Ukraine amazed the planet erstwhile it abruptly appeared on the map in 1991, and it did it again in 2022 erstwhile it successfully withstood the attack of the second army in the world. However, it inactive remains mostly unexplored and misunderstood.
Many western observers and politicians have developed their views of Ukraine on the explanation that the country looks either like a tiny and nice-looking “southern Russia” or an underdeveloped, eccentric east Poland. But both views are inadequate. Ukraine is simply a fundamentally different entity, and in order to form a successful policy toward Ukraine, 1 must first realize what it truly is. Only then will 1 be able to realize not only the peculiarities of Ukrainian statehood but besides Ukrainian society, as well as those things that make Ukraine pleasantly or unpleasantly amazing to the world.
Genesis
Ukraine as a country, state and society is shaped by 3 factors.
Frontier is the first factor. A frontier is simply a region of sustainable interaction at the intersection of respective distinct social structures: settled and nomadic peoples; different socio-economic systems; and cultural, spiritual and another communities of commensurate power with many points of contact. Geographically speaking, Ukraine is simply a crossroads of Eurasia – just look at the physical map with its scenery zones, rivers, mountains and impassable swamps, and this becomes obvious. Life at a crossroads is rather specific: there are different people, different ideas, and different troubles moving back and forth. A very circumstantial community is formed at specified a crossroads, and these are the Ukrainians.
It is worth noting that Ukraine is not a single frontier between civilizations, but a “multifrontier” — the intersection of respective frontiers. First of all, between the forest and the steppe, settlers and nomads, and later Christians and Muslims. Secondly, between Europe and the Horde, between the regulation of law and the regulation of force, and later between democracies and autocracies. Thirdly, between the land of east Europe and the sea of the east Mediterranean.
A long period of statelessness is the second factor. Having emerged as a powerful nation in the ninth century and losing its statehood in the thirteenth century, the country became part of various states and later empires. However, amazingly the community did not break up, was not assimilated, and retained its unity. In fresh centuries, most of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, and then the full of Ukraine was part of the russian empire. This helped form a circumstantial stateless society. This society could not trust on a long-standing tradition like the 1 that allowed Poland to recover in 1918 after more than 120 years of statelessness, or even on a single-generation statehood like the Baltic states had between the 2 planet wars. For Ukrainians, statehood was something ancient and semi-mythical, while the reality was a abroad state – imperial, occupying and hostile. Trusting the state almost always meant a failure – failure of property, freedom or life. Instead, the society was based on strong horizontal ties.
The combination of frontier and statelessness gave emergence to what the Ukrainian writer and presently a soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Pavlo Kazarin called the “Wild West of east Europe”, drawing parallels with the American frontier.
The 3rd origin in the genesis of modern Ukraine is the fact that Ukrainian society is not only post-colonial, but besides post-genocidal. Unlike the maritime empires of Europe, whose distant colonies were populated by people of another races, and the multi-layered land-based Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian/Soviet empire was of an assimilatory character. Vienna never tried to turn everyone into Germans, while Moscow tried to make everyone the same and continues doing so to this day. The algorithm of actions is standard: exterminate part of the population; bring in already assimilated people from another regions to replace them; kill the elite – officers, artists, scientists, priests; limit the functioning of language and culture; and encourage the remainder of the population to passively turn into a copy of their oppressors (and then mobilize them to conquer the another lands). The modern past of Poland, from the anti-Russian uprisings to Katyń, provides many examples of these imperial mechanics.
Europe experienced 2 planet wars in the 20th century, but for the remainder of the time it was able to make comparatively peacefully and calmly. For Ukraine, however, the full century was a tumultuous one: the Bolshevik conquest, the Red Terror, the Holodomor of 1932-33, the Executed Renaissance, the man-made famine of 1946-47, Chornobyl, and another little known but no little tragic events. This all happened along with the wars, encompassing many generations and leaving each of them traumatized. Lots of Holocaust events besides happened in these territories. In Europe, more or little average life was punctuated by catastrophes, while Ukrainians lived under endless force and so experienced a chronic deficiency of safety for many generations.
So, there has never been a strong state on this land. The medieval feudal mosaics, fragile kingdoms, and early modern Cossack republics had nothing in common with European absolutism or Russian authoritarianism. Ukraine had been occupied by empires for centuries and had no modern tradition of state-building. Therefore, any state on this land was perceived by people primarily as hostile, as an alien, as an occupier.
In Ukraine a weak state and a strong society make an atypical kind of politics. It is simply a country of balance, not leadership. No 1 can regulation Ukraine like a king (a brief effort at monarchical regulation in 1918 lasted little than a year).
