The Broken Mirror of the World in Crisis
Volodymyr Ishchenko, Freie Universität Berlin
Which Ukraine?
When we ask how Ukraine arrived at its present catastrophe, the first question should be: which
Ukraine are we talking about?
1
The war has been lived through in radically different ways. For some
Ukrainians, it has meant death, dispossession, exile. For others, it has meant career breakthroughs,
political projects suddenly feasible, or access to new resources and sources of income. Ukraine is not
and has never been a single subject, but a mosaic of diverse and diverging fates.
The war economy has generated its share of predators: middlemen in weapons supply and hu-
manitarian aid, conscription officers pocketing bribes, corrupt rent-seekers at the highest level of the
government. But these are only among the most obscene forms of profiteering. On both sides of the
front, new business and career opportunities have been seized. Some of those who stayed in occupied
territories filled the posts vacated by those who fled. Figures like Viktor Medvedchuk, losing fortunes
in Ukraine, could have found fresh stakes in Russian real estate, Donbas metallurgy, Siberian oil (Ti-
tov, 2023). At the same time, many have climbed up in ways more legitimate for the Western elites:
into politics, into public visibility, into cultural and academic prominence at home and abroad. To be
a “Ukrainian voice” in Western media and institutions has itself become a mode of career ascension
(Ishchenko, 2022a), playing a role not unlike that of Cuban, Venezuelan, or Iranian “voices,” typically
drawn from privileged groups.
Paradoxically, even amidst devastation, an optimistic discourse has taken hold among influential
segments of both the Ukrainian and Western public. Prominent commentators hailed wartime Ukraine
as more democratic than ever and even economically buoyant (Cooper, 2024; Gumenyuk, 2022;
Onuch & Way, 2024). Somehow they look past the fact that most of the state budget had become
entirely dependent on Western funds, and that the suppression of opposition and dissent, however
unsurprising in wartime, is a problem for democracy, not a sign of its vitality. As late as 2025, some
exalted Western leftists reported that Ukraine’s Armed Forces relied “on a popular war effort, with the
army made up of ordinary workers, trade unionists, students, LGBTQ people, and volunteers fighting
for their communities” (Lanson & Le Tréhondat, 2025), while remaining conspicuously blind to the
realities of “busification” (brutally forced conscription on the streets), the mass scale of draft evasion,
and record levels of desertion. Ironically, in the 1930s many prominent Western leftist intellectuals
made pilgrimages to Stalin’s USSR, celebrating the revolution’s achievements while averting their
eyes from famine and terror (Furet, 2000). Their present-day successors, applauding wartime Ukraine,
cannot even plead the excuse of restricted access. The realities of Ukraine’s economy, state, society,
and army have been extensively documented and freely available online. What is missing is not in-
formation but the willingness to see: a blindness no longer imposed by censorship, but chosen in the
name of “solidarity” – solidarity with those who fit their ideological fantasies rather than those who
suffer the most.
Many Ukrainian (and not only) intellectuals, meanwhile, greeted the war as an epochal chance for
“derussification” and “decolonization,” the long-awaited moment to recast Ukraine in their own image
and likeness. As one Ukrainian writer exulted in the essay “The country of our dream”:
Day by day, we realize dreams we had for years… We pay a horrible price, but in exchange we
receive things once thought utopian – impossible to implement in practice… For example, the
derussification of cities and public space (Liubka, 2022).
1 The work on this article was supported by the Einstein Foundation.
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For many in these circles, the war presented not a catastrophe but an unprecedented opportunity. As
polemicist Mykhailo Dubynianskyi put it, such visions are possible only because “someone else pays
the horrible price” (Dubynianskyi, 2023) – the millions who lost their lives, their health, their close
ones, or their homes.
Nor is this dynamic confined to elites. Many refugees have found opportunities abroad, especially
for their children. Landlords in Ukrainian cities discovered windfalls in letting apartments to displaced
families. Local economies of survival and profit have grown amid the ruins. The war has crushed lives,
but also opened avenues that would otherwise never have appeared.
Ukraine today is like a shattered prism: each fragment refracts the same catastrophe into a different
color. Some see blood and ruin; others glimpse opportunity. For some, the opening of peace negotia-
tions offered a space for hope; for others, it unleashed hysterical denunciations of capitulation. Some
have been in the army for several years and cannot wait for demobilization. Some hide from or resist
busification. Some would rather kill a conscription officer than go to the front line. The war has only
posed the question more sharply than ever: who will benefit, and who will pay the highest price?
The answer to this question is not decided by the people together in any act of collective “self-de-
termination.” The war has not only produced diverging interests among Ukrainians but has deepened
the inequality in their political capacity to pursue those interests. Those empowered by the war have
typically been the more privileged, affluent, educated, organized, already aligned with and connect-
ed to elites in Ukraine and the West. Those marginalized by it have typically been the subaltern, the
poorer, the less educated, and atomized. They were already the least equipped to defend their interests
before the war, and are even less so now.
It was not supposed to end this way. Many, such as some of the authors cited above, saw the war as
the culmination of a long historical process of national consolidation: not fragmentation and dispersal,
but the forging of a unity that would finally settle, once and for all, the questions of what Ukraine
is and who Ukrainians are in relation to Russia, to the West, to the rest of the world. The war was
expected to fix some fundamental common interests of a nation that had spent decades, or even a cen-
tury, failing to agree on what those interests were. Beyond national consolidation, it was anticipated
to complete Ukraine’s full integration into the international order organized by Western elites – into
“civilization” itself – joining the club of the most developed and rich nations and leaving behind what
the ideologues and beneficiaries of that order presented as the burdensome legacy of the Soviet Union:
that supposedly dead-end road of suffering and delusion, first enforced by bloodthirsty fanatics and
later mismanaged by hypocritical bureaucrats. Furthermore, the fighting and winning Ukraine was to
serve as a shield for the “democratic world” against the authoritarian threat, and in doing so to reaffirm
the whole post-1989 narrative of liberal capitalism’s triumph, supplying, both at home and internation-
ally, a much-needed injection of legitimacy to Western elites who claimed to stand on the right side of
history. The war, in short, was expected not only to complete Ukraine’s nation-building but to breathe
new life into Western, above all U.S., global leadership. The war was supposed to unite not merely a
nation but “civilization,” rallying the “free world” around its own highest self-image at the moment
of its greatest test.
As the chasm between expectations and reality becomes impossible to ignore, so too grows the need
to explain it. Some will simply dress defeat as victory through increasingly obvious mental gymnastics
(“maintaining Ukraine’s independence” by becoming dependent on foreign aid as never before, and
so on). Others will seek self-justification, either through a blame game about mistakes and failures
or even “betrayal” – by Trump’s cynicism, Ukrainian elites’ incompetence and corruption, European
leaders’ vacillation, the Russian opposition’s impotence – or by pointing to “objective circumstances”
that supposedly predetermined the disastrous outcome, for example, the sheer balance of forces that
favored Vladimir Putin and other challengers of the U.S.-led order, without asking how that imbalance
came to exist, or why the former proved so much more capable of mobilizing their resources for the
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fight than the latter.
But there is also a growing demand to question the dominant narratives themselves – about Ukraine
and Russia, about the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations, about the West and its global role
– that shaped the failed expectations of the entire period since the end of the Cold War for the nation,
for the region, and for the world. These ideological narratives obfuscated political processes bound up
with interests that concerned us all – processes to which we all contributed in different ways, through
individual and collective action, but which disproportionately served the narrow interests of the few,
and which propelled events in precisely the opposite direction from the promises sold to so many, not
least in Ukraine. It is the ruthless criticism of these bankrupt paradigms and the development of alter-
natives that can better explain what has been happening and help us understand what follows – that is
becoming ever more urgent, and to which this essay seeks to contribute.
The starting point is not the unfulfilled promise of unity and integration but the factual reality of
prolonged national, regional, and global disintegration. The task is to outline an alternative compre-
hensive narrative about Ukraine and the post-Soviet countries in general, not as an anomaly, but as
the current norm – and even more so as the vanguard of the world in crisis. The argument advanced
here is that Ukraine’s catastrophe is fundamentally a product and a factor of a dual crisis: the crisis of
revolution and the crisis of hegemony. On one side, the degeneration of the Soviet revolution, which
built modern Ukraine, and its centrifugal disintegration, which defined the main lines of the post-So-
viet class conflict that tore Ukraine apart. On the other, the parallel and also interconnected decay
of the US-centered international order that the prevailing part of Ukraine’s elites fatally staked the
nation’s future upon. Its appeal rested on the hegemonic project of “democratic capitalism” – one that
promised, and partially delivered (foremost in the post-WWII West), social and political integration
for the majority and upward mobility for the “deserving,” and whose waning credibility has defined
the dominant narrative of the post-Cold War era. Through the interconnection of these two crises – of
bourgeois hegemony and of the social revolution that was supposed to overcome it but instead made
it possible – Ukrainians were among the crucial agents in both the creation and the destruction of that
order. Ironically and tragically, the more urgently they tried to enter it – dismantling the legacy of the
very revolution that had profoundly shaped the “civilization” they sought to join – the faster that order
itself was disintegrating. Ukraine’s catastrophe both reflected the world crisis and accelerated it.
To understand how we arrived here, and what may lie ahead, we must begin where modern Ukraine
itself began – with the revolution.
