Diminishing Ukraine: A Country’s Internal Entropy
during Times of Existential War
Mykhailo Minakov
Preliminary Observations
The world is saturated with chaos. However, chaos takes various forms. Some of these forms foster
life in all its aspects, while others cultivate entropy and lead to death. Some open space for individual
and collective creativity, expanding the boundaries of existence; others pit social forces against one
another, creating social hell. Some sustain the pursuit of common wealth and create conditions where
different individuals and groups might coexist; others compel a common dearth and fuel an eternal war
of all against all. Moreover, the worldly chaos grows more complex because different forms of it are
present in different places at different times: these forms shape cultures and traditions, yet they remain
open to human influence – they can be transformed through deliberate effort and durable collective
will, either enhancing life’s possibilities or wiping them out entirely.
Considering this perspective, the question posed by Ukrainian Forum – “Has anything gone wrong
in Ukraine?” – might appear pointless. If the world and its history are inherently chaotic, then there is
no true right or wrong, correctness or goodness – these concepts simply have no ground.
And yet, this question is both valid and worth considering. How else can we understand the internal
roots of the ongoing Ukrainian tragedy that has been unfolding for over a decade? The perspective
embedded in the question is critically important. We are not concerned here with the external causes,
whose importance is no less than that of internal factors in this tragedy. Rather, the question’s inten-
tionality directs us toward that part of the sources of the tragedy that stem from Ukraine’s own internal
specificities – the chaos in us – and that require clarification, understanding, and, possibly, treatment.
One more philosophical preliminary is required. When a significant event occurs, it gathers dis-
parate elements of the world’s historical chaos into a coherent whole, imposing a certain order and
creating what we usually call “causes.” Precisely so: the event defines its “causes,” not the other way
around. This is both the limitation and the importance of any analytical effort. On one hand, we can
only see those origins that the event itself has chosen and points us to – or even commands us to see.
On the other hand, within the dialogue between event and analyst, it becomes possible to discern far
more than the event intends to reveal. This knowledge can assist therapeutic efforts to reduce harm and
help overcome the effects of a tragedy that has come home to the lives of millions in Ukraine.
The Internal Sources of the Ukrainian Tragedy
From within, Ukraine’s tragedy manifests itself as extreme polarization – not just the usual political
disagreements characteristic of both healthy democracies and toxic autocracies, but something far
more destructive: the development of a politically structured, institutionally embedded, and ontologi-
cally deepening void between fragments of what was once a cohesive network of people – the multi-
tude – that constituted Ukraine’s Third Republic in the early 1990s.
1

1 On the division of Ukraine’s political history into three periods or three “republics,” see, for example:
B. Lozhkin and V. Fedorin, The Fourth Republic: Why Europe Needs Ukraine and Why Ukraine Needs
Europe (Kyiv: Novyi Druk, 2016); Y. Hrytsak, “The Third Ukraine: A Case of Civic Nationalism,”  Philosophy
& Social Criticism, 50, no. 4 (2024): 674-87; M. Minakov, “Balancing Coercion and Extortion: Change and
Continuity in Ukrainian Statehood,” Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Istituzioni, Società (NAD-
DIS), 7, no. 1 (2025): 85-98.
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This fragmentation is not merely disagreement or competition over different visions of the com-
monwealth and the national future, which is genuine politics, or koinonia concerning the highest of
common goods.
2
It is, in fact, the systematic dismantling of the very possibility of shared existence, of
the political community itself. Where once there was the intricate yet interconnected fabric of society
– though imperfect, contested, and chaotic – now yawns a carefully crafted and infinitely expanding
emptiness that prevents these fragments from recognizing each other as part of a shared Ukraini-
an reality. I would call this polarizing and self-annihilating force the phenomenon of “diminishing
Ukraine.”
The phenomenon of “diminishing Ukraine” is sustained by two fundamental cleavages that run
far deeper than the well-known cultural split between the eastern/bilingual and western/monolingual
poles of Ukraine’s globe or the more recent clash between pro-Russian and pro-European partisan
orientations.
3
The first cleavage stems from the contradiction, rooted in Ukrainian political ontology
itself, between the country and the state. Our chaos is partly organized around the inconsistency be-
tween Ukraine as a lively homeland (country), rich in regional particularities and local attachments,
and Ukraine as a state apparatus demanding cultural uniformity and total allegiance to ideological
authority.
