Two observations: First, the implications that a pro-Ukrainian outlet is now regularly publishing accounts of how badly things are going for Ukraine on the battlefield. Second, not only will Ukraine’s population of young to middle aged males be decimated by the time this is over, but many of the survivors will be injured and/or traumatized. – Natylie
By Asami Terajima, Kyiv Independent, 3/15/23
Editor’s note: The Kyiv Independent is not revealing the soldiers’ surnames or the exact location of their deployment due to security concerns amid the ongoing war. Some military personnel spoke without the authorization of their commanders or a press officer.
DONETSK OBLAST – Just days before heading back to fight in the Battle of Bakhmut, a Ukrainian soldier Volodymyr, 54, said he felt ill-prepared.
“When they drive us to Bakhmut, I already know I’m being sent to death,” Volodymyr told the Kyiv Independent during his brief stay in Kramatorsk, a city in Donetsk Oblast some 25 kilometers west of the front line.
Volodymyr, an infantryman from the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, said he struggled to eat after fighting in Bakhmut for months. He looked shaken as he talked.
For two months, Volodymyr’s unit was tasked with guarding Bakhmut against small Russian assault groups creeping into the city. The brigade was constantly under mortar fire as soldiers were outdoors where shrapnels could wound or kill them at any moment.
“(The Russians) keep firing at us, but we don’t have artillery – so we have nothing to attack them back with,” Volodymyr said. “I don’t know if I will return or not. We are just getting killed.”
Ukrainian infantrymen interviewed by the Kyiv Independent described the fighting in Bakhmut as a desperate survival challenge against Russia’s “infinite” stocks of artillery munitions and manpower. With just their machine guns and rifles, they say they braced relentless Russian mortar and artillery attacks until their hideout was eventually destroyed.
Volodymyr is haunted by the thoughts of his comrades killed in Bakhmut. He recalls a 29-year-old comrade whom he found lying dead after shrapnel hit the young man’s head at a position.
“I knew he was dead, but I just kept wrapping his head (with bandages),” Volodymyr said.
Volodymyr’s story is far from the only harrowing account of what soldiers face as they defend Bakhmut.
Eight months into the Battle for Bakhmut, Ukraine faces growing concern over the need to defend the ruined city, now nearly empty of its 70,000 residents.
Russians have almost encircled Bakhmut and have entered the city. Ukraine has been clinging to Bakhmut at a high price. Withdrawing from it would give the Kremlin its first major victory since July 2022.
Seizing the ruined city has become a symbolic and political objective for the Kremlin after facing humiliating defeats in late 2022 amid Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives.
Speaking to the Kyiv Independent in the nearby town of Kostyantynivka in early March, Senior Lieutenant Oleksandr said he was unaware of any plans to withdraw from Bakhmut but acknowledged that the situation is tense “everywhere.”
Russians put enormous pressure to “squeeze out” the Ukrainian troops from Bakhmut, Oleksandr said, with the fiercest fighting raging in the northern part of the city. The lack of munitions and equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, makes it hard to hold on to the city, Oleksandr added.
Russian forces outnumber the Ukrainians two to three times on the Bakhmut front, with approximately 20,000 to 30,000 troops fighting in the area, according to Mykola, a staff sergeant from the 28th Mechanized Brigade.
If Russia keeps up its current pace of attacks, “it could be a few weeks, and that’s it,” Mykola said about the fight for Bakhmut.
“The situation is now very difficult because they have already felt the taste (of victory in Bakhmut),” Mykola said. “And now they know that there is only a little bit left.”
Ukraine’s military leadership said that a complete withdrawal from Bakhmut is on the table, but such a decision would only be made if necessary.
As Russia throws more Wagner Group mercenaries to fight in Bakhmut, the tension surrounding the city is at an all-time high.
Bloody warfare
While Russian casualties on the Bakhmut front are assumed to be very high, Ukraine is also taking heavy losses as it holds on to the city, soldiers’ testimonies reveal. NATO intelligence estimates that at least five Russian soldiers were killed for every Ukrainian loss, CNN reported on March 6, citing an unnamed official with the alliance.