The Ukraine the Revolution Built
The heated debates about the Soviet Union were never only about the sustainability, effectiveness,
progressiveness, or repressiveness of its order. They always carried an explicit or implicit comparison
with capitalism – the system the Soviet revolution sought to supplant. And just as perceptions of the
Soviet Union shifted across decades, with the “winner” of the comparison alternating from one period
to another, so too did the relative standing of capitalism as its rival. The consequences of the Soviet
revolution were perceived in radically different ways: in the 1920s, amid escalating political crisis
across Europe and the rise of fascist counterrevolution; in the 1950s, at the peak of Soviet internation-
al might and prestige; in the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse, amid widespread doubt about whether
all the labor, suffering, and blood had been in vain; and again today in the 2020s, with the ever more
apparent crisis of the global order, which was supposed to be the triumph of capitalism. Interpretations
of the Soviet revolution shifted because the world itself changed along with the revolution that once
helped to bring it about, and whose legacies continue to shape it still.
From the vantage point of the 1990s “end of history,” the contest appeared resolved once and for
all: liberal democracy would supplant one-party rule; prosperity would flow from efficient markets
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replacing a dysfunctional planned economy; sovereign nation-states would emerge from Moscow’s
shadow and claim a decent place in the “civilized world.” Of course, few imagined this could be
achieved overnight, and so each failure was reclassified and excused. If liberal institutions did not
yield democracy, this was attributed not to their inherent flaws and contradictions, but to the claim
that they remained merely formal “façades” over entrenched informal authoritarianism. If capitalism
brought poverty and not prosperity, this was because it was not “proper” but “crony” capitalism. If
post-Soviet nationalism led not to stronger states but to demodernizing ethnic primordialism, this was
framed as a “natural” reflex of age-old grievances against Russian and other privileged ethnic groups’
dominance, only thinly masked by Soviet internationalism. The stalled march toward “civilization”
was thus interpreted as the result of correctable flaws, rather than the inevitable consequence of the
Soviet collapse itself.
Today, the bankruptcy of liberal teleology is clearer than ever. Post-Soviet societies did not move,
however haltingly, toward the promised horizon; instead they drifted, with occasional reversals, yet
overall, in the opposite direction. More fundamentally, the very attempts to “return to the main road of
civilization” helped dismantle the very conditions that had made that road attractive in the first place.
At least for a historically circumscribed period, a few decades after World War II, and in a geograph-
ically limited set of places, above all the “West,” “democratic capitalism” offered genuine economic
advancement to large sections of the working class, drawing them into the new “middle classes” and
integrating them politically into the bourgeois state and civil society. This hegemonic development
within the US-centered order – the growth of political unity, organization, and consciousness of the
ruling class that allowed it to forgo short-termist and particularistic interests in favor of a compromise
with the subaltern classes – was never simply an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself, the formation
which rests fundamentally on high inequality and exploitation, but a product of its dialectical relation-
ship with the social-revolutionary threat, above all with the Soviet revolution. At its height, especially
after the defeat of fascism, the Soviet Union represented a credible counterhegemonic pole on a global
scale, convincingly claiming political leadership toward a fundamentally more progressive order for
subaltern classes around the world. The expansion of social revolution posed an existential threat of
mass expropriation to the ruling class, compelling capitalism to reform itself in progressive directions.
This is the dynamic Gramsci famously theorized as “passive revolution” – one through which the
ruling class preempts social revolution by conceding partial reforms to the subaltern classes while pre-
serving and expanding its own power, and whose twentieth-century Fordist variant was driven above
all by competition with the Soviet counterhegemonic pole (De Smet, 2016, pp. 55–59; Gramsci, 1971,
pp. 114, 120, 282, 314–315; Ishchenko & Zhuravlev, forthcoming). Welfare states, expanded suffrage,
social rights, progress toward gender equality – all bore the imprint of the Soviet challenge. As long as
the USSR offered an alternative perceived as viable and desirable, capitalism remained dynamic and
inclusive. Once the Soviet revolution began to degenerate and then collapsed, and with it any plausi-
ble social-revolutionary threat, there was less and less restraint on the neoliberal rollback. By inertia,
Western democracies could still seduce the middle classes on the peripheries with the promise of inte-
gration into the global elite. But the foundations of that promise were already crumbling. The kind of
“proper” capitalism that many (ex-)Soviet citizens once aspired to join was itself eroding: inequality
widened, welfare states were hollowed out by austerity, and politics slid toward polarization, populist
backlashes, and increased authoritarian trends even in “consolidated” Western democracies.
The Soviet revolution was both capitalism’s antagonist and its corrective. It failed to build com-
munism, but in striving toward it, it did transform the country, the region, and the world profoundly.
Soviet revolutionary and modernizing success does not annul the terror, famines, and ethnic deporta-
tions of Stalin’s era, nor the debilitating bureaucratic despotism of the late Soviet period. However,
the usual way of staging the discussion – whether Soviet achievements “justified” the violence – is
intellectually, politically, and morally wrong. This was not a matter of a “free choice” between equally
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possible, “justified” and “nonjustified” options. This retrospective trial presumes that “normal life”
under the capitalist order was not only the sole admissible alternative but was even possible for the
majority without a social-revolutionary challenge. This false premise is unraveling before our eyes.
The question of the “price” of the Soviet revolution is invoked not to defend human lives from unjus-
tified violence, but to discredit the very idea of social revolution – rational and radical social transfor-
mation in the interests of subaltern classes through their conscious and organized collective action –
which threatened ruling-class interests far more than it offended their conscience. As if an even higher
human “price” were not being paid today, in a world where social revolution has been foreclosed.
The bitter irony is that the years following the Soviet collapse, culminating in the Russia–Ukraine
war, have not produced a principled abhorrence of political violence. On the contrary, such violence
has been normalized in the public sphere. Even yesterday’s Soviet dissidents, contemporary human
rights defenders and liberals discover, with remarkable ease, reasons to justify – or at least to look
away from – the “unfortunate excesses” of Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan realities, which radicalized
further under the full-scale war: capturing men on the streets, thousands prosecuted under politically
motivated statutes, prison terms for social media “likes” and private conversations, ethnic assimilation
policies, religious persecution, the suppression of opposition parties, and calls for categorical discrim-
ination and the collective punishment of entire social groups.
2
All of this becomes tolerable – and in
their eyes mostly reasonable – so long as it is carried out not in the name of social revolution but in the
name of a specific national project for Ukraine and an ever more delusional promise of integration into
“civilization”: aspirations that have been, from the outset, explicitly oriented toward the destruction
of everything the revolution built.
Demography makes this hypocrisy measurable: despite the Holodomor, the Great Terror, WWII
and their postponed demographic consequences, Soviet Ukraine’s population reached about 52 mil-
lion by 1991, the high point of the modernizing trajectory. By contrast, the UN’s most recent median
projection points to roughly 15 million by 2100 (even under the overly optimistic assumption that the
war would have been over by 2025)
3
– an existential threat to Ukraine’s future. Importantly, the war
did not begin this slide but sharply accelerated it, deepening the demographic trends of mass emigra-
tion, collapsing fertility, and preventable mortality that had already defined the post-Soviet decades,
in which “national revival” was paralleled by an ageing, ever-poorer, and de-industrializing society
within ever-shrinking borders. And so the question that the rhetoric of “price” tries to monopolize
by depreciating Soviet achievements returns with a sharper edge: what could politically or morally
“justify” a project of nationhood that ends by undermining the capacity to reproduce itself of the very
society carrying the identity supposedly at stake in this war?
What defined the particular brutality of the twentieth-century struggles on Ukrainian lands was
that Ukraine was a critical territory of the social revolution: the core of the industrial base on which
Soviet socialism relied, the breadbasket without which counterrevolution might have prevailed, and a
crucible of cultural and scientific innovation. In that fight, Ukrainians were an integral part of the force
that changed the world, and in the process built the foundations of their own modern economy, state,
culture, and society. The foundations that thirty-five years of post-Soviet crisis, comprador reforms,
and military cataclysm have not been sufficient to fully eradicate, and whose legacy still shapes the
material reality and consciousness of Ukrainians today. Outside the western regions, the majority of
Ukrainians (beyond narrow, mostly intellectual circles) underwent the transition from pre-modern lo-
2 Systematic research on this large yet widely overlooked, or actively denied, dimension of wartime
social reality in Ukraine remains scarce. For references to specific cases, see, for example, Marcetic (2023);
Ishchenko & Korotaev (2025); Kasianov (2026).
3 United Nations. World Population Prospects 2024, https://population.un.org/wpp/
graphs?loc=804&type=Probabilistic%20Projections&category=Population&subcategory=1_Total%20
Population.
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cal identities to a modern Ukrainian ethnonational identity within the Soviet Union. For many of them,
especially in the late Soviet period, that identity was entirely compatible with shifting to Russian, not
as a language of oppression, but as a language of upward mobility and social advancement. The Bol-
sheviks did not “invent” Ukraine. It is even possible that without the competition with the short-lived
project of the Ukrainian People’s Republic of moderate socialists and bourgeois nationalists during
the Civil War they would not have instituted the separate Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at all.
But the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians became a modern nation in and through the Soviet rev-
olution – even if that national vision of Soviet Ukraine was typically unrecognized, long despised, and
is now being erased by nominal Ukrainian nationalists. Ironically, those who claimed to speak for the
nation were often the enemies of its real historical development, while the nation itself was built by
those who fought not for a national-particularistic but for a social-universal project.