The second key division emerges in the conflict between two incompatible forms of statehood
based on Ukraine’s power practices: the Leviathan, which maintains civic peace through strict hier-
archical structures and a totalitarian social contract concerning a bitter common good, and the Behe-
moth, which generates perpetual civil war and destabilizes any stable political system through its ideal
of a honied common harm. And the intermediate, less radical forms of statehood between these two
extremes were unable to establish themselves.
These two fundamental divisions intersect and amplify one another, creating conditions in which
ordinary political disagreements metastasize into internal existential conflict, now complicated by
external existential war.
Ukrainian Leviathan and Behemoth vs. Country
Thomas Hobbes’s stark vision of politics – formed in the turmoil of seventeenth-century British rev-
olutionary upheaval at the start of Modernity – speaks with a disturbing immediacy to the historical
phase that Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe entered in 2013. This was when the comfortable
illusions of post-communist transition began to fall apart, also signaling that Modernity itself seemed
to be ending. Hobbes’s idea that the legitimate authority of the state exists in perpetual tension with
the constant threat of returning to the state of nature – where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short”
4
– captures precisely the existential stakes that arise as power institutions prove fragile, laws
reveal their impotence, and social chaos spreads. The Hobbesian insight that Leviathan’s sovereignty
isn’t a fixed fact but an ongoing achievement – constantly threatened by the forces of dissolution, as
embodied by the figure of Behemoth – shows how quickly the apparent normalcy of stable statehood
and relative civil peace could give way to a raw struggle for survival. The revolutionary events since
2013’s Euromaidan, in this strange symmetry between Modernity’s beginning and possible end, seem
less like an interruption of progress and more like a return to politics in its most basic form: the funda-
mental question of who has the power to decide between life and death, order and chaos.
Unlike the Roman provinces of Southern and Western Europe, the lands of Eastern Europe estab-
lished a more or less regular state presence only in the eighth or ninth centuries. The Dnipro-based
2 See Aristotle’s Politics II.1.1261a18, III.1.1275b20.
3 Here, I accept and continue to develop the concept of “Little Ukraine,” first formulated by Andrii
Yermolaiev in 2015. See, e.g., A. Ермолаев, Капли росы (Киев: София, 2015).
4 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1651]), 207.
Mykhailo Minakov9
The Ukrainian Forum: Finding the Center – Beyond the Russian World and Ukrainian Ultranationalism
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026): Has Anything Gone Wrong in Ukraine?

slave-trading enterprise of the Varangians evolved into the Rurikid dynastic polity of ancient Rus',
which laid the foundation for a political culture distinctive to the peoples of Eastern Europe.
5
Here, the
foreign origin of ruling groups – and of government as such – came to be seen as a legitimate source of
political authority. This regional form of Leviathan rested on a hierarchical contract between foreign
rulers and local subjects, with fundamentally different normative systems governing each category.
In this arrangement, civil peace of the Hobbesian kind grew from a stark bargain: local communities
would obey the foreign government provided they were permitted to maintain their traditional ways of
life, while the rulers retained the right to employ radical forms of coercion and extortion. This coercion
aimed to preserve the distinction between rulers and ruled without penetrating too deeply into local
communal affairs, while the extortion functioned as systematic tribute – protection money that kept
governing predators at a safe distance.
This Eastern European Leviathan evolved through successive stages over more than a millennium.
Far from weakening this state form, the Mongol conquests, subsequent Tatar overlordship, Lithuanian
expansion, and the Polish colonial project of the Lublin Union only reinforced its fundamental logic
in Ukraine. Both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union were shaped decisively by this Leviathan
model, adapting its core principle – legitimate foreign rule over autonomous local communities – to
the demands of imperial expansion and ideological transformation. In this evolution, it was not only
the specific form of Leviathan that shaped Ukraine’s political culture, but also the strict division be-
tween state and country that this arrangement institutionalized.
Within this framework, the “state” refers to formal political structures, institutions, and elites that
seek to maintain control over resources, people, and discourse – always retaining its character as a
non-indigenous entity, an intruder from the hostile outside world. The “country,” by contrast, en-
compasses the lived realities, traditions, and identities of Ukraine’s culturally and regionally diverse
population – multiple life-worlds, each with its own local traditions, cultures, and languages, existing
in carefully negotiated autonomy from state power. It manifests in civil society, informal networks,
and communities that resist or substitute the state’s ideological impositions through everyday practices
of evasion, accommodation, and quiet dissent. Where the state demands conformity and control, the
country pursues survival and local autonomy. Yet the country itself remains fractured by incompatible
regional memories that generate mutually exclusive political languages, preventing the emergence of
shared civic identity or genuinely pluralistic discourse.
