The Reality of Ukraine

A larger meaning of the largest contemporary war

The divide in politics today is between unreality and reality. Those who seek to rule the world blur human experience and smudge memory, making cooperation and friendship laughable and unthinkable. Rather than possessors of truths, we are to serve as lonely nodes in a power network.

Ukraine resists an unreality war. Putin's premise for invasion is that Ukraine does not exist. There is no state, no nation. Ukraine is just a misunderstanding that can be corrected by the violence and propaganda. And so the country was to be occupied, the children were to be reeducated, and everyone with any sort of political involvement was to be murdered.

The Russian lies told for foreigners return to that basic premise of non-existence. Ukrainians want to be Russians -- because they do not exist. The Ukrainian government is illegitimate -- because there is no Ukrainian nation that could have elected it. We will call the Ukrainian government or Ukrainians "Nazis" -- not because that has any basis in reality, but because that would justify eliminating them. We will claim that Ukraine is an element of a conspiracy -- if it is real, Ukraine is not.

The claim that somehow Russia had to invade Ukraine because of NATO also comes down to the notion that Ukraine does not exist. The story starts from the premise that only NATO has agency, that only NATO can act. Russia is therefore blameless in whatever it does, and Ukraine is simply a pawn. In this telling, the problem is that NATO was going to endlessly "enlarge" or "expand." But that is not what happened. NATO was not an issue in Ukrainian politics before 2014. Ukraine could not have joined NATO back them because of military agreements with Russia that made this impossible. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine anyway. Then Ukrainians, sensibly enough, decided that joining NATO might be a good idea.

Vladimir Putin gives us no reason to believe that he fears a NATO invasion. If Russian leaders feared such an eventuality, the last thing they would have done would have been to undertake a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as they did in 2022. That amounts to sacrificing most of their army inside a country that is not a NATO member. If Russians feared a NATO invasion, they would not have created a situation in which Finland and Sweden join NATO, which they have done. By invading Ukraine, Russia created a new, very long border with NATO, its border with Finland. But because Russia does not fear a NATO invasion, it does not need to seriously guard that border, and does not. It throws everything it has at Ukraine, because it is invading Ukraine for reasons of its own.

Did you remember, by the way. that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014? That invasion was a giant triumph for unreality. A very simple event, the invasion of one country by another, was covered by the application of social media techniques. In a pioneering act of unreality politics, the Russians targeted the vulnerabilities of westerners with messages that would resonate with prior beliefs and thus demobilize them, or even bring them along to Russia's side. The far right was told that Ukraine was part of a Jewish plot. The far left was told that the Ukrainians were Nazis. All of these were different ways of saying that Ukraine was not real. And everyone was told that Ukraine had no history, no culture, no language, and so on.

The Russians won a very real victory back in 2014: even if we do not accept the specifics of their propaganda, many of us still have trouble with the basic sequence of events: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then NATO became popular in Ukraine. Russia voided military agreements by invading. When we talk about "NATO enlargement" or "NATO expansion" we accept a story in which Russia has done nothing wrong. But more insidiously, we accept the premise that Ukrainians do not figure in the story. We fail to consider what happened to them in 2014, an invasion of their country by Russia, and why it would have made sense for them to react as they did.

The basic attack lines on President Volodymyr Zelens'kyi from the Kremlin and its allies go back to the same unreality. The idea that he is not a legitimate president has no foundation in the political or constitutional reality of his country. It goes back to the same basic lies, which rest on the same premise that Ukraine is not real. He cannot be a president because he is a "Nazi" -- an absurdity that the Kremlin, the actual world center of fascism, keeps repeating. He also cannot be the president because he is a Jew. And here the Russian anti-semitism is all too real, as is the anti-semitism of quite a few people who question Zelens'kyi's status.

What the Kremlin feared in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, and what it feared in 2022, when it undertook the full-scale invasion, was reality-based politics. While in Russia Putin was able to control the information environment, no single person was able to do that in Ukraine. Whereas in Russia elections were fake after (reckoning generously) 1996, in Ukraine they were competitive and even unpredictable. In Ukraine, people showed a disturbing (for the Kremlin) tendency to act according to their own sense of what was important, and even to risk their lives for it.

Selection from a mural in an underground school in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine

The claims about Ukrainian unreality are smooth and featureless. Ukrainians are just Russians who do not know it. They are just an element of some larger conspiracy. They are just objects on a strategic chessboard between Russia and America. None of this is true, none of this is real. Much of it is self-contradictory. But it does not have to make sense, since its sources are not reason but conformism and pain. One side of unreality is the spectacle: the social media, the television, the cooperation of fascist billionaires. The other side is the violence: in the case of Ukraine, an invading army, executions, torture chambers, reeducation centers for kidnapped children.

The reality of Ukrainian resistance, on the other hand, is rough and human. There is a popular president who was new to politics. There is a state that continues to function. There is an experienced civil society, trained in protest, that applies its skills and its trust to new tasks. There is an impressive tech sector, which has kept ahead of the Russians in new ways of fighting war. There is cooperation among all of these groups. It is not always smooth, and it is not without intense emotion. But it is real, in the sense that it arises from human truths and human commitments. And that, for Putin, is the problem. The claim that Ukraine does not exist is really the claim that nothing like this should ever exist.

Ukrainians have fought for three years, giving far more proof of their reality than anyone should have to give. As we consider three years of this awful war, we can also consider why people take the sides that they do. The issue goes well beyond Ukraine and Russia. Russia’s specific falsehoods work in the minds of people who take the Kremlin’s general approach.

One does not have to be a Russian to take the side of unreality, to take the view that might makes right, that facts and values do not exist, that everyone who disagrees should be humiliated, that democracy is a sham. And one does not have to be a Ukrainian to take the side of reality, to believe that some things are true, some things are worth caring about, that those of us who agree about that can work together and become friends, and that there can be a better form of politics.