Soviet state socialism “failed” only in its relative contest with capitalism, which for a time seemed
to deliver more, until it became less and less capable of doing so. This returns us to the question of
“which Ukraine” in a different register. The ethnonationalist rejection of Soviet Ukraine – as not
“properly” Ukrainian, as “Russified,” as lacking independence from Russia – could have been justi-
fied, at least on its own terms, if a stronger, more prosperous, more advanced Ukraine had in fact been
built on the ruins of the Soviet legacy. But has not precisely the opposite occurred? Soviet Ukraine
was an integral part of the struggle that created a world in which such a bet could even appear plau-
sible. The defeat of that struggle, together with the collapse of Soviet Ukraine, undermined the very
foundations of this possibility.
Post-Soviet Fractures
For Ukraine, what followed after 1991 was not a transition toward a new progressive or even stable
formation, but a protracted and escalating sociopolitical crisis. The crisis began well before the Soviet
collapse and Ukrainian independence, and has not ended despite proclamations of national consolida-
tion supposedly achieved through a series of nation-building maidan revolutions (1990, 2004, 2014)
and resistance to Russia’s attempt at subjugation. Millions of Ukrainians in annexed Crimea and the
seceded Donbas since 2014, in the southern regions rapidly occupied by Russia in 2022, along with
those who fled to Russia from 2014 onward and after 2022, and an even larger number of refugees in
the EU (many of whom are increasingly absorbed into building new lives abroad) have been routinely
erased from teleological nation-building narratives. These narratives typically rely on polls that have
almost always excluded a large and ever-growing share of Ukrainian citizens outside the territory
under the government’s control, and that by now cover only roughly two-thirds of the population es-
timated to have lived in Ukraine at the onset of the war
4
– not to mention a not insignificant minority
of respondents who dissent from the “national consensus” even on the most sensitive questions (such
as who is to blame for the war) (Ishchenko, 2023a, pp. 272–273).
Moreover, whatever “unity” appeared in 2022, it has proven to be short-lived, with divides over
the use of the Russian language, forced conscription, corruption, and the terms of peace resurfacing
in the public sphere, on social media, and in private (Artiukh & Fedirko, 2025; Gorbach, 2026; Ish-
chenko & Korotaev, 2025; Korotaev & Ishchenko, 2025). The consolidation can be called “national”
only insofar as it excludes ever more Ukrainians from the nation itself. This is not to deny that certain
groups have grown more cohesive over time and remained mobilized for the cause through the years
of war. Yet this consolidation of a minority – a significant one, but still a minority – has proceeded in
tandem with the steady loss of ever more Ukrainians beyond Ukraine’s shrinking borders and the al-
4 Interfax-Ukraine. “There’re 29 mln Ukrainians living in territory controlled by Ukraine, 4.3 mln in
EU countries - Institute of Demography chief,” 20.07.2026. https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/1186657.
html.
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ienation of many of those who stayed within them. From the perspective of the historical period since
1991 and the borders we inherited from the Soviet Ukraine, what has unfolded in post-Soviet years
is continuous disintegration, with no coherent order emerging to replace what was lost. This pattern
of fragmentation and polarization reemerged after each fragile moment of euphoric consolidation that
briefly united some Ukrainians but ultimately left even more beyond the new boundaries: after the
referendum for independence in 1991, after the maidans of 2004 and 2014, after Zelensky’s election in
2019, and, eventually, after the full-scale invasion as well. This fluctuating, contentious, yet ultimately
disintegrative dynamic has been the “normal” of Ukrainian society and politics, frequently mistaken
as its “democratic” character when contrasted with the authoritarian stability of many of its post-So-
viet neighbors.
This post-Soviet fragmentation was, however, neither predetermined nor an “automatic” manifesta-
tion of supposedly long-held divergences rooted in ethnocultural practices and identities: whether one
thinks they should have been treated as a “normal” diversity to be recognized for the sake of Ukraine’s
peace and pluralism, or as the burden of a “postcolonial” legacy of Russian domination to be over-
come for the sake of development. The divergences have been commonly associated with language,
church, political culture, or historical memory, and often subsumed under the infamous “East/ West”
divide, and exemplified by regional polarization on electoral maps. Neither the durability nor change
of these ethnocultural practices and identities can be explained endogenously, unless we accept that
some are inherently more “natural” for Ukrainians than others – that is, accept a primordialist premise
shared, from opposite ends, by Ukrainian ethnonationalists and supporters of the triune Russian peo-
ple concept. We need to look for an explanation on a different sociopolitical level altogether: one that
identifies the sociopolitical processes that activated and sustained certain cultural differences while
suppressing others, and that made fragmentation, rather than consolidation, the default trajectory of
the post-Soviet period.
Furthermore, this disintegrative dynamic cannot be grasped within a national frame alone. Both
typical culturalist narratives about Ukraine – of the “divided country” and of successful nation-build-
ing gradually overcoming the legacy of Russian domination – presuppose that post-Soviet sociopo-
litical dynamics were primarily an outcome of some peculiarity of Ukrainian or Russian history, and
could be understood in isolation from the dynamics of the wider world. But the underlying crisis that
has driven Ukraine to catastrophe has been global. To analyze it as though its origins lay primarily
in ethnocultural divergences or in the historical relations between Ukraine and Russia is to remain
trapped within the very bankrupt paradigms we need to overcome. What is needed instead is an inte-
gral explanation capable of placing the processes in Ukraine, in Russia, the relations between them,
and the world crisis into a single coherent theoretical framework – not because Ukraine and the broad-
er post-Soviet region merely reflected global trends, but because it was here that the crisis manifested
itself earlier and developed further, and in doing so, profoundly shaped the world.
The concept of the dual crisis of revolution and hegemony supplies the crucial pillars of such a
framework.
5
It grounds the analysis of post-Soviet disintegration in political fragmentation, disorgani-
zation, and disarticulation of the fundamental social groups – the classes – in the very process of Sovi-
et degeneration and collapse, and it connects these dynamics to the transformation of global capitalism
rather than treating them as a provincial anomaly. The concept that binds both dimensions of this dual
crisis, and that has gained ever wider currency in recent years, is political capitalism.
Political capitalism points to both a global political-economic convergence process slowly unfold-
ing since the 1970s and the shift from the virtuous circle of counterhegemonic revolution and hegem-
onic capitalism to the compounded crisis of both. On one side of this convergence stands the Western
5 This theoretical framework is outlined most systematically in Ishchenko & Zhuravlev (forthcoming).
Earlier published works containing some of the most important conceptual building blocks include Ishchenko
(2024a) and Ishchenko & Kalb (2026).
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trajectory: the erosion of “democratic capitalism,” that configuration lasting for roughly three decades
after the Second World War in which exceptionally high growth rates during the “Long Boom” had
sustained a positive-sum hegemonic politics and an unprecedented integration of the working class
into the bourgeois state (Riley & Brenner, 2025). Under conditions of secular stagnation and declining
returns on productive investment, that configuration has given way to one driven not by industrial
growth but by politically manipulated asset prices, where various fractions of capital, and workers
themselves, increasingly turn to the state to extract resources in a zero-sum competition that fragments
both the ruling and the working classes, hollows out liberal-democratic institutions, and fills the vac-
uum with technocracy, identitarian populism, and escalating authoritarian trends, while opportunist
elites continue to pump wealth from the bottom to the top.
On the other side stands the trajectory of the regimes born of twentieth-century social revolutions
and typically led by communist parties in the Global South (the paradigmatic case being China) – re-
gimes that have stopped being part of a global alternative to capitalism but succeeded in modernizing
their societies and in the process turned into managers of national capitalism (Milanović, 2019). Here
the power of a sovereign state, autonomous from the emerging capitalist class and run by technocrat-
ically effective bureaucracies, has offered a comparatively effective developmental model exploiting
the global opportunities opened by the political-capitalist shift in the West, though one undermined by
endemic corruption and the absence of the rule of law.
Both of these shifts – in the West and in the Global South – were fundamentally enabled by the de-
generation of the Soviet revolution, which dismantled the global counterhegemonic pole and removed
the social-revolutionary threat against which the bourgeoisie had been compelled to consolidate, ex-
pand its organization, and integrate the subaltern classes through its own hegemonic apparatus. The
counterhegemonic pole began to disintegrate globally starting from the Sino-Soviet split and the rup-
tures of 1968 – the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the rise of the New Left, the Eurocommunist drift – in
parallel with decomposing from within through the patrimonial fragmentation of the late Soviet elite
and the institutional and ideological ossification of the Communist Party itself. Post-Soviet disintegra-
tion thus was not an exotic deviation from the global norm but structurally continuous with a transfor-
mation that has been reshaping capitalism everywhere. Moreover, it was one of its crucial drivers, the
vanguard of a global fragmentation.
This is why post-Soviet political capitalism assumed an especially predatory form, developing di-
rectly out of the centrifugal disintegration of the Communist Party’s counterhegemonic apparatus –
the principal political structure that had integrated and modernized Soviet society – and leaving behind
no organized social force from below capable of checking the ruling predators. Consequently, the mas-
sive capital accumulated by the state was appropriated by political capitalists: the dominant fraction
of the emerging post-Soviet ruling class (including but not limited to the notorious “oligarchs”) whose
competitive advantage derived not from technological innovation or super-exploitation of the labor
force, but from selective state benefits, often acquired through “corruption,” exploiting loopholes in
legislation and patronage networks (Ishchenko, 2022b, 2024a). Post-Soviet political capitalists’ typi-
cal mode of operation was short-termist and opportunistic, extracting rents, shifting capital offshore,
and disinvesting domestically (Dzarasov, 2013) – a model that, when taken to its conclusion, leads to
sociopolitical disintegration. At best, it could offer the stability of stagnation, which is not something
to underestimate, and which has been valued by significant sections of the post-Soviet working class,
especially in heavy industry and the public sector, whose livelihoods were bound to paternalist ar-
rangements with their employers (Gorbach, 2024).
