taiwan, where it found a safe haven for the next 70 years.
In Europe, the general rule boils down to the fact that the further to the East, the later, on average, the local modern nations got on their feet firmly enough to claim their own Event.
Read also: Modernize or die, or Why Ukraine is still outside the time and space of Europe
The great French revolution of 1789–1799 is here, so to speak, an ideal type, echoes of which can still be heard everywhere in the country with an unarmed ear. If we consider the unification of scattered lands between the Rhine and the Baltic Sea into a single state formation as a key event in the history of the German nation, at least in the 19th century, then it turns out that the Germans lagged behind the French by almost a hundred years.
More to come. The Poles managed to restore and maintain their own statehood only in 1918–1921, when all the empires that at the end of the 18th century literally tore the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between themselves collapsed one after another. At the same time, three Baltic republics gained independence. The Founding Events of the rest of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, with a few exceptions, are also localized in the timeline between the second half of the last century and the conclusion of the First World War.
Regarding our intrusive eastern neighbors, there is ongoing debate in research circles as to whether the Russian nation is sufficiently formed even today. This, however, does not in the least prevent the Russians from fervently convincing the whole world and, above all, themselves, that their great Event dates back to May 1945. However, as always, they lie. The victory over German fascism is undoubtedly the common property of the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, including all the peoples of the former USSR.
It may seem that the Ukrainian Event should also be sought somewhere in the maelstrom of the mad 20th century, because without, for example, the liberation struggles of 1917–1921 and the 1940s, it is impossible to imagine the crystallization of national consciousness, which eventually became one of the prerequisites for the declaration of state independence.
And yet, if the attempts to win sovereignty by armed means in the first half of the last century were, unfortunately, an experience of defeat – a thousand times heroic, but a defeat – then the exit of Ukraine under the leadership of the local communist nomenclature from the USSR against the background of its collapse is rather a historical necessity.
And indeed, when on the morning of August 25, 1991, the residents of the Ukrainian SSR suddenly woke up as citizens of Ukraine, they hardly experienced this metamorphosis too deeply, since they were not sufficiently involved in it.
The process of self-awareness of the newly born Ukrainian civil society moved slowly, but inevitably – until in the fall of 2004, it ran into a wall called “administrative resource” which is mandatory for young republics.
The attempt of the forces of the nation to oppose the then government – which, following the example of its Russian, Belarusian and Central Asian colleagues under the Soviet nomenclature, felt ready to falsify the results of the popular will – turned out to be successful. However, politically infantile.
The quick and bloodless success of the Orange Revolution gave Ukrainians faith in their own strength – and at the same time equipped them with the moral right to abdicate responsibility at that exact moment , when the main demand of the protest was fulfilled. As soon as Viktor Yushchenko was declared the guarantor of the Constitution, the nation, delegating to him and his entourage all the full power, dispersed to the houses of the outskirts as quickly as it had previously gathered together in the center of Kyiv.
The revolution won, but the Event did not take place. This happens when a very young society, satisfied with the first successes, allows itself to prematurely believe that “the Moor has done his job, the Moor can go.”
To say in this context that the political biography of President Yushchenko after 2004 is eloquent is to say nothing. He himself seems to be aware of how quickly he turned from an engine of great hopes into a symbol of unfulfilled expectations, thus personifying the fate of the movement that brought him to power.
The opportunity to correct mistakes and immediately pass a decisive test of the maturity of a political nation happened exactly in a decade – at the same time in the same place.
Integral democracy Alain Badiou, the patriarch of modern French philosophy, who devoted the lion’s share of his own intellectual biography to the development of the Event category, emphasizes that it is always the product of joint purposeful activity of people united around a certain set of values.
An event, unlike a situation that precedes it and is formed under the influence of more or less objective factors, does not arise “by itself”. Its foundation is laid by a person’s readiness to make a choice at a critical moment, and therefore bear responsibility for it: as much as it will be necessary.
When a sufficient number of such people find each other, noticing that their choices coincide, a powerful subject of the historical process appears, made up of many specific personalities. Each of them feels like a conscious participant in social creativity, so to speak, a driver of time – and she really is. At least as long as the window of opportunity outlined by the Event remains open.
