The Democracy Seminar’s response to Russia’s War in Ukraine began on the very day of the invasion, February 24. Coincidentally, we were holding our monthly informal Zoom gathering on that fateful day, just a few hours after Putin’s military invaded. Our agenda was open, as is our custom, but we became laser focused on the developing catastrophe. The discussion was fascinating; an in-the-moment worldwide response to the invasion from Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States.
I asked my colleagues to briefly write their responses up, and then we published them, at first from Romania, Slovakia and Lithuania and Hungary, next from a Czech scholar in Germany who works on issues of sovereignty and international law, and a Romanian military analyst, who predicted quite early the problems the Russian army would face. Then there was an important contribution from Ukraine itself, from our colleague Mykola Balaban, who reported in certain terms “What happens in Ukraine right now has a single definition: it is a war,” contradicting Russian propaganda. Since these opening responses, many more have followed, leading us to feature an active forum on Russia’s War in Ukraine with many contributions that offer critical accounts of the unfolding struggle against Russia’s attack on an independent nation and on democracy. Consider, among others:
Jeffrey C. Issac’s account of President Zelinsky’s heroism:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a 44-year-old man who until a few years ago was a professional actor and comedian.
In 2019 he was catapulted to the Presidency of Ukraine, in an election in which he stood against corruption and ran as the leader of a party, “Servant of the People,” named after the television series in which he had starred.
An unlikely politician, and an even less likely statesman, he is now a hero, for Ukrainians and for all citizens, of Europe and the world—including Russia—who stand for freedom and liberal democracy.
Read more here.
Irena Grudzinska-Gross’ poignant analysis of the frightening violence of Putin’s words:
It was the most terrifying speech I heard in my adult life. These twenty-eight minutes activated my inherited memory of war’s destructiveness. The calm with which Putin spoke was leaden. Even the fact that he was sitting behind a desk, with white low-tech phones on his left showed his determination. I don’t need to show off, to raise my voice, he seemed to say. Indeed, he slightly raised his voice only at the end of his speech. Otherwise he was just resolute.
He just unleashed a war.
Read more here.
Such a violent vocabulary is embedded in an ideological script, leading Pavlo Shved to analyze closely a report that announced the victory in Ukraine prematurely. Along with Grudzinska-Gross, he depicts the new totalitarian imagination coming out of Putin’s Russia.
At first glance, it may seem like a strange and even a preposterous undertaking. My country is under attack. Thousands of people have already died. Many more may die in the upcoming days, even hours. Ukrainian cities are being shelled, schools and hospitals are being destroyed by bombs and artillery fire, women and children are hiding in bomb shelters and basements. The whole world is watching a gigantic humanitarian catastrophe unfold in front of their eyes at the heart of Europe… And I sit down to write about a seemingly unimportant, even marginal piece of Russian propaganda authored by a certain Piotr Akopov, a “journalist” known for his far-right, conservative-nationalist views. What’s the use of it? Wouldn’t it be better if I abandoned my “intellectual aspirations” for the time being and just took up arms to help defend my country? No, because understanding Russian goals in this war is nearly as important as resisting Russian invasion with military means. I hope to show in this essay that Mr. Akopov’s article can help us achieve just that.
Read more here.
And then there is the lived experience of the unfolding horrors. Consider Oleksandra Sauliak’s first-hand account of the refugee experience:
It’s my seventh day in Hamburg. I’m sitting on the bedroom floor, leaning against the closed door, and talking on FaceTime with a close friend. People down the corridor are about to go to sleep. Then he says, “Write. Notes. On Twitter. On Instagram.” And I ask, “why?” He responds, “Maybe, a person will read them and feel better for a second.”
I have never thought that I would say “I love you” that many times in my life as I have done so as of February 24. I can’t cease to write it in my daytime and nighttime messages. I just clench my teeth I say to myself, “Just don’t fuck up the names.” And I hope that the worst won’t happen and these words won’t lose their meanings for me.
Read more here.
And if you want to have a sustained sense of how the invasion and its consequences have unfolded on the ground, read our remarkable series from the Polish “poet laureate of hybrid war,” Paweł Pieniążek here. Fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian, Pieniążek has been reporting from Ukraine for nearly a decade. He had returned to cover the escalating threat of Russian military buildup on the country’s borders for Tygodnik Powszechny and was in the eastern city of Kharkiv when the invasion began. His reports cut through the cacophony of conflict to shed light on the tragic and pointless human cost of war.
Drawing on our Worldwide Committee of Democratic Correspondence work (our playful description of our activities relating them to the 18th Century American “Committees of Correspondence”), I presented my response.
As the war in Ukraine unfolds, I am both horrified and hopeful. Day by day, the suffering of the Ukrainian people is ever worse. Yet, as well, the limited effectiveness of the brutal military actions of invading forces are likewise revealed day by day. Here, six notes on the horror, five notes on hope, and six reflections between hope and horror, followed by judgments, all with some special attention given to contributions to the ongoing forum of the Democracy Seminar on Ukraine .
Continue here.
We are expanding our deliberations in an upcoming webinar, a discussion among three Ukrainians currently in the country and two studying at the New School.
And speaking of webinars, we had a fascinating one, a discussion among E.J. Dionne, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol on the Trumpian threat to American democracy, which included comparisons between what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and the clear and present danger to democracy in the United States.
These are days filled with horror, as the killing in Ukraine relentlessly escalates with no end in sight, but we seek to constitute a virtual space for us to deliberate, trying to understand together and searching for grounds for hope, no matter how remote they may be. Our next newsletter will introduce in more detail Paweł Pieniążek’s dispatches.