However, Ukrainian political capitalists have been consistently successful in undermining the es-
tablishment of stable coercive rule organized from above by authoritarian leaders who, in most other
post-Soviet countries, proved eventually capable of enforcing the long-term interests of the ruling
class through a combination of coercion, corruption, and patronage. Gramsci used the term Caesa-
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rism to describe an autonomous third force that stabilizes a society torn apart to the point of driving
the country toward catastrophe, shifting the balance in favor of one class or another (Gramsci, 1971,
pp. 219–222).
6
Yet none of the potential candidates for Ukraine’s “Caesar” – Kuchma, Yanukovych,
Poroshenko, or even Zelensky (at least so far) – succeeded in consolidating rule and strengthening the
sovereign state, even under the favorable circumstances of foreign threat and war. The reason for this
may lie in a paradox of the Soviet revolution in Ukraine – at once one of its modernization achieve-
ments and one of its failures. Soviet Ukraine built economic powerhouses in the southern and eastern
parts of the country – Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia – but did not strengthen the
political center in Kyiv (Kibita, 2024). This problem perpetuated itself through the years of post-So-
viet Ukraine, providing a source of power to the fractions of political capitalists who appropriated
the Soviet legacy against an insufficiently strong central power. Whether the war has resolved it by
transforming Ukraine’s political-economic geography in the most brutal of ways remains to be seen.
This dynamic formed the basis of Ukraine’s “regional” cleavage and its profound class and politi-
cal asymmetries. Ukraine’s “Western” and “Eastern” camps may have appeared roughly equal on the
electoral maps of the 2000s, but they were crucially asymmetrical in terms of which class interests
they represented, how those interests were organized politically, and the degree to which they could
be hegemonically universalized – presented not as particular interests but as the common interests of
broader social groups. Systematic local disinvestment by political capitalists in Ukraine prevented
them from relying on a substantial loyal middle class integrated through selective redistribution (Ros-
enfeld, 2021). This is why the “Eastern” civil society, which could legitimize the rule of and univer-
salize the interests of Ukrainian political capitalists, was profoundly weaker (Ishchenko, 2023b). This
was, in practice, either organizations existing more on paper than as civic associations, or television
pundits and influencers tied to oligarchs by money rather than any ideology. It was this mercenary re-
lationship that shaped their pragmatic calculations when the full-scale war erupted: their choices were
driven less by any sense of “identity” than by risk avoidance or even by the pursuit of new opportuni-
ties by switching to the opposite political camp and becoming “more Catholic than the pope” in per-
formative national-patriotic “conversion” (Zubchenko, 2022). And instead of a “militant” wing, this
camp had the Communist Party of Ukraine, with its aging membership and opportunistic leadership,
which proved unable to defend even itself against post-Euromaidan repression (Ishchenko, 2023c).
The “Eastern” camp in Ukrainian politics, often misleadingly labeled “pro-Russian,” exploited the
legacy of Soviet Ukraine materially and symbolically, but could not build on it or on an alternative
tradition any forward-looking project for post-Soviet Ukraine. The aspiration that could be properly
called “pro-Russian” – that is, closer political, economic, and ideological integration with Russia – ap-
pealed to the past or to the promise of stability under a more effective authoritarian state rather than to
future prospects of development. The ideas of “multi-vector” neutrality or a “bridge” between Russia
and the EU lacked positive modernizing content. Whatever national or nationalist agenda this camp
articulated never amounted to more than legitimating the opportunism of the political capitalists and
their claims against either Russian encroachment or the demands of transnational capital. If Ukraine
moved neither toward the “West” nor toward Russia, then where? And Ukraine did not have the priv-
ilege of simply staying where it was, because this effectively meant accepting the prolongation of the
downward spiral of the crisis.
This is why the main ideological frame capable of mobilizing voters for the “Eastern” camp, be-
yond patronage networks, was the threat of “fascism” – reactive, invoking an existential evil from
the past and the specter of chaos and violence threatening fragile stability. However, there was hardly
any frame offering a positive vision of Ukraine’s development. The “fascist” label was not without
6 For the elaboration on the use of the Caesarism concept for post-Soviet context, see Artiukh (2020);
Ishchenko & Kalb (2026, pp. 149–150); Ishchenko & Zhuravlev (forthcoming).
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referent, even if generalizing it: since the 1990s the far-right nationalists had formed a small but most
militant wing of the “Western” camp, while ethnonationalism had been gradually developing among
the national intelligentsia since the late Soviet period. Yet the “fascism” framing also worked as a
self-fulfilling prophecy in a dynamic of escalating polarization. The far right and ethnonationalism
were eventually strengthened, seizing the opportunities offered by the hegemonic deficiency of the
ruling class, mass protests, failed Caesarist attempts, and the growing Russian threat – moving into
Ukrainian civil society and the political mainstream, shaping policies and dominant discourse on
national identity, peace, and war, and building electoral, organizational violence, and military capac-
ities (Colborne, 2022; Ishchenko, 2014, 2018; Katchanovski, 2026; Mierzejewski-Voznyak, 2018;
Umland, 2020).
Unlike in Russia or Belarus, the formation of a significant “Western” camp was not prevented
or repressed, and it enjoyed far greater political opportunities in Ukraine. The “Western” camp was
not an alternative “oligarchic clan” or a “financial-industrial group,” even if it occasionally gained
opportunistic allies among political capitalists. The “East/West” divide expressed politically the con-
flict between the interests of transnational capital, which sought to dismantle selective protectionism,
and the collective class interest of local political capitalists in a sovereign state on which their major
competitive advantage depended. Western integration promised a future of development, an appeal
that drew on the still-potent if eroding attraction of “democratic capitalism.” That promise grew more
exclusive as the years passed, addressed most to those who believed themselves “deserving” of higher
rewards and status by virtue of their scarce skills and education. Much of the Soviet intelligentsia
and the post-Soviet professional middle class, excluded first by the Communist nomenklatura and
later from the circuits of political capitalism, came to see their advancement in incorporation into the
US-centered order, in particular, through its transnational institutions, including NATO, which until
2014 its supporters presented less as protection against any threat from Russia than as a step toward
joining “civilization” (Boucoyannis, 2025; Zhyrun, 2026). The most organized segment of Ukrainian
post-Soviet civil society emerged as an extension of or became integrated with the transnational bour-
geois hegemonic apparatus – NGOs funded by Western donors, think tanks, media outlets, and select
universities – and had little connection to the mostly small and scattered grassroots initiatives that
addressed the socioeconomic problems of subaltern classes (Ishchenko, 2017, pp. 216–218). After all,
the pro-Western middle class has typically despised the plebeian masses below – paternalistic work-
ers, public sector employees, pensioners – whose attachment to Soviet guarantees, to “oligarchic”
patrons, and to Caesarist strongmen marked them as a ballast on the path toward “civilization.” This is
how class, “civil society,” and nationalism were intermingled in post-Soviet politics. Nationalism was
also an ideological tool for distancing Ukraine from “backward” Russia and the “Soviet legacy.” This
is why seemingly cosmetic measures – such as renaming streets, dismantling Soviet monuments, glo-
rification of Nazi-collaborationist nationalists, removing the Russian language from the public sphere
and public space, and so on – could be seen not simply as the assertion of a specific national identity
but as important signs of social progress. They also functioned as a vehicle for affirming class dis-
tinction against a large part of the country stereotyped as poorer, “losers,” uncivic, “Sovietized” and
“Russified” residents of the more industrialized “East.”
This is the political-economic dynamic that lay behind secular fragmentation in the post-Soviet
period: the working-out of a class conflict emerging in the very process of Soviet collapse and post-So-
viet disintegration as part of the global turn to political capitalism. The conflict was between local
political capitalists, whose competitive advantage depended on a sovereign state shielding selective
protectionism, and a professional middle class allied with transnational capital, whose advancement
depended on comprador integration. The “Western” and “Eastern” camps – in Ukraine and elsewhere
across the post-Soviet space – were the political representation of this class conflict, which was at the
same time an intra-class conflict setting against each other factions of the ruling and working classes
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in a continuous political fragmentation. Neither camp could consolidate a majority behind a positive
program of development. The “Western” promised a modernization whose costs would fall dispro-
portionately on the poorer majority, and rested its appeal on integration into a “civilization” that was
itself sliding into deeper crisis. The “Eastern” could offer only stabilization amidst the crisis without
any clear vision of development; in response to the disintegrative dynamics, it could not present an
alternative center of integration. Ethnicized polarization – mobilization against the “fascist” threat to
the fragile stability, on the one side, or, on the other side, against the threat to a peculiar ethnonational
identity but also a shaky promise of the future as a “normal country” in the “civilized” international or-
der – was stepping into the void of insufficient hegemonic capacity to win stable majoritarian support
by an affirmative program. As a result of the class asymmetry, the “Western” camp was, nevertheless,
better positioned to organize and mobilize than its rival, and more able to present its particular interests
as universal; these advantages let it push its agenda further than its electoral support warranted. The
maidans brought together diverse groups in massive but short-lived mobilizations, and empowered
the “Western” camp. But they repeatedly failed to consolidate the nation. The “Western” camp staked
its own and the whole nation’s bet on the integration into the US-centered order, which increasingly
diverged from the ideological imaginary of hegemonic “democratic capitalism” at its peak. In the
process, it helped erode and destabilize the economic, institutional, and social foundations inherited
from Soviet Ukraine, without the internal capacity or external backing to replace them with anything
stronger or more legitimate, and so contributed to the further escalation of the dual crisis.