Valeriy, a Ukrainian infantryman, says that most of his fallen comrades were fatally wounded by projectile fragments.
“It’s a pity that probably 90% of our losses are from artillery – or tanks and aviation,” Valeriy told the Kyiv Independent a few hours after leaving the Bakhmut front. “And much less (casualties) from shooting battles.”
Valeriy counted that “only a few” of the original 27 members of his platoon got out of the Bakhmut front with him, though he explained that most of them were wounded, not killed.
“The Russians have so many weapons, and there are so many of them,” Valeriy said. “They are firing at us all the time. Sometimes, you hear an incoming (shell) every second.”
Russian forces have intensified their assault on Bakhmut since mid-January after capturing the nearby salt-mining town of Soledar, which sits some 15 kilometers northeast of Bakhmut.
Infantryman Vladyslav from the 58th Independent Motorized Infantry Brigade says many soldiers in his platoon have refused to go to Bakhmut as Russians came closer.
Multiple soldiers from other brigades also said they’ve encountered many “refusers” who did everything not to be deployed back to Bakhmut.
During the last rotation in late February, Vladyslav said that only eight out of 25 soldiers in his platoon headed out to Bakhmut – and the rest said they couldn’t go because of sudden fever or body pain.
The eight then headed to a position at a crossroad near the Bakhmutka River, where destroyed houses lined up. The platoon came under heavy Russian mortar fire as soon as they arrived.
Two were killed, and two were severely wounded – one soldier lost his arm, and the other was hit in the stomach by a projectile, Vladyslav said. The rest, including Vladyslav himself, received a severe concussion.
They were all evacuated from Bakhmut that day and lost the position.
Ukrainian soldiers fighting in and around Bakhmut told the Kyiv Independent that Russia’s tactics are potent. They locate Ukrainian positions, use mass fire to kill as many as possible, then move forward with infantry, usually also witnessing heavy losses.
Infantryman Vladyslav said that the Russians would usually appear in a group of about five people at night, but they seemed “scared” to launch close-range attacks.
So instead, the Russians would use mass firepower to destroy the houses – where the Ukrainians hid to monitor invading forces – to the point that they were forced to abandon the position to seek another position with better protection, according to Vladyslav.
“They are (now) fighting smartly, too,” Vladyslav said.
Some soldiers deployed in Bakhmut said the Russians split into small assault groups of about ten people and launch waves of nearly suicidal attacks. They say that Wagner mercenaries could have been among them, but it was difficult to assess since they all wore similar uniforms.
Maksym, 33, an infantryman from the 5th Separate Assault Brigade, said the Russians also had an established tactic in the southern area near Bakhmut.
The infantryman from Kyiv was deployed on the Ivanivske front, at the southwest outskirts of Bakhmut, throughout February 2023, where fierce fighting rages over a strategic village that sits on one of the key routes into the city.
Relying heavily on drones, the Russians would locate Ukraine’s positions in the area. They would then fire multiple rounds of mortar and artillery, which would then be followed by infantry assaults, in an attempt to encircle Ukrainian soldiers, according to Maksym.
If the drones cannot detect Ukrainian positions, the Russians will send a few soldiers to fire gunshots until they hear return fire, according to Maksym.
As brutal as they may be, the Russian tactics have slowly worked and pushed back Maksym’s unit by 1.5 kilometers in total throughout February. He said that his unit had to relocate to another position 100-300 meters away every now and then, especially if nearby units began withdrawing and the defense line began to collapse.
According to Maksym, Russia’s weapons, such as its Soviet-designed mortars and grenade launchers, might not be accurate, but they are “very effective infantry weapons” when used en masse.
As Russia strives for full-encirclement of Bakhmut by capturing settlements such as Ivanivske, Ukrainian forces are under increasing pressure.
Anticipating Russia’s next move
While Russia’s capture of Bakhmut is becoming more plausible, “Russian forces lack the capability to exploit the tactical capture of Bakhmut to generate operational effects,” the Institute for the Study of War predicted.