Looking at Ukraine through the western lens sometimes does not let us to realize what is happening here. For example, on many occasions I have witnessed how western diplomats and politicians continued communicating with the government, considering it the most crucial political actor in Ukraine, and erstwhile this approach failed, turned to the opposition, which besides has very small support. The weakness of political institutions has been clearly evident at key moments in history, for example, during the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity, erstwhile 94 per cent of protesters said they were not supporters of any political party.
It is not amazing that conventional sociological surveys show a deep distrust of all political institutions: parliament, government, the president, the opposition, and even the media. Only 4 institutions enjoy the people’s trust: the Armed Forces, churches (which vary in multi-confessional Ukraine), volunteers (a common word for all civic networks that aid supply the army and accommodate internally displaced persons, etc.) and non-governmental organizations. It is interesting to note that the vernacular distinguishes institutionalized NGOs from volunteers by calling the first by an obsolete word, which in the 16th to 17th-century Rzecz Pospolita was utilized to mention to Cossacks in royal service, as opposed to self-governing non-institutionalized Cossacks.
The outbreak of the full-scale war brought a crucial increase in trust in all state institutions related to defence, from the president to the police. But over time, everything has returned to the erstwhile level. This is why Ukrainian political institutions are frequently not only ineffective but besides have a limited mandate from the people.
All of the above may paint a image of an anarchic society with no structure. But specified a society is not capable of resisting a stronger enemy in a prolonged war. If Ukraine were an anarchy, it would have long since ceased to exist. So, there is something else that is not visible through conventional optics. These are horizontal networks independent of hierarchies, which have been well described by Niall Ferguson in his book The Square and the Tower.
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Four roles
In Ukraine, civilian society does not meet the conventional definition of this phrase in the western world. To realize this, let us start with the social roles.
In Europe, civilian society has traditionally acted as a watchdog: it closely monitors the actions of state authorities while loudly drawing attention to problems, making corruption or ill-considered decisions impossible. Certainly, this function of civilian society in Ukraine exists, but it is not limited to it. Moreover, in our country this function is actually a secondary one.
First of all, civilian society is the main actor that develops and implements changes erstwhile the government fails. Thus, civilian society is not just a watchdog, but the country’s sled dog, pulling the sled on its own. It is not only about traditional-style NGOs, but besides about a variety of overlapping networks that go far beyond NGOs and in many cases replace weak political institutions at the national and local levels. Without these networks, Ukraine could have become a failed state. More formally, this function could be called “capacity outsourcing”: failing institutions get into the resources of civilian society, which, while not unlimited, inactive are well scalable.
Another function of civilian society is to act as a public policy customer. All decisions about Ukrainian life have always been made in Moscow, both in imperial and russian times, despite the fact that Ukraine formally had its own parliament and government, which, however, were deprived of powers. The country simply did not have a regular cycle of government decision-making, and this did not change after 1991, erstwhile the yellow and blue flag was raised over state buildings. Many politicians and government officials, who have never had any experience of public administration, simply did not know what this was all about (and this partially explains the time wasted in the first decades of independence). While developed democracies have political parties and governmental policy-making mechanisms, Ukraine’s emerging democracy has many formal and informal groups, movements, and networks that make request for a certain policy.
Finally, another circumstantial function of civilian society is that it is simply a origin of innovation. The reason for this state of affairs is again the same, alternatively sad one: the weakness of state institutions and public administration. civilian society has the ability to massively engage pro bono experts from the private sector at a level that the public sector cannot afford due to low salaries, backward cultures, and low levels of trust. Thus, erstwhile the public sector needs innovation, it usually comes from civilian society.
One of the reasons for the fast improvement of civilian society between 2014 and 2024 was the failure of the 2004 Orange Revolution, erstwhile the political triumph of the active pro-European part of society ended with the transfer of the mandate of trust to the applicable politicians, but they yet failed to implement the desired reforms. That is why 1 of the informal slogans of the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14 was “We will not leave the Maidan this time.” This, of course, does not mean the desire to stay in tents in the central squares of Ukrainian cities, but in this context shows knowing that reforms cannot be implemented without the individual engagement of active citizens, i.e. the continuation of the revolution in the form of regular civic engagement.
To conclude, Ukraine has a network of civilian society groups encompassing both formal and informal structures that operate independently but at the same time are well-coordinated. This increases not only capacity, but besides flexibility and adaptability which, as we will see below, are vitally important.
Achievements
Below, I will effort to show how these 4 roles have manifested themselves in different spheres of Ukrainian life.