Maidans and the Crisis of Revolution
In 2016, the prominent Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak ruefully admitted:
The irony is that Ukraine is perhaps the last country in Europe where Europe, European unity, and
European values are taken very seriously – so seriously that people are ready to sacrifice a great
deal, even their lives. This was what the Euromaidan showed. And against this background, of
course, there is great disappointment (Kostiuk, 2016).
But the disappointment of the Ukrainian national-liberal intelligentsia masked a far greater tragedy.
Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that in 1985, or even slightly later, somewhere in the Global
South, a pro-Soviet revolution breaks out. The new government swears allegiance to the socialist path
(with national specifics) and begs for help against American imperialism and its local proxies. Rapa-
cious neighbors are preparing to crush the communist threat and seize poorly defended territories. The
popular masses, having overthrown a corrupt dictator, look with hope to the most progressive country
in the world, the defender of all oppressed peoples. But at that very moment in Moscow, the first pe-
restroika rallies are gathering. The movements for independence are forming in the national republics.
On distant peripheries, ethnic pogroms are brewing. The entire “progressive” Soviet public watches
with profound bewilderment as revolutionaries in some distant “Third World” country actually believe
in Marxism-Leninism – unlike the party ideologues – suspects that it is all lies from Pravda, and feels
no burning desire to fulfill their “internationalist duty.” Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership, losing con-
trol of the country, is in no position to get entangled in a new war.
Incidentally, something like this, only slightly earlier, actually happened in Afghanistan. Then the
Soviet Union withdrew, and the war in Afghanistan continued for over thirty years until 2021, when
the Taliban rapidly seized control of the country in one of the spectacular manifestations of the crisis
of the US-centered order.
If this sounded familiar, even if contentious, in the immediate post-Euromaidan years in Ukraine, it
has become far more apparent since 2025, when Trump escalated the crisis, and the EU – increasingly
fragmented, retreating from its own proclaimed values and commitments – struggles to mount any
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collective sovereignty. The student waving an EU flag on Kyiv Maidan square now looks like a Black
child waving a Kalashnikov under the banner of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in the late 1980s.
There is, however, an important difference between social and maidan revolutions. The Soviet
revolution – and the social revolutions it inspired and supported worldwide – aimed at overcoming
capitalism, and in posing a real threat to it, compelled capitalism’s own transformation – its hegemonic
development and democratization. The post-Soviet maidans shared with social revolutions the ab-
stract revolutionary form – the sovereign will of “the people” asserted against the government through
mass protest mobilization (Sewell, 1996) – but neither the depth of the social-revolutionary challenge
to the ruling class nor the capacity to articulate and establish a radically different and superior social
order. This deficiency followed from a counterhegemonic weakness: the political fragmentation of the
subaltern classes, their disorganization, disunity, and disarticulation – itself the immediate outcome of
the Soviet revolution’s degeneration, especially pronounced in post-Soviet societies but exacerbated
worldwide as the dual crisis unfolded. Nor were the maidans unique in this respect. They belong to
the category of loosely organized popular responses that react to the diminishing legitimacy of elites
and the authoritarian trends of the global turn toward political capitalism, while paradoxically con-
tributing to their reproduction and intensification (Ishchenko & Zhuravlev, 2021). Similar “deficient
revolutions” proliferated through the post-Cold War decades and erupted far beyond the post-Soviet
space – the Arab Spring of 2011 among the most prominent waves, the recent Gen-Z revolution in
Nepal and the repressed protests in Iran that preceded the US–Israeli aggression among the latest. In
their counterhegemonic weakness, they share fundamental features with the broader manifestations
of contemporary “hyper-politics” – populism, identitarianism, affective polarization – all marked by
heightened politicization without organization (Jäger, 2026).
However, deficient revolutions did not simply “change nothing,” even if they produced no so-
cial-revolutionary outcomes, i.e., radical or rapid transformations of fundamental class and state
structures. The combination of revolutionary form with counterhegemonic weakness had significant
political consequences, in particular, contributing to further sociopolitical destabilization.
7
According
to Beissinger’s (2022) systematic analysis of all revolutionary episodes since 1900, contemporary “ur-
ban civic revolutions” tend to increase expressive political liberties substantially but also, in contrast
to social revolutions, tend to weaken state capacity, fail to curb rising crime rates or reduce corruption,
exacerbate social inequality and ethnic tensions, and ultimately undermine the stability and legitimacy
of post-revolutionary regimes (pp. 359–416). Deficient revolutions may succeed in breaking regimes
but fail to construct stronger alternatives in their place, leaving behind even more fragmented socio-
political orders.
From a global perspective, the post-Soviet maidans proved to be failed attempts at integration into
the US-centered order contributing to its downward crisis trajectory. Directed against the legacy of the
Soviet revolution, they were destroying the old without the capacity to build anything solid in its place.
They did not challenge the globally dominant social order nor offer a fundamentally different alter-
native. As a result, they launched neither a social-revolutionary nor a passive-revolutionary dynamic,
but a further disintegrative one. Maidans and other contemporary deficient revolutions have been a
manifestation and, at the same time, a mechanism of development and escalation of the interconnected
and mutually amplifying crises of revolution and hegemony.
The deepening of the sociopolitical destabilization has been the outcome of contemporary deficient
revolutions, produced precisely by the combination of the revolutionary form with the counterhegem-
onic weakness – working-class disunity, disorganization, and disarticulation – which the deficient
revolutions do not overcome but exacerbate. This, in turn, contributes to a deepening crisis of hegem-
ony – the further political fragmentation of the ruling class – and an intensification of disintegrative
7 This concept of deficient revolutions is further developed in Ishchenko (2025).
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effects. The Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan of 2014 illustrate the dynamic concretely.
Maidans defied the Caesarist attempts of Viktor Yanukovych (and also of Russia) and asserted the will
of “the people” against the government through massive protest mobilization. Typical of contempo-
rary deficient revolutions, that mobilization remained only loosely organized, in amorphous coali-
tions, with vague demands and without coherent leadership (Bayat, 2017; Beissinger, 2022). Like all
revolutions, they polarized society and politics, but also empowered certain social groups and political
agents. However, unlike social revolutions, maidans produced polarization across rather than along
the lines of the fundamental social classes, setting groups and fractions of the working and bourgeois
classes against each other along the ever more ethnicizing “East/West” divide and contributing to their
further political fragmentation. Maidans redefined the boundaries of the Ukrainian nation, excluding
non-supporters as “insufficiently Ukrainian,” uncivic, backward, plebeian, and Soviet, which happen
to be more “Eastern” in both geographic and political senses (Baysha, 2018; Zhuravlev & Ishchenko,
2020). The responses were the Anti-Maidan mobilizations and the local support for the annexation
of Crimea and the secession of the Donbas, for each of which the local Ukrainian constituency was
essential even if Russia played a (variably) important role in their instigation, escalation, and com-
pletion (Arel & Driscoll, 2023; Katchanovski, 2026; Kudelia, 2025). The securitizing response by
the “Western” camp, for its part, expelled those social groups, actors, their grievances, and interests
from the boundaries of legitimate Ukrainian politics, reducing the entire issue to a Russian “hybrid
war” against Ukraine and misrecognizing the local sources of counterrevolution. At the same time, the
revolutionary amplification against the background of class disorganization was limited to the more
privileged social groups and better-organized political agents – primarily the professional pro-Western
NGOs and the radical nationalists – and to opportunistic “oligarchs” switching camps. The result was
the empowerment of the agendas and interests that diverged from those of the Ukrainian majority and
of most maidan participants themselves. The political empowerment of the “Western” camp, in turn,
exacerbated the ethnicized polarization, as the camp sought to marginalize the constituencies and
political agents that could obstruct its agenda of turning Ukraine into “the country of their dreams”
through integration into the US-centered order and ethnonationalist transformation. The Minsk agree-
ments, which would have reintegrated the seceded Donbas, were resisted precisely for that reason
(Ishchenko, 2023b; Korotaev, 2023; Petro, 2023). Their implementation would indeed likely have
blocked the “Western” agenda, but it might also have reestablished the social basis for Caesarist sta-
bilization, politically strengthening the “Eastern” camp and opening possibilities for its readmission
into the governing coalition.
The outcome was intensified post-Soviet class conflict and political fragmentation within the ruling
class. The “Western” camp was strong enough to prevent any Caesarist consolidation of the political
capitalists, but not enough to lead the ruling class, let alone the nation as a whole, around its own
agenda. Its main promise of Ukraine’s integration into the US-centered order was being undercut by
the deepening crisis of that order itself and the narrowing possibilities for a properly hegemonic incor-
poration of Ukraine rather than mere defensive alignment against Russia. The “Western” camp could
rally around Viktor Yushchenko in 2004, Petro Poroshenko in 2014 and 2019, and Volodymyr Zelen-
sky in 2022 whenever it feared a reversal of Ukraine’s Western trajectory – but each rally dissolved
almost as quickly as it had formed. The underlying ruling-class fragmentation kept reasserting itself;
the state kept losing legitimacy; no strong regime could entrench itself. The 73 percent vote in 2019
for a complete political outsider – one who fused the maidan-style rejection of “old elites” with wide-
spread grievances against post-Euromaidan outcomes – showed how far the destabilization had gone.