Russia’s offensive will likely “rapidly culminate” after its possible capture of the city, according to the report.
But despite reports that Russia’s push could stall after what would be Russia’s biggest victory in eight months, Ukrainian soldiers deployed further out from Bakhmut are not taking chances.
According to soldiers that talked to the Kyiv Independent, while Russia was concentrating its forces on capturing Bakhmut, the intensity of fighting in areas outside Bakhmut had slowed down, giving Ukrainians the opportunity to focus on propping up the defense.
Staff Sergeant Mykola said his 28th Brigade had begun conducting short training exercises for less experienced soldiers now that the fighting had become less intense north of Bakhmut.
Oleksii and Vasyl, sappers from the 80th Air Assault Brigade, said they lay explosives – mostly anti-tank mines, but also anti-personnel mines in areas that they expect to be the next front line.
At this point, Bakhmut is “basically surrounded by mines,” the younger sapper Oleksii from Kharkiv Oblast says.
If Bakhmut falls, the ISW forecasts that Russia could attempt to push westward along the highway toward the nearby town of Kostyantynivka (about 20 kilometers from Bakhmut) and further northwest to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – the two central hubs in eastern Ukraine.
The village of Ivanivske, which sits on the highway to Kostyantynivka and is located only eight kilometers from Bakhmut, is among the settlements Ukrainian forces are fortifying.
A deputy company commander from the 80th Brigade, known under the call sign Third, told the Kyiv Independent that trenches were being dug out alongside the highway from Ivanivske to Kostyantynivka to prevent a Russian breakthrough in Ivanivske. The “operational pause” in the fighting in the areas further away from Bakhmut has been helpful to build fortifications.
“If the Russians capture Bakhmut, they will advance further to the south, to Ivanivske, then to Chasiv Yar, and further to the west,” said Third, 45, who has served since 2014. “We are preparing in advance.”
“At the moment, there is enough (defense),” he said of defending the rest of the region from Russians if Bakhmut falls. “But it’s for now, and I do not know what the enemy will do next.”
“Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.
In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”
The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.
We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?
Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.
Remember?
No more.
You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.
Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.
Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.
The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.
As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.
The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.
These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.
That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.
Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.
It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.
Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.
The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.
Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.
The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.
China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.
Wisely, China has ensured that all of the 100+ nations joining BRI are enriched by their participation, whether building themselves up domestically, or extending their reach internationally. It is the largest, most compelling, geographically extensive, nationally inclusive, mutually enriching economic enterprise in the history of the world. The U.S. is not part of it.
Finally, there is the matter of the dollar. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global economy has used the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. This has given the U.S. an “exorbitant privilege” in that it can essentially write an unlimited stream of hot checks to the world, because countries need dollars to be able to conduct international commerce. The U.S. “sells” them dollars by issuing Treasury debt, which is a universally fungible international medium of exchange.
One of the consequences of this arrangement is that it has allowed the U.S. to spend far beyond its means, running up $32 trillion of debt since 1980, when its national debt stood at a mere $1 trillion. The U.S. uses this debt to, among other things, fund its gargantuan military with its 800 military bases around the world, which it uses to do things like destroy Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and a host of lesser predations on other countries. All the world sees this and is repulsed by it.
The world sees how dollar hegemony underwrites the U.S.’ ability to carry out or attempt coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and, of course, Ukraine, among others. And these are just those in the past two decades.
The same dollar hegemony underwrote U.S. predations in the latter part of the Twentieth Century against Iran, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Again, the rest of the world sees this. U.S. citizens, rapturously oblivious in their hermetically sealed media bubble, do not.
The world saw how the U.S. stole $300 billion of Russian funds that were held in Western banks, part of its sanctions regime against Russia for its role in the Ukraine war. They’ve seen how the U.S. has carried out similar thefts against dollar-denominated funds of Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Iran. It sees how the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates to take care of U.S. needs makes capital flow out of other countries, and how it makes their currencies fall, forcing inflation on them. Not a single country in the world is left untouched.