First of all, civilian society plays a key function in the defence of the country. In the spring of 2014, Ukraine’s army was on the verge of collapse: decades of corruption, and most importantly, the deceptive belief that the country was surrounded by friends and so did not request to defend itself, had left the army small, disorganized, poorly armed, and poisoned by Russian propaganda. erstwhile Russia invaded, tens of thousands of volunteers took up arms to defend their families, cities, and the country. The situation repeated itself in February 2022: the Armed Forces were already experienced and trained, but their size did not match the scale of the largest war on the continent since the Second planet War. In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, almost 100,000 volunteers joined the ranks of the late created Territorial Defence (a component of the Armed Forces of Ukraine). Software developers, entrepreneurs, artists, educators, and people from dozens of peaceful professions joined the ranks. Many military units created by volunteers have become legendary, specified as the “Azov” (these is besides another brigade with this name) and “Khartiia” (“Charter”) brigades, the “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion, etc.
At the same time, tens of thousands of people provided supplies – starting from 2014, erstwhile the army supply strategy was virtually non-existent, and starting again in 2022, erstwhile its scale did not match the scale of the challenges the country faced. This was called the “volunteer movement” (in Ukrainian, “volunteer fighter” and “volunteer” are 2 different words). In the first period of the war, volunteers collected money donated by millions of people, bought bulletproof vests, first aid kits, thermal imagers, boots, uniforms, and food, and then delivered it to the front line. Without volunteers, many volunteer fighters would have been hungry and unequipped in the first months of a full-scale war. Nowadays, volunteers are supporting the state supply chain and taking care of those areas where the state cannot cope. For example, this is clear regarding the supply and repair of vehicles, which in modern warfare are simply expendable and live on the battlefield for a fewer days. Volunteer-run charities specified as the “Come Back Alive” Foundation, the Odesa-based “Monster Corporation”, the Kharkiv-based “Kharkiv with You”, “Leleka” (supplies of medical equipment) and hundreds of others address different problems faced by the military. It is no coincidence that the volunteer movement enjoys the highest level of public trust in Ukraine.
A separate crucial part of the volunteer movement is medical volunteers who do the evacuation and supply first aid. NGOs specified as the First Volunteer Medical Hospital, “Hospitallers”, “Angels of Taira”, and others have become legendary in this war.
Another highly crucial contribution of civilian society is the improvement of innovative military technologies. The phrase “the generals always prepare for the last war,” attributed to Churchill, now comes to life with extraordinary clarity. The nature of warfare changes dramatically all six months, and no government agency with its cycles of analysis and decision-making can keep up with the pace of innovation. This primarily concerns drones, electronic warfare and intelligence, and communications. Since the first days of the war, not only private enterprises but besides many civic movements specified as “Victory Drones” and hundreds of others have been producing innovative equipment. Only specified flexible structures can withstand the pace of innovation imposed by the war against an enemy that is much stronger.
In addition to technological innovations, there are besides tactical innovations. With the fresh nature of warfare not only does a Soviet-style army become outdated but even the Ukrainian army of 2022. Suffice to say it is clear technology makes the frontline transparent for tens of kilometres in both directions from the contact line, while the tank, the dominant vehicle on the battlefield of the Second planet War and even the Cold War, now survives on average for only a fewer hours. Everything has changed, and the army is simply a very conservative institution by definition. And it helps a lot, as I have already mentioned above, that people from peaceful professions, frequently with a advanced culture of management and innovation brought from business, have joined the army en masse. They contributed to tactical innovations that have made 20th-century tactics as outdated as medieval knights in armour during the Napoleonic Wars. The legendary “Aerorozvidka” (“aerial reconnaissance”) has become the origin of many military innovations.
The culture of horizontal connections brought to the army (by definition a vertical hierarchical system) by civilian society has become 1 of the organizational innovations that has ensured many tactical victories over the slow conventional Russian army, despite its dominance in numbers, military equipment and firepower.
Since the war is hybrid, I would besides like to emphasize the function of civilian society in cyber and information warfare (including combating disinformation). Obviously, the unprecedented nature of the challenges and their scale require much more than the state structures are able to provide. Since the first days of the war, the main burden in this area has been borne by civilian society organizations and informal networks.
To complete the discussion of the direct engagement of civilian society in the war, it is worth mentioning the non-violent opposition in the temporarily occupied cities (where people marched against tanks with Ukrainian flags in their hands), the partisan movement in the temporarily occupied territories, and the documentation of war crimes committed by the Russian army.