Within just two years, on the eve of full-scale war, Zelensky was already seen as no different from the
“oligarchs” he had promised to displace, while he picked fights with all the major political-capitalist
fractions – not only the “pro-Russian” ones of Viktor Medvedchuk but also those of Poroshenko and
the richest person in the country, Rinat Akhmetov. The same pattern recurred in the disintegration of
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the initial wartime rally around Zelensky amid growing war toll, shrinking victory expectations, and
mounting corruption scandals.
What the dynamics of the deficient revolutions had ultimately set in motion was pushing Ukraine
onto a course at odds with the long-term collective interests of post-Soviet political capitalists, yet
incapable of consolidating the state and the nation around a different fraction of the ruling class. As
a result, for the Kremlin, the maidan destabilizing trajectory was both a mounting threat and an op-
portunity to exploit. On the one hand, the strengthening of the “Western” camp and the positions of
transnational capital – even where these would not produce formal EU and NATO integration in the
foreseeable future – undermined the prospects for a sovereign center of capital accumulation in the
post-Soviet region, of which the heavy industries inherited from Soviet Ukraine would have been an
essential part. Insofar as there was neither offer nor possibility of hegemonic incorporation of post-So-
viet political capitalists into the US-centered order en bloc – not just selectively and individually – that
would have allowed them to pursue their collective interests within its framework, they had to be or-
ganized from outside and above, by Caesarist regimes – foremost Putin’s. This was, in particular, the
underlying issue behind Russia’s exclusion from NATO expansion. Unlike in the case of Ukraine or
Georgia, for Russia’s inclusion either NATO or Russia would have had to be profoundly transformed:
either NATO would lose its US-centered character, or Russia would undergo regime change and the
installation of a more subservient elite to open the commanding heights of its economy and control its
vast nuclear arsenal. The deficient revolutions across the post-Soviet states have ultimately threatened
the post-Soviet political capitalists with disorganization and piecemeal political and economic margin-
alization, as has been gradually happening in post-Euromaidan Ukraine.
On the other hand, the maidans, which prevented the consolidation of local Caesarist regimes
without building a stronger sovereign state in their place and reinforced destabilizing processes, also
provided an opportunity for the Kremlin. Notably, the initial “special military operation” plan bet
precisely on the Ukrainian political fragmentation and on the quick disintegration of centralized re-
sistance (Watling et al., 2023; Zabrodskyi et al., 2022). The plan exaggerated but did not invent out of
the blue the destabilizing trends that made Ukraine vulnerable. Even though the original plan failed
quickly, triggering among Ukrainians a post-invasion rally and expectations of victory over Russia,
these proved temporary and limited, and the deeper processes underlying sociopolitical disintegration
in Ukraine and globally eventually reasserted themselves. In this perspective, the Russian invasion can
be read as an attempted Caesarist solution imposed from abroad – the domestic Ukrainian ruling class
having failed to produce one of its own – serving the long-term collective interests of the post-Soviet
political capitalists amid the crumbling of the US-centered order, with Ukraine chosen as a supposedly
easy battlefield.
The War and the States
The trajectory toward the war cannot be reduced to or even meaningfully explained as an outcome
of individuals’ miscalculations, delusions, or opportunism, however powerful those individuals were.
Nor was the trajectory in any sense predetermined by the fissures of primordial identities, the legacy
of “historical imperialism,” or geopolitical conflicts. Emphasizing contingency and individual agency
typically leads to abandoning any coherent explanation for macro-processes such as wars. Emphasiz-
ing determination tends to reproduce teleological narratives that selectively look for (and can always
find!) retrospective corroborations in the past. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, this has led
to reproducing ethnonationalist and liberal teleologies, or, from the opposite camp, an international
“realism” that essentializes the interests of the complex class societies. All of these explanations fail
to account for why and when the structural conflicts escalated toward war, and why they were not
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prevented.
8
The dual crisis framework, instead, approaches the war focusing on dynamic political pro-
cesses produced by collective actions and their failure to coalesce around the interests of fundamental
social classes. These processes set the limits within which individual agency operates and condition
which structural or “historical” conflicts are activated, and when. NATO expansion, Russian “imperi-
alism,” and ethnonationalism can only be explained through the political organization and disorgani-
zation of class interests as they emerged from the Soviet collapse, both regionally and globally. This is
the most fundamental dynamic that led to the war, and it has also defined the war’s looming outcome
– for which the key issue was the capacity to mobilize and allocate human, economic, and military
resources efficiently for the common effort, while undermining that same capacity in the adversary.
The outcome of the war has never been predetermined by the simple imbalance of resources be-
tween Ukraine and Russia, or between Russia and NATO. The “resources” are never simply “just
there,” as if automatically available because they show up in statistics. People, money, weapons must
be organized, collected, extracted, bought – mobilized in a broad sense of the word – and then ef-
fectively allocated toward a common goal. These are sociopolitical processes, which run profoundly
differently and with different outcomes depending on the character of the state, its capacity, and its
relationship to the fundamental social classes. In fact, history offers many examples of smaller na-
tions prevailing over far stronger adversaries in protracted, attritional wars, often with little or none
of the kind of vast support from powerful allies that Ukraine has enjoyed. Revolutionary France after
1789 and revolutionary Russia after 1917 each repelled the counter-revolutionary interventions of
great-power coalitions and later went on to dominate large parts of Europe for decades. Vietnam from
the 1950s to the 1970s, Afghanistan from 1979 to 2021 prevailed likewise, and, most recently, Iran
has shown it can stand against the strongest global and the strongest regional power at once, even after
a decapitating strike. Time and again, social revolutions and national-liberation struggles prevailed
against the odds by forging stronger, more mobilized states in the process of overcoming the existen-
tial threats from domestic and foreign counterrevolutions (Beissinger, 2022; Levitsky & Way, 2022).
Furthermore, besides forging mobilizationist states at home, social revolutions could inspire massive
international movements of solidarity that helped undermine counterrevolutions from abroad, at times
even threatening revolutionary situations in the intervening states.
In Ukraine, however, the dynamic has been reversed. Maidan revolutions and nationalism were
decisive factors in this war too, but they worked against the country’s mobilizational capacity, not for
it. The modern and highly mobilizationist state had already been built on Ukrainian soil by the Soviet
revolution and the cataclysmic wars of the early twentieth century. The national project that might
have built upon this legacy evaporated with the Soviet collapse, and the anti-Soviet nationalism that
rushed into the vacuum was directed against the very foundations of that revolutionary modernization.
The maidans, as deficient revolutions, could not put any stronger or more durable regime in place of
the one they overthrew. Their ethnicized polarization fed disintegration, not consolidation – and not
only within Ukraine. Identitarian, and simultaneously pro-Western, comprador, ethnonationalism only
harmed the universalization of the Ukrainian cause that might have generated revolutionary solidarity
inside Russia or across the Global South (Ishchenko, 2022a) – the very countries that have become
crucial to sustaining the Russian economy since 2022. Instead, the “Western” camp that the maidans
empowered bet Ukraine’s fate on the US-centered order and could not lead any progressive moderni-
zation, since that order was itself sliding into deepening crisis.
The mass refusal to comply with state coercion – the millions of draft-dodgers, the hundreds of
thousands absent without leave or deserted, the growing resistance to mobilization, nonviolent and
increasingly violent – was therefore not merely an aggregate of individual survival strategies but the
8 See Bakalov (2024) for a systematic discussion of the critical gaps in the main explanatory narratives
of the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war.
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sharpest manifestation of the crisis of the Ukrainian state itself: a state that commanded little trust
before the war and that has, despite the short-lived euphoria of 2022, eroded what remained of its
citizens’ trust during it. The brutal coercion of “busification” is the direct consequence, and it feeds
back into a vicious circle of declining legitimacy of the state and elites, and deepening sociopolitical
disintegration (Artiukh & Fedirko, 2025; Korotaev & Ishchenko, 2025). This is why nationalism has
been turning ever more radicalized, ethnicized and divisive – an outcome that was neither inevitable
nor in any way “natural” in the wartime country, given how it has been alienating many Ukrainians
and eroding what international solidarity remained. However, it was also not “irrational.” When the
majority will not fight, the shrinking committed minority has to be mobilized all the harder, and the
stakes pushed ever higher, so that the sacrifices already made will not be seen in vain. They must be
constantly reassured that they are fighting not just for another corrupt government. When substantial
progress toward integration into the transnational structures of the US-centered order, primarily EU
and NATO, is far harder to achieve – often impossible, and cutting against the powerful vested inter-
ests both in the West and among domestic political capitalists – the radicalization of ethnonationalist
“de-Russification,” “decommunization,” and “decolonization” becomes the easiest way to deliver the
“Ukraine of their dreams,” even if it has never been a dream of the majority of Ukrainians.
Post-Soviet Ukraine was neither a “divided nation” in the culturalist sense, nor a case of progressive
nation-building. It was caught in a continuous and unresolved crisis of nationhood. Nationalism here
was not a part of modernization. On the contrary, it aimed against its legacy, while trying to carve a
niche among the privileged classes of a “civilization” it hoped to join. However, if that “civilization”
was itself plunging into crisis, then what announced itself as Ukrainian nation-building proved to be,
in retrospect, its opposite: Ukraine’s disintegration and demodernization.
Compare the mobilization crisis in Ukraine – the country supposedly waging an “existential” war
– with the steady supply of volunteers to the Russian army.