The cumulative impact of these facts is that many countries would rather not be held hostage to the implicit and explicit negative consequences of dollar hegemony. They also want to remove the “exorbitant privilege” that they believe the U.S. has abused to their individual and collective detriment.
They have begun—again, led by Russia and China—to build an international finance and trading system that doesn’t rely on dollars, that uses countries’ local currencies, gold, oil, or other assets to trade. This received special impetus last year when Saudi Arabia announced it would begin accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for its oil. Oil is the world’s most valued internationally-traded commodity, so the perception is that a dam is beginning to break.
It will take years before an equally functional substitute for the dollar is devised but what began a few years ago as a trickle has gained momentum and urgency as a consequence of U.S. actions in Ukraine. When the dollar is no longer the world’s international reserve currency and nations don’t need dollars to trade with each other, the U.S. will no longer be able to fund its massive budget and trade deficits by writing hot checks. The withdrawal will be agonizing and will greatly circumscribe the U.S.’ role as global hegemon.
U.S. actions in Ukraine have driven together its two greatest adversaries, Russia and China. They, joined by India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and dozens of other countries, are carrying out a Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration that will leave the U.S. outside of the world’s largest and most dynamic trading bloc.
The U.S.’ military failure has advertised, once again (after Iraq and Afghanistan), the relative impotence of U.S. military solutions. Yes, it can still destroy small, defenseless countries like Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But against a peer competitor that has chosen to stand up to it, the U.S. has, frankly, been handed its ass. All the world can see it.
Events have shown the hollowness of U.S.-led economic and financial systems, as well, especially compared to China. China’s economic performance has far surpassed that of the U.S. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in the history of the world. Its growth has made it the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. While average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. are little higher than they were 50 years ago, incomes in China are up more than 10 TIMES over the same period. And it has done this without brutalizing and pillaging other nations that refuse to bend to its hegemonic will.
And, the War has betrayed, as nothing else possibly could, the diplomatic isolation of the U.S., with the vast majority of the world’s people refusing to implement U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia. Its destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline is recognized as the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, easily surpassing 911 in terms of the hundreds of millions of people it will hurt. And this, to one of its putative allies, Europe. Imagine what happens to its enemies.
This is the tunnel at the end of the light, a multi-polar as opposed to a unipolar world. It means increasing isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, the closing in of options, the narrowing of opportunities, the loss of strategic primacy that once graced the greatest power in the history of the world. It will mean dramatically reduced power and influence vis-à-vis the U.S.’ strategic adversaries, and markedly constrained ability to operate militarily, economically and financially in the world, what with the hot checkbook soon to be taken away.
In twenty or thirty years, the U.S. will still be a substantial regional power, perhaps like Brazil in South America, Iran in West Asia, or Nigeria in Africa. But it will not be the global hegemon it once was, able to project and inflict power in the world as it has done for the last century. The U.S. abused its providential anointment as the exceptional nation. That abuse has been recognized, called out, and is now being acted against by most of the other nations of the world. The future will be very different for the U.S. than it has been for the past 80 years, since the end of World War II when it towered over the rest of the world like a giant among pygmies. Ukraine will prove to have been the turning point in this transformation, the tunnel at the end of the light.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ already-negative opinions of Russia have soured further in the past year, dropping from 15% holding a favorable view to 9%. The current reading for Russia is the lowest Gallup has measured since it first asked about the “Soviet Union” in this format in 1989.
Russia is now the fourth country in Gallup’s polling of country favorable ratings to register a sub-10% favorable score. Iran, Iraq and North Korea have had ratings below 10% on multiple occasions. The all-time low favorable rating for any country was 3% for Iraq in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.
Gallup’s 2023 World Affairs poll finds 90% of Americans having an unfavorable opinion of Russia, including a 59% majority who have a “very unfavorable” view. Last year, 42% held a very unfavorable opinion of Russia, and in 2021, 36% did. Before 2020, no more than 32% had viewed Russia very unfavorably.