Now let us look at what has happened and is happening far from the frontline. First of all, civilian society has played a key function in reducing the exile crisis. In the first phase of the war, after 2014, volunteers helped 1.7 million displaced people get first aid, food and clothes, shelter, and sometimes even jobs. This challenge could have turned into a humanitarian catastrophe, but owing to the efforts of civilian society, specified consequences were avoided. As a result, the communicative of many internally displaced persons from the first phase of the war remained out of focus for European observers, unlike the exile crisis in Syria. For this, we should thank groups like “Crimea SOS”, “East SOS”, the “Svoi” (“Ours”) Foundation and hundreds of another organizations.
Similarly, after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, tens of thousands of volunteers helped people evacuate to areas of Ukraine distant from the frontline, or to Europe. The organized evacuation of specified immense masses of people could not have happened without the hospitality and dedication of Europeans, especially Poles, but besides volunteers on the Ukrainian side. The number of officially registered internally displaced persons in the country presently reaches 4.9 million people – these people could have become an additional burden for the European social welfare systems if there were no NGOs and networks that helped them escape and settle in a fresh place in Ukraine. 1 should mention separately the evacuation of pets that were not evacuated from the frontline areas, and this was besides done by volunteers (for example, the “12 Sentinels” group).
Those people who stayed in the frontline territories besides request attention that government agencies were incapable to supply food, water, medicine, medical care, intellectual support, etc. All this is provided by volunteers. Residents of the de-occupied territories besides request help.
Taking care of the wounded in hospitals, buying and delivering medications, organizing rehabilitation and prosthetic centres (we cannot aid but mention the Superhumans Centre), helping with socialization, and the legal protection of veterans besides constitute crucial parts of volunteer activities.
This war does not have any rear, as air attacks are aimed at all cities in Ukraine, close and far. This is where another superpower of civilian society comes into play – the ability to organize fast reconstruction after rocket and drone attacks or after the de-occupation of cities and villages. The old Ukrainian word “toloka” – unpaid collective labour to rapidly accomplish a large-scale occupation – has come back into widespread use. A well-known example in the West is the immediate arrival of thousands of volunteers to clear the rubble after the rocket attack on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, but smaller and more organized “tolokas” are regularly held everywhere, and NGOs like “Brave to Rebuild” and “Building Ukraine Together” are organizing akin movements across the country.
Another crucial war-related function of NGOs and networks is advocacy for Ukrainian interests abroad. Not only NGO professionals, but besides those who have temporarily left Ukraine and pre-war diasporas are actively active in this endeavour. The fact that public opinion and political decisions in Europe and North America are siding with Ukraine is besides due to the public contribution of specified organizations as the International Centre for Ukrainian Victory, “Razom for Ukraine” and many others.
The function of public networks in organizing sanctions force on Russia should be noted separately. Investigating the activities of Russian companies abroad and global companies in Russia, identifying ways to circumvent sanctions, and another aspects of this highly crucial activity that undermines Russia’s ability to wage war have been taken over by public networks of experts. Obviously, the state simply does not have specified a professional staff.
So much attention has been paid to the war above due to the fact that the war is now defining all the elements of the life of Ukrainians, and besides due to the fact that the scale of the challenges is incommensurate with the capabilities of even very developed state institutions (and we have insufficiently developed ones, as I have described at the beginning of this piece). Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for civilian Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, said that in times like these average people do extraordinary things. In addition, I hope that these notes will be useful to European civilian society organizations in case the war escalates to their territory — something we would like to avoid at all costs, but the indecisive policies of western governments make specified an escalation very likely.
Now let us decision on to the peaceful part of life. First of all, I would like to point out that Ukrainian civilian society has traditionally played a crucial function in reforms, the improvement and implementation of essential laws, and government decisions. They gag that a actual pro-reform coalition in Ukraine is not a coalition between political parties that won elections, but a coalition between civilian society, the EU delegation and the US embassy. Given the way the reforms are being implemented, we see that this is not just a joke. All crucial changes have been developed outside of conventional institutions and adopted only as a consequence of joint pressure. Even Ukraine’s most successful reforms, specified as the award-winning public procurement platform ProZorro, were initially developed by volunteers (some of whom later joined the civilian service to complete the implementation). highly respected besides are the Public Integrity Council, which plays a key function in the renewal of the judiciary; the Centre of Policy and Legal Reforms, which has been developing the capacity of state institutions for almost 3 decades; the Better Regulation transportation Office (BRDO), which became the human resource base of 1 of the governments (unfortunately, for a short time), and many others. Those areas which, for various reasons, have lacked specialized civilian society organizations to develop, advocate for, and implement reforms remained unreformed.