6
Ukraine’s chaos is more complex, however. In certain periods and regions of Ukraine, there have
been instances of a completely different kind of statehood: Behemoth. Hobbes invoked this apocalyp-
tic beast to symbolize a state on the verge of collapse, where legitimate authority collapses and society
fragments into warring factions, making itself vulnerable to external political interference. Applied
to the Ukrainian context, Behemoth represents a form of state formation that actively generates civic
conflict rather than controlling it – a situation in which normal political order mechanisms fail, and
society goes through a phase of self-destruction.
Behemothic episodes collapse the protective distance between state and country that characterizes
the Eastern European Leviathan, resulting in periods of social chaos that paradoxically generate both
greater freedom and heightened existential risk. In these moments, the barriers separating governing
elites from local communities dissolve, throwing both into direct, often violent contact. The state
ceases to function as an external arbiter and becomes instead a prize to be captured, fragmented, or
destroyed by competing forces – both internal Ukrainian factions and external powers seeking to re-
impose Leviathanic control.
5 Here I follow the theory of Oleksii Tolochko formulated in А. Толочко, Очерки начальной Руси
(Киев: Лаурус, 2015).
6 For more on state-country division in Ukraine see: M. Minakov, “The Language of Dystopia: The
Ideological Situation in Ukraine,”  Russian Politics & Law 49, no. 5 (2011): 43-54.
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These external interventions, in collaboration with internal Ukrainian camps, generate entropic
processes. Timothy Snyder referred to this recent form of entropy as the “Bloodlands” effect – areas
where competing imperial ambitions and local forces collide, turning local populations into victims of
existential conflicts that extend beyond their immediate interests and loyalties, as well as transforming
the entire region into uninhabitable zones.
Ukraine’s sporadic descents into kozachchyna and haidamachchyna, its wars for independence
and Ruina, the marvelous creatively destructive 1990s, and the post-Euromaidan revolutionary inter-
regnum all exemplify these Behemothic phases. Each period witnessed the breakdown of established
political forms and the emergence of new, often ephemeral configurations of power – moments when
ordinary citizens found themselves thrust into roles as political actors, when long-suppressed griev-
ances erupted into open conflict, and when the very foundations of social order became subjects of
violent contestation.
The alternation between these two forms of statehood – the distant, predatory Leviathan and the
chaotic, self-destructive Behemoth – has created a political culture in which Ukrainians have rare-
ly experienced stable, legitimate governance that serves their collective interests. Instead, they have
learned to navigate between external domination and internal fragmentation, developing survival
strategies that privilege local autonomy over national unity, personal networks over public institutions,
and tactical accommodation over principled political engagement.
The Diminishing Ukraine
At the heart of diminishing Ukraine lies a perverse logic of common dearth – a systematic impoverish-
ment of life-forms that stems not only from external aggressions, but also from the internal dynamics
of both Leviathan and Behemoth as they devour the country they claim to govern and care for. This
is not the ordinary political competition over scarce resources that characterizes normal democracies,
nor even the predatory extraction typical of autocracies. It is something more fundamental: a structural
commitment to mutual impoverishment that operates regardless of which political force holds power.
Both forms of statehood – whether the distant, alien Leviathan or the chaotic, fragmenting Behe-
moth – share a fatal characteristic: they consume the country’s substance while generating nothing
sustainable in return. The Leviathan treats Ukraine as a colonial territory to be exploited, maintaining
power through the systematic weakening of local communities and their organic bonds of rhizomatic
life-worlds. The Behemoth, conversely, feeds on conflict itself, requiring the constant multiplication
of grievances and the escalation of mutual antagonisms. Neither form recognizes the country as some-
thing equal, or at least an object to be nurtured, developed, and served. Both see it as raw material for
their own reproduction.
This logic of common dearth explains why Ukraine’s political cycles
7
have consistently resulted
in net loss – why each revolution, each change of regime, each moment of apparent progress has left
the country poorer in human capital, social trust, and cultural richness than before. The state, in both
its Leviathanic and Behemothic manifestations, has become a machine for converting the country’s
accumulated wealth – social, cultural, and material – into political energy that ultimately dissipates
into nothingness.
The Ukrainian Behemoth operates according to a distinctive principle: it is not a single revolu-
7 On these cycles see: H.E. Hale, “Regime Cycles: Democracy, Autocracy, and Revolution in Post-
Soviet Eurasia,” World Politics 58, no. 1 (2005): 133-65; O. Huss and O. Bertelsen, “The Perpetual Cycle
of Political Corruption in Ukraine and Post-revolutionary Attempts to Break through It,” in O. Bertelsen, ed.,
Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge of Change (BoD-Books on Demand, 2016),
317-53; B. Madlovics and B. Magyar, “Ukrainian Regime Cycles and the Russian Invasion,” CEU DI Working
Papers 13 (2023), 1-74.