This sometimes almost orgasmic feeling, which has little to compare with, can be described as “We rebel, therefore, I exist” by slightly modifying the famous aphorism of Albert Camus. During the long winter of 2013-2014, on a utopia island surrounded by fire and ice in the center of a European metropolis, we experienced it day after day with every cell.
The revolution of dignity was an epiphany, a manifestation, a breakthrough of History as such. The space of freedom created by her allowed the active minority of society involved in the process to realize their own potential in creating the future.
The co-authors of the Maidan were people of almost all age groups. However, it is necessary to talk about two generations separately. For the oldest of them – those who entered the era of the late Yanukovych already at a mature age (30–55 years old, quantitatively – the most massive stratum of protesters) – the revolution and the subsequent period became the zenith, the highest point of political subjectivity. For the younger ones – from 15 to 25 – it was a formative event that largely determined their values, beliefs and way of life for decades to come.
The struggle was for the content of the national project: the images of the future of Ukraine, advocated by the government and the most active part of society, finally diverged after Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the association with the European Union and brutal beating of the youth who disagreed with such a decision on the Maidan.
Even the very symbols of the state turned into a battlefield. Formally, the coat of arms, anthem and flag belonged equally to the authorities and the opposition, the Maidan residents and the Berkut residents. However, after November 30, 2013, the ideological content that the participants of the confrontation invested in them became mutually exclusive.
In the first days, when the parties tested their own strength and found out with surprise that they had no idea how to force the enemy to surrender or at least retreat, a shaky balance was established. For several weeks, the past and the future coexisted above the intersection of the capital’s subway lines.
The Rubicon, the crossing of which doomed this schizophrenic superposition to collapse, was the unprecedented escalation of violence by the authorities for the social contract of post-Soviet Ukraine.
The blood of Nigoyan, Zhiznevskyi and Verbytskyi – the first among the equal knights of the Heavenly Hundred – sacralized the protest. The possibility of political compromise, mutual concessions for the sake of returning to the usual timeless stability, was buried with the dead.
The multiplicity of scenarios for exiting the crisis, potentially opened on the eve of January 22, collapsed in one moment into a dilemma: a revolution, the forceful overthrow of the existing regime, whatever it might be worth, or a terrorist dictatorship outright cynicism.
There is no need to travel to an alternate version of the Multiverse to understand what awaited us if Maidan lost. It is enough to look at modern Belarus, which after the defeat of the protests of August 2020 resembles something between a Latin American autocracy and the classic fascist regimes of the 1930s.
The authorities carefully prepared favorable positions for themselves. The dictatorial laws were passed in the Verkhovna Rada in violation of all possible procedures already on January 16 – less than a week before the first killings of protesters took place.
It is significant that the package voted that day, which was supposed to put an end to the 22 years of democracy in Ukraine, contained, in particular, the aping of the Russian law on “foreign agents”.
The latter not only turned out to be a convenient cross-border tool for suppressing civil society, but also became a kind of legal business card. Its appearance at the hearing of the national parliament unmistakably indicates that “Russian peace” has already begun to digest the once independent country. The tragedy of Georgia, which has been unfolding before us in recent years, looks even more instructive from this perspective.
On the opposite side of the barricades on Hrushevskyi and Instytutskaya streets, there were no doubts at the end of January 2014 either. Timothy Snyder, in his perceptive book “The Road to Unfreedom”, largely devoted to Ukraine, cites the testimony of an ordinary 53-year-old activist: “My friends are Jews, and I am a citizen of Poland, but all of us, patriots of Ukraine, walked together, convinced that our lives will have no meaning if the protests are suppressed now.”.
Overcoming the alienation between people characteristic of modern societies, carried out by the Maidan and sanctified by the sacrifice of its defenders, is mentioned in every first published memory of the participants of the events.
This process moved along two closely intertwined trajectories: we learned to love and hate at the same time for real as only a person who has just found a family is capable of – and risks losing it at any moment.