Americans’ opinions of Russia have not always been negative. In the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Cold War was ending, majorities in the U.S. viewed the Soviet Union and, later, Russia favorably amid increased cooperation between the powers. In the late 1990s, though, favorability toward Russia waned as Moscow opposed NATO intervention in the Kosovo region of Serbia.
U.S.-Russia relations improved in the early 2000s, and once again a majority of Americans had favorable opinions of Russia, peaking at 66% in February 2002. Opinions of Russia dipped temporarily in March 2003 after President Vladimir Putin opposed the U.S. taking military action against Iraq. But Americans’ opinions bounced back in subsequent years, mostly staying above 50% favorable until 2012.
During the past decade, with Putin in power for a second time, the U.S. and Russia have become increasingly at odds. This largely stems from U.S. criticisms of Russia’s human rights record and annexation of the Crimean peninsula as well as concerns about Russian meddling in U.S. elections.
Americans’ favorable ratings of Russia fell to 24% in 2015 after the annexation of Crimea and dropped to 15% last year as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. The current reading comes a year into that conflict, which has seen the U.S. provide billions in support for Ukraine.
Two-Thirds of Americans View Ukraine Favorably
In contrast to their negative opinions of Russia, Americans are mostly positive toward Ukraine. Sixty-eight percent have a favorable opinion of Ukraine, up six percentage points from a year ago and 11 points higher than in 2020. The current reading is by one point the highest in Gallup’s trend since 2005, with the prior high occurring in that initial 2005 reading.
Americans have become more familiar with Ukraine over time, with the percentage not having an opinion declining from 15% in 2005 to 2% today.
Currently, 23% of Americans have a “very favorable” opinion of Ukraine, more than double the 9% who did so last year.
Majority Sees Russia-Ukraine War, Russian Military Power as Critical Threats
Asked how much of a threat the Russia-Ukraine conflict presents to U.S. vital interests, 56% of Americans describe it as a “critical threat,” 36% say it is “important but not critical,” and 8% do not believe it represents an important threat. The perception of the conflict as a critical threat is up slightly from 52% a year ago and is much higher than the 44% measured in 2015.
A majority of Americans, 51%, also view the military power of Russia as a critical threat, though this is down significantly from 59% a year ago. The decline may be related to the prolonged battle with Ukraine. Many military experts thought the Russian military would overwhelm Ukraine, but it has made gains only in limited parts of the country. Those gains have come at a heavy cost in Russian military personnel and equipment.
Still, the percentage of Americans regarding Russia’s military power as a critical threat to the U.S. is among the highest Gallup has measured since it first asked the question in 2004. The higher readings have come in the past eight years as Russia has taken a more aggressive stance toward Ukraine. Since 2015, at least 39% of Americans have said Russia’s military was a critical threat to the U.S.; before that year, no more than 32% did.
From 2004 through 2013, at least half of Americans described Russia’s military as an important, but not critical, threat.
Republicans, Democrats Now Have Similar Opinions of Russia
Since 2021, Russia’s image has worsened among all major party groups, with its favorable rating down 19 points among Republicans, 13 points among independents and 10 points among Democrats.
Republicans and Democrats now each give Russia identical 6% favorable ratings, while independents are slightly higher at 11%.
The similar ratings among Republicans and Democrats are notable, given that Republicans have been more positive than Democrats toward Russia in the past, and that many more Democrats than Republicans regard Russia as the greatest U.S. enemy. Republicans are much more inclined to say China is the United States’ chief enemy.
In addition to having similar favorable ratings, Democrats’ “very unfavorable” ratings of Russia are only slightly higher than Republicans’, 65% to 59%.
Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans diverge in their opinions of Ukraine, although both groups (82% and 56%, respectively) view the country favorably. A party gap was apparent last year, but it has expanded greatly as Democrats’ favorable ratings of Ukraine increased 16 points this year while Republicans’ were unchanged.