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tionary force, but a multitude of warring minorities, each defined not by what it seeks to build but by
whom it seeks to harm. When any of these minorities takes control of the state apparatus, its main goal
is not only advancing its own agenda but also systematically damaging rival groups. This transforms
governance into a negative-sum game of common dearth where victory is measured not by shared
prosperity but by the successful humiliation and weakening of opponents.
What makes this particularly corrosive in the Ukrainian context is that these competing minorities,
despite their indigenous origins, inevitably become internal foreigners once they assume power. The
very act of capturing the state machinery alienates them from the organic communities they claim to
represent. They must enforce their vision through the same mechanisms of distance and coercion that
characterize foreign rule, thereby reproducing the Leviathanic logic even in moments of supposedly
popular empowerment.
In the past three decades, the Behemoth has visited Ukraine repeatedly with devastating regularity.
It emerged in 1990-1991, helping to secure independence through the dissolution of Soviet structures,
only to retreat as the chaos of freedom proved unmanageable. It returned in 1993-94, creating the
conditions that later enabled Kuchma’s Leviathanic consolidation. The twenty-first century witnessed
two major Behemothic eruptions in the form of the Orange Revolution (2004-05) and Euromaidan
(2013-14), each promising democratic transformation but ultimately preparing the ground for new
forms of autocratic control. Now, as Ukraine faces existential war, the Behemoth approaches the Kyiv
hills once more, drawn by the scent of collapsing society and the opportunity to feast on the fragments
of a disintegrating state apparatus.
The Ukrainian Leviathan embodies a more insidious principle: it presents itself as metaphysically
– and often geographically – foreign as a source of its legitimacy rather than as a liability to be over-
come. This is not the ordinary distance between rulers and ruled that characterizes all complex socie-
ties, but a deliberate cultivation of alienation as the foundation of political authority. The Leviathanic
state in Ukraine does not merely govern from above; it governs from outside, positioning itself as the
representative of transcendent principles that supersede local attachments and particularities.
In the three decades since independence, this Leviathanic impulse has been embodied by some peri-
ods during the presidencies of Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yanukovych, Petro Poroshenko, and even Volo-
dymyr Zelensky – each representing different ideological orientations but sharing a common dynamic
that led them to govern Ukraine as if from beyond its borders. Each of these Leviathanic experiments
has promised unity, stability, and civil peace under authoritarian rulership, but has delivered only the
temporary suppression of Ukraine’s inherent diversity. By cutting itself off from the country’s actual
life-worlds, the Leviathanic state becomes incapable of genuine governance, able only to impose order
through increasingly coercive and extortive means that ultimately provoke new cycles of Behemothic
resistance.
Kyiv occupies a unique and tragic position in this dynamic as a capital city that is simultaneously
indigenous and foreign, native and alien to the country it claims to head. As the historical urban center,
Kyiv possesses unquestionable indigenous credentials – it is Ukraine’s most organic urban space, root-
ed in centuries of continuous settlement and cultural development. Yet, as the seat of state power since
the Varangians, it has become the primary site of alienation, the place where members of the ruling
groups learn to govern Ukraine as if it were a foreign land.
This duality manifests in Kyiv’s role as both the launching pad for Behemothic takeovers and the
administrative center where these revolutionary energies are inevitably channeled into Leviathanic
structures. As an indigenous space, Kyiv serves as the natural gathering point for Ukraine’s diverse
multitude – the place where regional representatives come to compete and collaborate in shaping na-
tional policy. But as the seat of state power, it becomes the site where successful political forces learn
to exercise dominance over the very organic communities that elevated them to power.
The city’s architecture reflects this contradiction: the golden domes of St. Sophia’s Cathedral, sym-
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bols of organic spiritual authority rooted in local tradition, as well as local interpretations of the Byz-
antine and Polish Baroque influences, stand in uneasy tension with the governmental buildings in the
style of the Russian imperial classicism and the Soviet constructivism that house institutions designed
to impose uniform rule over Ukraine’s diverse regions. Kyiv thus embodies the fundamental con-
tradiction of the Ukrainian fate: the impossibility of governing a genuinely diverse country through
institutions that require homogenization as the precondition for effective control.