The cold reflection of Maidan fury can still be seen today in the methodical movements of the mortar gunner near Vovchansk, devoid of any fuss. Or in the concentrated calm of an SSO sniper in the gray zone in Kurshchyna, who waits for hours for an opportunity to make a single shot.
Love for their comrades filled Maidan and Maidans, enclaves of the revolution in the regions, generously spilling over from there to the country. Her avenue manifestations, methods of practical conversion into good deeds, it is physically impossible to calculate and systematize. However, there is one whose importance to the survival of the nation remains to this day.
Ukrainian volunteering born by the Event is a phenomenon that has no analogues in Europe of the 21st century in terms of its scale and duration.
According to a study by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a total of 20% of the population participated in the Revolution of Dignity. Approximately half of them collected and delivered everything necessary to the protesters: things, products, money, materials, equipment and technical means.
It hardly makes sense to talk again about the role played by volunteers in the first years of the war in Donbas, while the state gradually came to its senses. Actually, the only thing I received from the Armed Forces during my service in the 24th OSHB “Aidar” during 2014 was a rusty Kalashnikov machine gun and more than modest ammunition for it. Everything else – from socks to a bulletproof vest – was provided by caring Ukrainians.
Even now, when the state and the army are firmly on their feet, it is impossible to overestimate the volunteer movement. The communities created by the revolution or under its influence have turned into crowded, complexly organized institutions that move the country forward every day.
This is especially clear on the example of high-tech industries related to defense. Ukrainian unmanned systems, which a few years ago mostly looked like the parish of small groups of enthusiasts, today compete with the products of global concerns.
It is futile to try to comprehend this almost Hollywood success story without going back to its roots. 2014 forced the nation to externally master the skills of organizing utopia – creating everything from nothing.
Volunteering became the core of the ethics of free people cultivated by the Maidan: from each – according to opportunities, to each – according to needs.
The problem of effective distribution of public resources, which was fought over by generations of communist theoreticians, was solved by revolutionary Kyiv in a completely modern spirit through network self-organization, taking advantage of the potential of Twitter and Facebook.
Over the past decade, several influential intellectuals have observed that postmodernism died on the Maidan, as the Revolution of Dignity rejected ironic relativity in favor of the assertion of truth, particularly at the cost of the lives of its supporters.
However, few people paid attention to something else: on the Maidan, the Republic was reborn in the primary ancient meaning of the word, worn out from everyday procedural usage – a common cause in a literal translation from Latin. Her sudden, yet natural discovery in the vortex of revolutionary creativity allowed us to feel the heart of our own national project. The effect caused by such a discovery on numerous witnesses and participants in the process did not take long.
How I became a Ukrainian For the first time I found myself on the Maidan in December 2013. As a recent graduate of the Simferopol Institute of Science and Technology, who in 20 years of life has been forced to leave his cozy province near the sea five times, I was terribly anxious to see the revolution up close, because when will such an opportunity arise again?
However, there were also warnings about the “danger of aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.” Although during my sun-drenched and wine-drenched youth I occasionally wore a vyshyvanka, mostly to annoy the local Soviet public, I harbored a lot of prejudices built up by the hermetic nature of life on the peninsula, where time seemed to stand still in the late 1980s.
People who surrounded me did not associate themselves too much with Ukraine. However, they did not associate themselves with Russia either, remaining, as it was fashionable to say in the last political season, “somewhere in the middle”. Often – completely renouncing national identity in favor of self-determination based on regional characteristics: Crimeans.
The well-known saying that “there is no land beyond Perekop” was perceived by us as a practical demarcation of our own oikumene. The comfort zone ended where you had to drive more than two to three hours to your favorite beach. This does not mean that we despised the state we were part of. This means that we had no business with her. As, in fact, and – let’s put our hand on our heart – she is with us, until 2014.
The equidistantness of Crimea from various centers allowed it to drift between the stormy waters of history for decades, diligently pretending that nothing was happening around it. The peninsula slept and saw itself as an island in a dream.
The late Soviet mentality, based on despair and infantilism, merged here with the thirst for enrichment, characteristic of the era of primary capital accumulation, without a hint of social responsibility.