9
What matters is not that this supply rests
primarily on high and rising material compensation, but that the Kremlin has been able to keep raising
and paying it for over three years running, under heavy sanctions and without anything approaching
the foreign aid Ukraine has received. Every explanation resting on the imbalance of resources between
the two states must therefore confront a simple question: why did the Western countries, incomparably
richer than Russia, not simply offer Ukraine more financial support, enough to raise soldiers’ pay to
a level that would draw volunteers from the Ukrainian working class on something like the Russian
scale, sparing the country the need for ever more coercive mobilization, and to hire more foreign mer-
cenaries besides? Part of the reason is the political fragmentation in the West: even aid at its current
level – indispensable for Ukraine, yet relatively low as a share of EU and US GDP (Bomprezzi et al.,
2025) – has quickly opened widening divisions among Western elites and populations. But the more
disturbing part of the answer is that more money would not have bought many more Ukrainian soldiers
– as the failure of the lucrative 2025 youth contracts to draw any substantial number of volunteers even
from the healthiest 18–24 cohort made plain (Nieczypor, 2026). Raising the sums the state promises
would not have the expected effect when its institutions are weak and its citizens fundamentally dis-
trust it. And here the war exposed the decisive difference between Ukraine and Russia – a difference
formed by the divergent dynamics of the dual crisis.
Consider how the West has so far failed not only to strengthen Ukraine sufficiently but also to un-
dermine Russia. Western military support for Ukraine was ultimately bounded by the threshold of a
direct NATO–Russia conflict, with its likely escalation into nuclear war (Allison, 2025). The plausible
Ukrainian and NATO strategy for victory therefore lay elsewhere: inciting splits within the Russian
elite and society through escalating sanctions, mounting battlefield casualties, intensifying strikes on
oil refineries and logistical infrastructure meant to disrupt everyday life and state revenues, and the
9 Russia has recruited roughly 1000 new soldiers per day on average since 2024 (Kluge, 2026).
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“canceling” of Russians and Russian culture on international platforms. The costs of the allegedly
“irrational” war were supposed to outweigh the tolerance of both the Russian elite and the broader
population – neither prepared to suffer for war aims they had never really embraced – and so to under-
mine Russia from within , on the further assumption, which may prove mistaken, that Ukraine could
sustain its own mobilization long enough for that pressure to tell. Naturally, Russian oligarchs would
abandon or even conspire against Putin to recover their assets and their trade with the West. Certainly,
the Russian middle class would choose the freedoms of global consumption and professional mobility
over isolation and humiliation. Of course, Russian workers would revolt against the rising cost of
living and the new waves of forced mobilization that would follow once the flow of volunteers dried
up. What point was there in enduring further inconveniences for Putin’s “historical fantasies”? And
undoubtedly, the supremacy of Western “civilized” democracy would stand revealed against Russian
“barbaric” despotism.
While the power of attraction that “democratic capitalism” could still exert by inertia once helped
subvert the decaying Soviet Union, and later destabilize weaker post-Soviet regimes by enticing
opportunistic elites and a comprador middle class, it has consistently failed against Russia in the
twenty-first century. The grievances against the war among certain sections of the Russian elites and
workers are real, and may yet produce protests, elite conspiracies, or armed mutinies like the Wagner
private military company’s failed revolt of 2023. But they need not bring the regime down. The risk
of catastrophic destabilization, amid the waning hegemonic appeal of the US-centered order, is real as
well. So far, however, Putin’s Caesarist authoritarianism – unlike the chaotic aftermath of the maidans
– has strengthened the sovereign state, serving the long-term collective interests of the Russian ruling
class and also creating a substantial loyal middle-class segment based in the public sector (Rosenfeld,
2021). This contrast between a conservative and a deficient-revolutionary response to the dual crisis is
essential for understanding why the war has strengthened the Russian state while eroding the Ukraini-
an one, and why wartime mobilization has run along such divergent paths in the two countries.
Just as Ukrainian consolidation has been misunderstood and exaggerated – serving, rather, as a
discourse that masked largely the opposite disintegrative dynamic – so Russian consolidation during
the war has been misread and underestimated. It has been seen either as support for an imperial ide-
ology inherent in Russian culture and history, or as the indifferent, depoliticized conformism of the
majority, compounded by repression and the emigration of an oppositional minority (incomparably
smaller than the dissenting groups Ukraine has lost to annexation, occupation, emigration, or domes-
tic repression and alienation since 2014). Both readings presume a predetermined reproduction – of
ideology, or of passive conformism – and miss the sociopolitical dynamic bound to the trajectory of
the Russian state sector and the war economy (Ishchenko et al., 2023). The precise character of this
consolidating dynamic remains a matter of preliminary exploration and debate. Some describe it as
the development of an anti-Western national identity (Matveeva, 2025), others as merely “soft pat-
riotism” – not even properly nationalism – reduced to strengthening loyalty to the country or even a
specific region (Zhuravlev et al., 2025). Yet among specific social groups something more may be at
work, rooted in their socioeconomic collective interests. Segments of the working class that benefit
from military Keynesianism may be undergoing something like a Fordist incorporation, though with-
out its organizational component – trade unions and parties (Morris, 2026). In our data, some Russian
respondents (who tend to be state-connected middle class) articulated a discourse of a progressively
developing, modernizing, and just sociopolitical order that the Russian state organizes, one in which
they believe it is possible to rise legitimately into the elite, and that extends even to substantive support
for some essential elements of the authoritarian technocratic rule (Ishchenko, 2026).
10
If in Ukraine the
10 Based on the analysis of the in-depth interviews collected in 2024-25 within the “Wars after
Revolution: Maidan and the Post-Soviet Crisis of Hegemony” project led by Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg
Zhuravlev, and supported by Alameda Institute, https://alameda.institute/war-after-revolution/. Matveev &
Volodymyr Ishchenko37
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main hope for modernizing development rested on the integration into the US-centered international
order and the civic activism of a minority, in Russia the source of development is the state itself. At
the same time, even those Russians who expect nothing from their state typically take the order it
upholds for granted, whatever they think of the regime or the war. Ukrainians, however, tend to judge
their state against inflated and unfulfilled expectations of what it owes them, and most do not consid-
er themselves obliged to give their lives for it. Putin’s Caesarism organizes passive consent through
coercion and patronage – and, especially since 2022, through money. The Russian state can keep
buying its soldiers by contract as long as it can pay. In Ukraine, by contrast, deficient revolutions have
produced active alienation. The Ukrainian state needs its citizens to trust it, and no amount of money
can buy that back. It is left to take its soldiers by capture, further exacerbating the vicious circle of
state delegitimation and sociopolitical destabilization. The full-scale war sharply posed the need for a
sustained, national-scale effort to mobilize people and resources from society over a long period, and
it demonstrated how consequential this fundamental difference in the post-Soviet countries’ responses
to the dual crisis is.
Whether any of these dynamics will mature into a genuine hegemonic development in Russia –
and even open the potential for a counterhegemonic one, as hypothesized earlier (Ishchenko, 2024b,
pp. 63, 74) – remains to be seen.
11
It may ultimately turn on whether post-Soviet political capitalism
comes to follow the Chinese model in some substantial respects (Milanović, 2019), which would
become possible if China consolidated itself into an alternative hegemonic pole for the global ruling
classes, above all in the Global South. But even without such a hegemonic development, Russian Cae-
sarism is at least sliding into crisis more slowly than Ukraine, and perhaps more slowly than the West.
In a war of attrition, that may be enough to win. Meanwhile, the prolonged costs of aiding Ukraine,
together with the blowback from sanctions, have only deepened the political fragmentation of the
Western ruling class, sharpening divisions within and between Western nations. Failing in its capac-
ity for global leadership, that ruling class resorts to ever more coercive action, betting on its current
military supremacy – and so finishing off the US-centered international order rather than restoring US
global dominance.
Futures (If Any)
Post-Soviet Ukraine’s future has typically been described through comparisons with foreign nations, a
manifestation, in itself, of the loss of one’s own developmental agenda. The Soviet Union, Ukraine in-
cluded, once aimed to “catch up with and overtake America,” while striving to build a superior social
order. Having lost that intrinsic and self-determined source of futurity, Ukraine was compelled to seek
its vision in the image of others. Simultaneously, the crisis of all hegemonic projects reveals itself in
the erosion of political language: words like “democracy,” “rule of law,” and “sovereignty” have lost
any illusory self-evidence. We are left only with the primitive recourse of pointing to foreign exam-
ples, hoping they will be immediately understood and accepted as positive, without problematizing by
whom. As time passed, these adopted models formed a deflated, regressive trajectory that became ever
less ambitious and ever less inclusive for Ukrainians across different locations, cultures, and classes.
For example, on the eve of independence in 1991, it was common to compare Ukraine’s future to
that of the richest and most advanced Western European nations: France, the UK, Germany, and Italy.
Through a flawed statistical trick (by separating Soviet Ukraine from the whole of which it was an
integral part) it could be presented as possessing one of Europe’s largest industrial economies and
Zhuravlev (2026) offer a partially divergent interpretation of some of these interviews.
11 Two such developments are already emerging: the concentration of capital and “chaebolization” of
the Russian political capitalists (Petrov, 2023) and, at the same time, a marked increase in the structural power
of Russian workers tied to the war economy (Morris, 2026).
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most powerful military forces. It remains questionable whether, by the late 1980s, the opportunity to
advance upon that legacy had not already been lost. What is certain, however, is that breaking away
from the Soviet project – not merely through formal independence, but through all the processes aimed
at the intentional destruction of modern Ukraine’s politico-economic and social foundations – meant
abandoning any future among the developed nations.