Similar percentages of Republicans (62%) and Democrats (58%) believe the Russia-Ukraine conflict represents a critical threat to U.S. vital interests, as do a smaller majority of independents (51%). Republicans (up six points) and independents (up five points) are modestly more likely to see that conflict as a critical threat than in 2022.
Last year, all three party groups showed notable spikes in perceptions that Russia’s military power is a critical threat to the U.S. Those figures have shown sharp declines this year among Republicans and Democrats, but not independents. Now, 60% of Republicans, 50% of independents and 45% of Democrats say Russia’s military power is a critical threat.
Bottom Line
The Russia-Ukraine war is now in its second year, and Americans’ opinions of Russia have deteriorated further. Fewer than one in 10 Americans have a positive view of Russia, and a majority now say they view that nation “very unfavorably.” Those are easily the worst ratings of Russia in at least 34 years of Gallup polling. Russia is now in the company of nations like Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in receiving nearly universal disapproval from the American public.
The U.S. government and many of its allies have condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine, imposed sanctions on it and strongly supported Ukraine’s defense. The end game of the conflict is unclear, and diplomatic efforts have so far been unproductive. As long as the war persists, it is unlikely Americans’ opinions of Russia will improve.
James Bohn is an economist and risk analyst with thirty years of experience in business, government, and academia. Most recently he was an officer in the supervision function at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He has a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University.
America’s twenty-year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that nation building is often more expensive, prone to failure, and politically unpopular than expected at the outset. The State Department’s Afghan Stabilization Assistance Review acknowledged the difficulties nation building poses and found that there was no appetite in the American public for such ventures in the future. Yet today, less than two years after the Afghan withdrawal, the United States and its European allies are faced with a nation building exercise more expensive and at least as extensive as those of the past two decades.
NATO’s pursuit of the long war risks pushing Ukraine past a tipping point beyond which it’s economy may never recover. Revitalization of the Ukrainian economy would even have been difficult had the war ended in 2022. Continuation of the fighting and the introduction of more destructive and lethal Western arms risks making Ukraine a permanent economic vassal state of the United States and the EU.
Even the hawkish Rand Corporation in their review of the costs and benefits of the long war acknowledged the tradeoff between continued fighting and the additional cost and difficulty to revitalize the Ukrainian economy post-war.
Existing estimates of reconstruction costs are enormous. The National Recovery Plan that Ukraine’s National Recovery Council put forth in July 2022 carried a $750 billion price tag. In January 2023, Ukraine President Zelensky put the cost to rebuild Ukraine at $1 trillion. These estimates are several times that of the $150 billion in all forms of aid that the West has extended to date. They also exceed by a factor of five or more the size of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, $150-160 billion in today’s dollars, and the $145 billion that the U.S. government spent on rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan.
Existing estimates significantly understate actual reconstruction costs. Understatement of costs and overstatement of benefits makes it easier to sell donor nations, their publics and NGOs on participation in reconstruction schemes. Low-balling costs also makes it easier for self-serving bureaucrats to achieve buy-in within their agencies. The report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that US aid programs routinely underestimated the time and resources projects required and prioritized political preferences over what could realistically be achieved.
In addition to cost, reconstruction efforts will have to deal address Ukraine’s declining demographics, it’s outdated industrial base, and limitations on the EU’s ability to implement or oversee the implementation of structural reforms.
Ukraine lacks the single most important ingredient for its economic recovery: young people. Reconstruction is a lot of work and a young population willing to invest in the future of the nation is essential. One reason for the rapid economic revitalization of Germany and Japan following World War II is that both countries had a young population. In 1950, 46 percent of the German population was under the age of 30 (compared to 39 percent in the United States today). A growing labor force allowed for the expansion of industrial production and exports while also rebuilding its infrastructure. Foreign exchange earnings from exports allowed West Germany to self-finance its reconstruction efforts without further aid.
Post-World War II Japan was even younger than Germany. Despite enormous losses during the war, the population of Japan increased by 10 million between 1940 and 1950. In 1950, 63 percent of the Japanese population was under the age of 30.