All this together turned the autonomy into a kind of reserve of a far from the best period in the biography of post-communist countries. The internal cohesion of the small Crimean Tatar community against the background of general selfishness and inertia looked like the very exception that only confirms the rule.
So you can imagine with what stunned delight I slept in the midst of a living sea under the walls of the Mykhailo Golden-Top Monastery, from where I started my way to the Maidan.
Almost all the people with whom we started conversations or at least met a glance for a couple of seconds were not just friendly. To say something like that is like trying to describe the beauty and majesty of thermonuclear fusion using concepts from an elementary school science course. They behaved as if they knew and loved you, just you – a random stranger, all your life, until finally the long-awaited opportunity came to treat the dear guest to tea and almost by force to force him to eat the most delicious sandwich in the world.
Why? Obviously, because the revolution considered each person in the context of the same common cause – a new social contract written on the streets of Kyiv with barricades, donations and Molotov cocktails. Joining this process, even if initially in the role of a passive observer, meant becoming part of a family that cares about its children.
It’s about a universal experience – after all, that’s one of the hallmarks of the Event. However, for Crimeans, with our insular consciousness and archaic political culture, he was perceived as a miracle raging around on live air.
On the Maidan, each of its participants saw the nation – and in this way the nation saw itself. Unlike in 2004, this mirror did not reflect the familiar profile of a political messiah, but the endless eyes of caring citizens.
As Andrii Bondar aptly put it, “Maidan was a laboratory of the social contract, a union of a Dnipropetrovsk aitishnik with a Hutsul shepherd, an Odessa mathematician with a Kyiv businessman, a translator from Lviv with a Crimean Tatar peasant”.
The sociology of the Revolution of Dignity testifies in favor of scientific ideas about nation-building, which are commonly called “constructivist”. Researchers from this school consider national identity not as something given to a person at birth, simply “by the fact” of being born in a specific ethno-cultural environment, but rather through the prism of his political choice.
Identification with the community is important. Therefore, the nation is a “sea common consciousness” and “great solidarity”, as defined by Ernest Renan – appears where there are people who aspire to be it.
The Event category comes in handy here as well, allowing you to localize the outbreak of the process in time and space. It is undeniable that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of holders of passports with a trident on the cover realized their belonging to the Ukrainian national project for the first time in their lives under the influence of the events of 2013-2014.
I am lucky to be one of them. There and then, something important and irreversible happened to me – to all of us.
I don’t know about “Nuland cookies”, but Maidan fed its participants to their heart’s content with Morpheus’ red pills. The first “come” from the narcotic sense of subjectivity, the heartbeat of the revolution that beats in your own chest, turned out to be so powerful that it moves generations to this day. And forces him to do strange things time and again, from the point of view of people without similar experience. Like, for example, going to protests as if to work, instead of having a peaceful rest with the family. Or climb under the machine guns of the “second army of the world”: first in 2014, and then in 2022.
Because, catching Maidan’s gaze with your back, the dim shine of Nigoyan’s big eyes, you cannot do otherwise. Even if I really wanted to.
The awareness of this transformation overtook me in the broken vestibule of the Kyiv-Simferopol train on the eve of the new year, 2014. Swallowing to quell the excitement, cigarette after cigarette from a pack of blue “Pryluk”, presented a few hours ago by a volunteer near the House of Trade Unions, I returned home as a fully formed carrier of Ukrainian political identity, because I passionately wanted to belong to it.
As if a high-quality stimulant, a mixture of pride, delight and ruthless responsibility, which is impossible – and unthinkable – to delegate to anyone, left no chance of sleep that night.
Long 2014The next time I dived into the Maidan was on February 21, 2014. At that time, local centers of the revolution were more or less active in several cities of the ARC. However, all eyes, of course, were directed at the capital.
Taking advantage of the invitation to present the peninsula during the voting of the audience in the “Shuster LIVE” studio as an invaluable opportunity for yesterday’s student to get to Kyiv at the expense of the organizers, I called a friend from the Crimean Self-Defense Center of the Maidan as soon as I stepped on the platform in Darnytsia. He asked not to resist.