The function of civilian society in the fight against corruption is besides related to the reforms. Despite a well-developed strategy of anti-corruption law enforcement agencies, the key function of public investigators nowadays cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. The aforementioned ProZorro strategy would not have worked without Dozorro, a platform for public oversight of public procurement. Extraordinary civic activism in the fight against corruption frequently plays a bad gag on the country, leading the West to overestimate the real scale of corruption in Ukraine.
Human rights protection, care for the environment and historical heritage, cultural and educational projects (here I gotta mention the Open University of Maidan and the Ukrainian Leadership Academy), etc. constitute conventional areas where civilian society in Ukraine is besides very active. We should besides mention the active community of bloggers that helps us to realize the problems of home and global politics, and even converts its popularity into fundraising for the needs of the frontline and assistance to the wounded. Sometimes large sums of money, urgently needed to address certain challenges concerning the country’s defence, are raised in a substance of days or even hours.
Finally, in its function described above, civilian society frequently sets policy goals, principles and constraints. A prominent example is the alleged Lugano Declaration, erstwhile nearly 300 leading civilian society organizations signed and agreed on common principles ahead of the first global Ukraine Recovery Conference in 2022. Another typical example is the Sustainable Peace Manifesto, which describes the key parameters of a just and unchangeable peace in Europe after the war.
It is besides worth mentioning that civic engagement is an crucial way to counter emigration: it prevents despair and despondency.
All of the aforementioned examples are only the most prominent of hundreds, if not thousands, of civic initiatives, movements and organizations.
To summarize, we see that the unique function of civilian society in Ukraine is due to 2 reasons:
- The weakness of state institutions in a frontier, post-colonial, and post-genocidal society.
- The scale of the challenges of the war is incommensurate with the capabilities of even the strongest state institutions in developed countries.
Problems
However, this unusual and strong civilian society faces many challenges. Firstly, it does not consist of appropriate institutions: in many cases, we see immense amorphous networks alternatively than well-structured NGOs. Secondly, there is simply a large shortage of resources: since civilian society is much more active than the state, after respective years of intensive work, its resources are exhausted. Thirdly, not only resources, but besides energy is moving out. It is hard to work year after year for free, moving all part of a marathon as if it were a sprint. Finally, the most painful thing is that this immense social movement cannot change the rules of the political game, for example, by creating its own political organization and taking a worthy place in the political system, taking advantage of the advanced level of trust. The reasons for this sad reality are the conventional aversion of Ukrainians to politics and the aforementioned long-standing distrust of all political institutions. erstwhile in the past individual volunteers joined political movements, they usually lost trust simply due to the clear difficulties faced getting into this muddy swamp.
As aforementioned, civic activism, especially in times of large social transformation, is simply a marathon, not a sprint. Since not everyone has the strength to run a marathon, the right approach is simply a relay race: fresh people come to replace the exhausted ones and those who face burnout. But specified constant recruitment requires quite a few effort.
In general, civilian society has quite a few homework to do. Ideally, it would be good to make state institutions to the point where they would take over a crucial part of what civilian society organizations and networks are presently doing. But this is hampered by both the war and the long-standing reasons mentioned above.
In conclusion, I will state that past knows only 2 ways to modernize countries: either a slow bottom-up germination of fresh values through many generations, or a fast authoritarian modernization with a full bouquet of force and further challenges to the democratization process. Ukraine does not have time for the first way and cannot hazard the second. A strong civilian society creates hope for the existence of a 3rd way. Therefore, the Ukrainian experience has a value that goes far beyond Ukraine.
My advice to western politicians would be to realize that civilian society in Ukraine is simply a direct and crucial associate in all processes, and if it does not have a seat at the table, the conversation will not be meaningful and successful. Certainly, it is not very convenient to work in an environment where amorphous and incomprehensible groups have both the mandate from society to request changes and the right to veto bad decisions. The intent of these notes is to show that specified difficulties can be an advantage in times of extraordinary challenges and fast profound changes. Unfortunately, they have already come for all of us, not only for Ukraine.
My advice to western societies is that your states, which were created for good, quiet times, will not be able to cope with these extraordinary challenges. 1 should survey the Ukrainian experience and start preparing in advance.
This text was first published in the book “RESILIENCE AND SOLIDARITY – Ukrainian civilian Society in the Face of War” – A study on the function of Ukrainian society in defending against Russian aggression. The publication is available for free on the Stefan Batory Foundation website.
Valerii Pekar is simply a president of the board of the Decolonization NGO, the author of 4 books, an adjunct prof. at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a erstwhile associate of the National improvement Council.
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