‘A democracy in action’: Ukraine’s new civic identity

While the world’s eyes are on the diplomatic surge trying to head off a Russian invasion of Ukraine, WBUR reports, for Ukrainians themselves, there’s also something else — the feeling of a nation being reborn.

“Putin is always trying to say that Ukraine is a failed state, Ukraine is an artificial state,” says Hanna Hopko, a former Ukrainian member of parliament. “But Ukraine is a democracy in action.”

For centuries, Ukraine has been a pawn in great power competitions. This time, Ukrainians say it’s different, experts suggest.

“This crisis galvanized, consolidated, accelerated the development of this new civic identity, where folks who never in their lives spoke Ukrainian all of a sudden made a conscious choice to make an effort to start speaking Ukrainian in public,” Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Kansas, says.

Today’s Ukraine crisis is entirely fabricated, according to Damon Wilson, President and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Putin recognizes that if freedom and democracy succeed in Ukraine—or Georgia or Belarus—that if they follow the wildly successful path of the Baltic states, it is only a matter of time until the Russian people demand more for themselves, he told the launch meeting (above, from 4.25) of a new Atlantic Council analysis, Thwarting Kremlin aggression today for constructive relations tomorrow.

“The warning signs were ample,” read the opening lines of Anne Applebaum’s book, Red Famine, about the Holodomor – deliberately engineered by Soviet Russia (see below) – in which at least 3.5 million Ukrainians perished, said Wilson. Similarly, today we should have taken heed of earlier Russian aggression in Georgia and eastern Ukraine.

But adopting a geopolitical perspective, simplifying strategic responses to the crisis as hawks vs doves is “intellectually lazy,” he added. We should put the people of both Ukraine and Russia “front and center,” especially given the resistance evident in the popular mobilization of Ukraine’s resilient civil society – the determination and ingenuity of which is “the success story of the country’s uneven democratic record.”

Russian media are spreading disinformation about US bioweapons as troops mass near Ukraine, according to reports. 

Misinformation campaigns “are really dangerous to democracy because we were not built for monolithic decision-making at the executive level,” says Justin Pelletier, a professor of practice at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Global Cybersecurity Institute. “Manipulating public opinion can be a way to delay response—it creates a space of freedom for [more repressive regimes] to maneuver within.”