Serhii Plokhy: evaluation

Transcript context

…So if we step back from the historical context of this and maybe the geopolitical purpose of writing such an essay, and forget about the essay altogether. I have family in Ukraine and Russia. I know a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia. Forget the war, forget all of this, they all sound the same. If I go to France, they sound different than in Ukraine and Russia. If you lay out the cultural map of the world, there’s just a different beat, and music, and flavor to a people. What I’m trying to say is there seems to be a closeness between the cultures of Ukraine and Russia. How do we describe that? Do we acknowledge that and how does that add tension with the national independence? First of all, especially when it comes to Eastern Ukraine or to big cities, many people in Ukraine spoke Russian. Generally, it’s the same language. On the top of that we started our discussion with talking about the Slavs, so both Ukrainian and Russian language are Slavic languages, so there is proximity there as well. On the top of that, there is a history of existence in the Soviet Union, and before that in one empire for a long period of time. So you see a lot of before the war, a lot of Ukrainian singers and entertainers performing in Russia and vice versa. And biography of President Zelensky certainly fits that particular model as well, that all talks about similarities. But this similarities also very often obscure things that became so important in the course of this war. And I already mentioned the book titled by President Kuchma of Ukraine, Ukraine is Not Russia. So that’s the argument, despite the fact that you think that we are the same, we behave differently. And it turned out that they behave differently. You have Bolotnaya in Moscow and police violence, and that’s the end of it. You have the Maidan in Ukraine and you have police violence, and that’s the beginning, that’s not the end. History really matters in the way why sometimes people speaking the same language with different accents behave very differently. Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state, and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state, and that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history. Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state. Ukraine came into existence out of the parts of different empires, which means they left different cultural impact on them. And for Ukrainians to stay together, autocratic regime so far didn’t work. It’s like the colonies of the United States. You have to find common language, you have to talk to each other. And that became part of the Ukrainian political DNA. And that became a huge factor in the war. And very few people in Ukraine believed what Vladimir Putin was saying that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, but the majority believed that they’re certainly close culturally and historically nations. And from that point of view the bombardment of the Ukrainian cities became such a shock to the Ukrainians. Because deep down they maybe looked at Syria, they looked at Chechnya, and were explaining that through the fact that there was basically such a big cultural gap and difference between Russians and those countries and those nations. But my understanding at least, most of them had difficulty imagining the war of that proportion and that ferocity, and bring that war crimes and on that level. It’s interesting you say that in the DNA of Ukraine versus Russia. So maybe Russia is more conducive to authoritarian regimes, and Ukraine is more conducive to defining itself by rebelling against authoritarian regimes.…

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