In contrast, pre-war Ukraine was rapidly becoming a nation of pensioners. Ukraine’s working age population peaked in 1992 and declined by 5 million by 2021. Ukraine’s birth rate collapsed following the breakup of the Soviet Union falling from 13 per thousand in 1990 to 8 in 2000. Only 31 percent of the population of Ukraine before the war was 30 or younger.
The war has accelerated Ukraine’s demographic decline. Ukrainian refugees tend to be younger than the population as a whole. A survey of Ukrainian refugees by the German government found that only a third planned to return to Ukraine immediately after the war ended. Moreover, once Ukraine lifts the ban on men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, many will leave to join family and friends, to find jobs, or to avoid the possibility of being pressed into service should the war resume.
Ukraine’s prewar economy was stuck in the Soviet era. The country’s largest exports were commodities: agricultural products, metals and minerals. There’s a vast disconnect between the structure of the existing Ukrainian economy and that envisioned in reconstruction plans. The National Recovery Plan envisions a green economy consistent with the EU’s Green Deal and growing the information technology sector. These items may be titillating to the ears of potential donor nations and NGOs. However, such a transformation would require not only the creation of new industries but also scrapping much of Ukraine’s existing industrial base. Ukraine’s economy is highly energy intensive. According to the International Energy Agency, prewar Ukraine used more energy per dollar of GDP (at purchasing power parity) than any European nation. Plans to develop knowledge industries run headlong into Ukraine’s demographics. Knowledge industry workers tend to be young and adaptable. Ukraine’s labor force is aging and shrinking.
Finally, plans need to recognize the inherent difficulties with nation building. To put it mildly, past efforts have fallen far short of expectations. Afghan reconstruction efforts began with high aspirations. In the end, even George W. Bush acknowledged in his memoir, Decision Points, that nation building “turned out to be even more daunting than I anticipated.”
The inability of the EU to revitalize the Greek economy following that country’s debt crisis should give Western leaders pause. By any measure, revitalizing Greece should have been a far easier task than that facing the EU and United States in Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, Greece is familiar territory for the EU. Greece had been an EU member since 1981. The extent of assistance for Greece was more limited. Greece only required financial assistance and institutional reform, not new infrastructure. Greek infrastructure was not only intact at the time of the debt crisis but much of it was new. The debt crisis arose in part due to excessive government borrowing for public-sector infrastructure projects.
Despite multiple rounds of financial assistance since 2010 and twelve years of EU oversight the Greek economy still underperforms. Labor productivity has been stagnant over the past decade. Greek government debt to GDP has risen by 50 percentage points since the crisis Youth unemployment hovers around 30 percent. Evidence the Greek economy has become more competitive is scant. The Fraser Institute ranked Greece 63rd among the nations of the world in 2010. In its most recent report Greece was in 85th place.
Widespread corruption is a major impediment to economic development in Ukraine. The Greek experience illustrates practical limitations to the EU’s ability to address corruption. Corruption remains a significant problem in Greece. A European Commission survey in 2022 found that 98 percent of Greek respondents felt that corruption was widespread in their country, the highest percentage for any EU nation.
Given Ukraine challenging demographics, Soviet-era economy and the EU’s own track record at structural reform, revitalization of the Ukrainian economy would be challenging in the best of circumstances. Further fighting will make revitalization even more difficult and costly to achieve.
The neocon dream for Ukraine is that it serves as NATO’s eastern bulwark against Russia’s alleged expansionist tendencies. Realization of that dream requires postwar revitalization of that country’s economy.
Continued escalation of the war will further decimate the country’s infrastructure and make rebuilding ever more difficult by turning large numbers of young Ukrainians that could have invested their lives in rebuilding the country into wartime casualties. Paradoxically, the longer the war continues, the more likely that postwar Ukraine not be an independent nation, but instead a long-term dependent on the West for the military and economic aid necessary for its survival.
Western leaders need to be upfront with their publics on the obvious tradeoffs between the pursuit of NATO’s military goals, such as pushing Russia back to pre-2014 borders, and the increased likelihood that achievement of those goals will make it impossible to put Ukraine back together again after the shooting stops.