On Shuster’s evening broadcast, Verkhovna Rada Vice Speaker Ruslan Koshulinsky eloquently explained why the president is still strong and will definitely not resign voluntarily. I listened to him, but mostly looked at the journalist Pavlo Sheremet, who was sitting on the couch next to the lawyer of the imprisoned Tymoshenko.
Pavlo had an unusual look: attentive, open and at the same time skeptical, with metallic reflections. This is how people think, passionately confident in what they do and what they believe.
In a few days, already in Simferopol, I will have the opportunity to meet another bearer of the same view – director Oleg Sentsov. One of the leaders of the Kyiv Automaidan, who will soon lead our activist group.
The show ended late in the evening, but there was still a ghostly chance to catch the bus somewhere towards the center. Pulling the phone out of the stash in the studio lobby, I first saw about fifty missed calls from my mom. And immediately after that he came to the conclusion that it was not the smartest idea to hope to keep his visit to Kyiv a secret, when you have to sit in front of the cameras for several hours of political prime time live during the revolution. As it turned out later, I called my mother back when this revolution had won.
On the night of February 22, the sleepless Maidan woke up to the news of Yanukovych’s escape. The dictator has finally been removed from power: maybe not in the way many of us dreamed of, but the protest was successful nonetheless.
And yet, nothing even remotely similar to a holiday was felt in the sticky, black, smoky air. Instead, there was trepidation mixed with wary anticipation. And there were many confused, tired faces of men and women. Many of them were not destined to rest: with the beginning of the Russian invasion, the clubs and stones in the hands of the revolutionaries will be replaced by machine guns, and the front line will shift from the hills of Pechersk to the distant Donbas.
As the Soviet song teaches, a revolution is a process that has a beginning but no end. Having launched a change of political regime after the removal of the dictator, Maidan only created the prerequisites for the implementation of its own program, which provides for the integration of Ukraine into the Western world, including the EU and NATO, and thus overcoming the consequences of centuries of Russian colonization.
During 2014–2016, both of these interrelated requirements were enshrined at the constitutional and legislative levels.
Meanwhile, the main slogan of the protests, borrowed from the Ukrainian liberation movement of the mid-20th century, became the official greeting of the first members of the state apparatus. Many activists spread across institutions of all levels, regions and industries, taking part in reformation processes.
With the beginning of the war in Donbas, it was the people of Maidan who formed the backbone of the volunteer battalions, which in turn became one of the drivers of the surprisingly successful, as we can see today, transformation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the national security sector in general.
Maidan became a state.
Unfortunately, Antimaidan also became it. More precisely, we are talking about the state that was Antimaidan long before such a word appeared. Indeed, if you think about it, you will not find any other stable ideology in modern Russia, except for this hysterical desire to stop history at all costs, to prevent the Event from happening: both on its own territory and abroad. The master of the Kremlin is perfectly aware of the function of the “gendarmerie of Europe” assigned to him by the thousand-year-old imperial tradition, just as, naturally, he is also aware of the significance of the Maidan for Ukrainian nation-building.
“The source of all current power in Ukraine is a coup d’état”Putin insists. “It [Революція гідності] brought to Ukraine the establishment of such a regime in Kyiv, which turned out to be dangerous for us”– his press secretary Dmitry Peskov interprets the dictator’s words with touching immediacy.
If the return of Yanukovych to Bankova in the event of the success of the original “SVO” plan was indeed considered by the occupiers as a way to legitimize their power over the conquered state, then their logic is obvious: everything that happened in Ukraine during and as a result of the Maidan is a “perversion” and therefore must to be erased from history through a symbolic restoration of the situation that preceded November 2013.
“Symbolic” is the key word here, since in reality, for sure, it would be a parody of pre-revolutionary Ukraine, carefully cleansed of any hints of civil society, national consciousness and democratic procedures.
As a result of the tectonic processes initiated by the Revolution of Dignity, the post-Soviet world as we knew it slowly and painfully died for almost a decade. Until he breathed his last on the morning of February 24, 2022. Two antagonistic future projects immediately took its place wow: their clash was inevitable, as the success of one means the death of the other.