By the 1990s, these ambitions were already considerably tempered. The new lodestars were the
Visegrád Group, with the Ukrainian maidans envisioned as our belated 1989 giving a chance to catch
up with a successful transition to the EU and NATO. The actual result, however, was not following
the path of Poland, but rather fueling the Polish economy with millions of cheap Ukrainian laborers.
Even more ironically, since the 2000s, our Western neighbors, these supposed showcases of transition,
have been converging, first gradually and then rapidly, in crucial aspects of their political regimes
with our archenemy: Putinist Russia (Ishchenko & Kalb, 2026; Szelényi, 2015). Orbán, Fico, Babiš,
Kaczyński – these leaders and their parties may suffer electoral defeats, but their “illiberal” politics
meets a powerful social demand growing even more as the crisis of the US-centered order and the EU,
in particular, escalates, and so they will return to power, and with an even more explicit anti-Ukrainian
agenda as in Poland.
With the onset of full-scale war, Ukraine’s plausible futures were downgraded even further. A wide-
ly circulated analysis published in May 2025 by JPMorgan Chase’s Center for Geopolitics epito-
mized this shift, outlining four scenarios: “South Korea,” “Belarus,” “Israel,” and “Georgia,” none
of which, notably, presumed NATO membership anymore.
12
While the “Belarus” scenario (Russia
turning Ukraine into a vassal state) and the “South Korea” model (European troops protecting Ukraine
under U.S. guarantees) were deemed the least likely, the “Israel” and, especially, the “Georgia” were
considered more probable outcomes.
The “Israel” model has been invoked throughout the full-scale war by Ukraine’s most prominent
figures, including President Zelensky and Generals Zaluzhny and Budanov, as a desirable outcome
in the absence of full integration into EU and NATO structures. In fact, this idea predates the war;
many in Ukraine’s pro-Western political camp have long admired Israel as a strong, militaristic, and
ethnonationalist state on the frontier of “Western civilization,” one that ruthlessly defends its interests
against hostile neighbors as well as the “dangerous,” too “Eastern,” population on its own territory. An
“Eastern European Israel” is, in effect, a description of the function Ukraine is expected to play for the
European Union: an outsourced defense against Russia. One can recall the term foederati, which in the
late Roman empire designated “barbarian” tribes allowed to settle within imperial borders precisely to
protect the empire from other “barbarians.” Failing to become a nation-state striving to represent the
common interests of the people living within the borders inherited from Soviet Ukraine, Ukraine may
eventually be transformed into a “function-state” that serves the interests of a particular fraction of
European elites. In this vision, it matters little who exactly performs the function: the very definition of
“Ukrainian” will be redefined accordingly, excluding – perhaps even formally, through the deprivation
of citizenship or disenfranchisement – those who do not fit the function, whether they find themselves
beyond Ukraine’s shrinking borders or within them. Conversely, it will include those willing to serve
the “Israeli” function, however indifferent they may be to the Ukrainian culture that was ostensibly at
stake in this war.
Yet, setting aside the profound ethical and political implications of identifying with Israel, such
a future would require massive investment, both to build a military-industrial complex capable of
matching Russian capacities and simply to stem the demographic hemorrhage of the war years, while
attracting millions of migrant workers and soldiers to a depopulated and devastated land. Develop-
12 “The Russia-Ukraine Endgame and the Future of Europe,” Center for Geopolitics, JPMorgan Chase,
May 2025, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmorganchase/documents/center-for-geopolitics/
jpmc-cfg-russia-ukraine.pdf.
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mental states on the frontiers of the Cold War were possible during the high-growth era of democratic
capitalism – South Korea being a prime example. Whether this remains feasible today is an open
question, not only because of sheer economic constraints, but because maintaining the political unity
of European elites has grown increasingly difficult in the face of mounting domestic backlash against
the costs of the war and militarization.
The “Georgian scenario,” by contrast, is precisely what the comprador “civil society” has vocally
feared ever since Zelensky’s landslide victory. Like Ukraine, Georgia experienced its own maidan
revolution in 2003, followed by a war with Russia in 2008 after attempting to retake secessionist South
Ossetia, events precipitated by the notorious Bucharest summit decision that offered a vague “future
in NATO” to both countries. The Georgian Dream government, which replaced post-revolutionary
President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2012, has not abandoned the goal of European integration but has
nevertheless cracked down on its own pro-Western camp and “civil society,” passing foreign agent
legislation and suppressing opposition protests in 2024 despite intense EU pressure. The “Georgia”
outcome is a “revolt of the elites,” establishing a Caesarist rule independent of both the comprador
“civil society” and transnational capital. Often accused of being a “pro-Russian” shift, it is more ac-
curately viewed as part of the local political capitalists’ “sovereigntist” balancing act between great
powers amid the disintegration of the US-centered order (Gigantino, 2024). This is precisely what
Ukrainian elites, plagued by political fragmentation and short-sightedness, failed to sustain before
the catastrophic events of 2014. While their ability to execute such a strategy now remains far from
certain, it may become unavoidable if, as a result of the war, Russia emerges strengthened, the West
grows more divided, and the global order continues its shift toward multipolarity, or even China-cen-
tered hegemony.
As Ukraine’s horizons darken, even “something like Israel” or “something like Georgia” begins
to look optimistic compared to the grimmer precedents now looming. The specter of Syria or Libya,
echoing the most disastrous trajectories of the Arab Spring deficient revolutions, has haunted Ukraine
since the first outbreaks of violence in central Kyiv during the Euromaidan. It now represents a plau-
sible future should both “Western” and “Eastern” stabilization efforts fail amid the coming global
chaos. This is the prospect of a failed state: a government in Kyiv controlling only fragments of its
territory, while large swathes remain occupied by neighboring powers or fall under the de facto con-
trol of radical movements rather than any recognized state authority. The 3rd Army Corps and the
expanding ecosystem of connected military units, paramilitary movements, and civic organizations of
the extreme-right “Azov movement,” thoroughly whitewashed and glorified in both the Ukrainian and
Western public spheres (Golinkin, 2023; Havryshko, 2026) are increasingly positioned to become the
Ukrainian equivalent of “moderate democratic Islamists” of Ahmed al-Sharaa (who led the organiza-
tion that used to be the Al-Qaeda branch in Syria), who is now consolidating control over his country
after fifteen years of a labyrinthine civil war. Western liberal rule at the core, even at the high point
of post-WWII democratic capitalism, has typically relied on dictatorships and brutal violence on the
periphery. Now, as liberal order is unravelling at the core itself, “centrist” elites are growing ever more
willing to embrace authoritarian practices and obscurantist ideologies in a desperate bid to preserve
their power.
Moving further down the regressive path, with expectations about the future in deflationary freefall,
the minerals deal imposed last year by Donald Trump on Zelensky, the full details of which remain
undisclosed to the Ukrainian public, points toward what we might call the “Congo,” or more precisely,
the “Katanga” scenario. Katanga was the mineral-rich Congolese province whose short-lived seces-
sion in the early 1960s was engineered by Belgian mining corporations and mercenaries to preserve
their grip on copper and cobalt deposits after formal decolonization. What this scenario describes for
Ukraine is not a failed state like Syria (though the two may well coexist), but rather a captured ex-
tractive state: a resource colony where political sovereignty is formally maintained but functionally
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hollowed out to service the aggressive extraction of critical minerals and the exploitation of remaining
profitable infrastructure. In this plausible future, US corporations backed by private military contrac-
tors, rather than official “peacekeepers,” would secure direct access to Ukraine’s resources, bypassing
the need for a functioning nation-state altogether. This is the naked commercialization of territory, in
which profitable zones become securitized islands amid a sea of social abandonment. In such a future,
Ukraine is not a frontier shield but a distressed asset to be liquidated in the strategic resource compe-
tition against US rivals.
As the world descends deeper into crisis, seeking Ukraine’s future in the mirror of known “models”
or “scenarios” may be altogether futile. Curiously, JPMorgan Chase’s updated 2026 forecast suddenly
named the “Finnish scenario” – ceding territory to Russia while keeping a Western orientation and
eventually joining the EU and possibly, in the very long term, even NATO – as the most likely out-
come for Ukraine.
13
That this should count as an optimistic scenario, when Ukraine’s “finlandization”
had for years been denounced as “capitulation” by the country’s own “Western” camp, also manifests
the regressive trajectory. What is becoming an even graver question is whether any future at all re-
mains possible. Further global political fragmentation is an existential threat to all of humanity, wheth-
er through the rising risk of nuclear war or the failure of international coordination to avert climate
catastrophe. The escalating crisis demands a response: either a new hegemonic order imposed by the
ruling classes from above, or a counterhegemonic revolution brought from below, or perhaps a new
mutually amplifying cycle of both.
Yet the immediate imperative is survival. For Ukraine to have any future, it must first endure the
present. This necessity extends far beyond its own borders, resonating with all the wretched of the
earth who suffer from the unwinding spiral of crisis far more acutely than those above them. Amidst
the deepening catastrophe, the priority must be saving lives and preserving what remains of the coun-
try’s shattered infrastructure, for without this human and physical foundation no future can take root.
No Russian regime is eternal, no American presidency is permanent, and the European Union is cer-
tainly not immune to decay and disintegration. To preserve what we still have is not an act of resig-
nation but of defiance: holding the ground for a revival when the storms of this interregnum finally
break. The question, ultimately, is not which Ukraine we will become, but whether we can endure long
enough to once again define that answer for ourselves.
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