The most damning evidence for the reality of diminishing Ukraine lies not only in abstract political
analysis but also in the simple arithmetic of existential decline. In the constant revolutionary cycles
that have defined Ukraine’s Third Republic, the state apparatus has been continuously challenged
and periodically overthrown. However, it was not the ruling groups that lost their interest – it was
the country itself that emerged as the permanent loser. Each oscillation between the Behemoth and
Leviathan phases has left Ukraine with fewer people, weaker social ties, and diminished ethnolingual,
confessional, and cultural diversity.
The demographic statistics tell a stark story of the constant depopulation of Ukraine since the early
1990s. But the loss is not merely numerical – it is qualitative. Generations have become increasingly
disconnected from one another, with each electoral cycle witnessing the emergence of new politi-
cal movements that explicitly reject the experiences and wisdom of their predecessors. “Steal your
babusya's passport” became an unofficial electoral motto of youngsters, capturing the systematic de-
valuation of intergenerational continuity that has characterized Ukrainian political life.
The country’s ethnolinguistic and confessional diversity – once a source of cultural richness – has
been steadily diminished through emigration, assimilation, and the pressures toward homogenization.
The fragments of Ukraine’s multitude, rather than learning to coexist within a genuinely pluralistic
framework, have drifted further apart, separated by an ever-widening void of mutual incomprehension
and ressentiment.
This is diminishing Ukraine in its most literal sense: a country that grows smaller and emptier with
each passing political cycle, not merely in population but in the diversity of life forms – human and
animal, cultural and natural – that it sustains. The variety of choices available to its citizens in matters
of knowledge and faith, speech and silence, continues to contract. It is as if someone has inscribed on
St. Sophia’s walls the graffiti of divine judgment: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN – weighed in
the balance and found wanting, numbered and finished, divided and given away.
The Therapeutic Impossibility: Between the Cherry Orchard and the
Bloodlands
These reflections, I believe, provide an answer to the question of what went wrong in Ukraine. The
tragedy lies not in any single political mistake or historical accident, but in the structural impossibility
of sustaining a genuine political community within the oscillating cycle of Leviathan and Behemoth
that has defined Eastern European statehoods for over a millennium. Ukraine has been caught in a fatal
dialectic: the alien Leviathan that governs from outside while systematically weakening local life-
worlds, and the chaotic Behemoth that promises liberation but delivers only fragmentation and mutual
harm. Both forms of state power treat Ukraine not as a living community to be nurtured, but as raw
material for their own reproduction. The result has been the progressive diminishment of everything
that makes life worth living – human connections, cultural diversity, intergenerational continuity, and
the basic possibility of shared existence. What went wrong was not a deviation from some proper path,
but the very logic of Ukraine’s long-term political development itself.
Yet knowing what went wrong does not automatically reveal the path forward. As an ontologi-
cal anarchist, I envision the possibility of something radically different: the rebirth of the Ukraini-
an rhizome through a minimalist state, robust constitutional democracy, and genuinely autonomous
Mykhailo Minakov13
The Ukrainian Forum: Finding the Center – Beyond the Russian World and Ukrainian Ultranationalism
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026): Has Anything Gone Wrong in Ukraine?

self-governance. This would mean resurrecting the organic networks of local life that both Leviathan
and Behemoth have systematically destroyed, creating space for Ukraine’s diverse communities to
flourish without the mediation of alienating state power. In essence, it would require replanting Taras
Shevchenko’s Cherry Orchard – that symbol of rooted, flourishing community life whose destruction
Anton Chekhov so poignantly registered at the dawn of the twentieth century. Such a Ukraine would
embrace its multiplicity rather than demanding homogenization, would govern through genuine con-
sensus rather than coercion, and would treat political power as a tool for nurturing life rather than
controlling it.
But I remain deeply uncertain whether such therapeutic renewal is possible, or even appropriate,
for a continent now plunged into a new era of international warfare. The forms of worldly chaos that
currently grip Eastern Europe seem merciless toward any attempt to cultivate the delicate conditions
necessary for organic political life. The Bloodlands did not finish in the twentieth century; they are
recurring nowadays, creating an environment where survival itself requires the very forms of state
mobilization and social militarization that preclude the gentle work of community rebuilding. Perhaps
the dream of the Ukrainian rhizome is simply incompatible with the existential realities of our histori-
cal moment. In this recognition lies my deepest pessimism: that life, in any form worthy of the name,
may not spring again in these tortured lands for the foreseeable future. The diminishing Ukraine may
continue to diminish until nothing remains but the memory of what might have been – and the bitter
knowledge of what went wrong.
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