During the following months, most of the countries of the world made their choice, becoming allies, openly or shyly, of one of the parties – the last geopolitical confrontation of comparable volumes was the Cold War.
This is how the Maidan reached the global level. The protesters from snowy Kyiv in construction helmets and penny respirators could barely imagine the scale of their own influence on world history. However, this is what the real Event is: national in form, universal in content, global in meaning.
It may seem strange at first glance, but historical time rarely coincides with calendar time. It is about the fact that the Event, like a massive celestial body in astrophysics, organizes time around itself, using its own significance for human societies instead of gravity.
For example, Western historiography often speaks of the “long 19th century”, the chronological framework of which is determined, respectively, by the Great French Revolution and the beginning of the First World War. Or about the “short XX”: from 1914 to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By the same logic, it would not be a big exaggeration to assume that a long 2014 is going on outside our window – one might say, “Maidan of a long duration”. After all, the consequences of the Revolution of Dignity, like circles on water, continue to diverge in all directions for the eleventh year.
The echoes of our national Event can now be heard in one way or another in the most diverse corners of the planet: from the United States, where the issue of aid to Ukraine became one of the important topics of the presidential campaign, to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, which, as a result of Russian aggression, are experiencing an increase in food prices.
Meanwhile, from a purely political point of view, the aspirations of the Maidan, except for the most superficial ones, have still not been realized. Like any great revolution, ours is measured not in weeks and months, but in years, if not decades. Given the distance already traveled and the geopolitical situation created by the nation’s ability to effectively resist the invaders, there is no doubt that Ukraine will sooner or later become a member of the EU.
Despite the earthquake caused by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, few in the North Atlantic Alliance deny Kyiv’s key role in the continent’s postwar security architecture: NATO will need Ukraine no less than Ukraine needs NATO.
If one fine day, as a result of overexertion from the war of attrition instead of the planned “special operation” for a week, the Russian Federation ceases to exist (at least in the form in which we know it), it will be safe to say that the Maidan has even exceeded its program Well, it’s nice when the byproduct of your willingness to stand up for your own rights is the collapse of the world’s last empire, isn’t it?
***
Returning to the imaginary experiment from the beginning of the text, it is appropriate to cite other headlines of current news:
“A million dead and wounded. WSJ on losses of Ukraine and Russia in the war”;
“According to the UN, more than 6.5 million Ukrainians have become refugees since the beginning of the Russian invasion”;
“In Ukraine, 26% of the territory is mined”;
“In Ukraine, 50% of the country’s entire energy system has been damaged,” etc.
A significant part of my acquaintances from 2013, having learned that such a future awaits them, would be rightly horrified and immediately turned into ardent conservatives. Like, it’s better to leave everything as it is, not to muddy the water and not to rock the boat. In fact, many people are saying exactly that now; every day of war amplifies these voices.
However, the truth is that during the revolution, society did not choose between the old and the new – in practice, such a choice never exists – but between two options for the new: what is unfolding in Ukraine after Yanukovych’s escape, and the one with which we would we have been dying for almost three years in a row.
If history can teach anything, it is that progress and freedom are very expensive. Few societies managed to pay for their own Event “with little blood”. From a comparative point of view, the price that Ukraine pays every day, despite its terrifying scale, is more the rule than the exception.
One could cite Benjamin Franklin’s well-worn quote about the choice between liberty and security (or Bandera’s paraphrase of it about liberty and bread), but in the moment it seems much more productive to clean the gun and tighten the armor.
After all, for the first time in many centuries, Ukraine is not only the stage where the defining events of world history unfold – nothing new here – but also their main actor.
According to Badiou, the Event, in order to fully reveal the potential embedded in it by history, requires followers to be faithful to themselves.
If we want to run this marathon to the victory ribbon, without leaving the course prematurely due to fatigue and burnout, we must remind each other again and again of the choice we made in the central square of Kyiv 11 years ago.
The revolution of dignity continues – we remain worthy of it.
Maxim Osadchuk, historian, military serviceman, public activist