Few Ukrainians have spent as many years of their life fighting authoritarianism as Volodymyr Chemerys.
The sixty-year-old Ukrainian human rights campaigner’s record of activism reads like a history of Ukrainian protest: the 1990 “Revolution on Granite” against Soviet domination of the country, today dubbed the “first Maidan”; the 2000–2001 “Ukraine without Kuchma” protests targeting an independent Ukraine’s later, similarly repressive president; founding human rights bodies that monitored and gave legal aid to the Euromaidan protesters in 2014; and fiercely criticizing Ukraine’s post-Maidan establishment and the growing menace of the far right that came with it.
When the Russian invasion began, things kicked up a notch. In July 2022, officers with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s chief law enforcement and domestic spy agency, entered Chemerys’s home, broke one of his ribs, and seized his electronics. (Chemerys provided Jacobin with medical documents from July 2022 documenting a fractured tenth rib). His crimes, according to the “official warning” he received after the visit, included “his openly pro-Russian position,” “criticism of the activities of the Ukrainian authorities” during the war, and denying Russian aggression against Ukraine by portraying the war since 2014 “as an internal civil conflict.”
“Political persecution of leftists and other dissidents has not become something new since February 24, 2022,” Chemerys says. “It’s just that since February 24, they have acquired a larger scale.”
Chemerys’s story is part of a little-reported fact about today’s war-torn Ukraine. While authoritarianism is nothing new in the country, it has severely worsened in the wake of the invasion, which has seen a centralization of power by Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, and a crackdown on dissidents and all things “pro-Russian.” A lack of Western media and public attention, coupled with US and European policies actively exacerbating it, are helping to fuel the problem.
Prison for Politics
Chemerys’s story isn’t unique. On March 10, 2022, poet, satirist, and television host Jan Taksyur disappeared after armed men claiming to be from the SBU searched his apartment, turning it upside down and seizing his savings, according to accounts provided to local news outlets and to Jacobin by his family. It took two days for his wife and children to find out where he was: in a pretrial detention center, where he was kept for more than five months on charges of treason, and unable to get medical help despite a cancer diagnosis — not an uncommon situation, according to the doctor who eventually treated him.
“He criticized the authorities under all our presidents. Since he is a satirist, this is his profession,” says his daughter Maria.
Over the years, Taksyur’s satire has hit both Vladimir Putin and Russia, but it has also taken aim at more politically inconvenient targets: from Biden, oligarchs, and the Ukrainian elite, to ultranationalists and the Maidan revolution. One poem imagines a Ukraine where Putin has vanished, only for the country’s domestic problems to remain unsolved. Another mocks the impulse to cast any dissent or unhappiness with life in Ukraine as Kremlin subversion — the very impulse Taksyur would fall victim to.
The pacifist Ruslan Kotsaba, proclaimed a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 2015, went through a similar ordeal. Kotsaba’s prosecution for “high treason” predated the Russian invasion, after a 2015 video post labeling the war over the Donbas a “fratricidal civil war” and urging resistance to military conscription got him labeled a traitor, prosecuted, and imprisoned for sixteen months.
But Kotsaba says things took another turn immediately after Moscow invaded last February, when the judges presiding over his case took on a “more aggressive and uncompromising attitude.” Sensing the court would now more likely take their side, he says, prosecutors recalled the dozens of witnesses whose absence had previously gummed up the trial’s progress and proceeded without them. Kotsaba believes his conviction had already been decided on.
“This staged process was for propaganda reasons, to ascribe popular antiwar sentiment to traitors and to blame people with antiwar views for the insufficient readiness of people for military recruitment,” he says today from Brooklyn, where he’s been able to secure temporary political asylum.
Repression Escalates
Both antiwar activists like Kotsaba and experts in Ukrainian politics say political repression in the country has become worse since the start of the war.
“Zelensky used the Russian invasion and the war as a pretext to eliminate most of the political opposition and potential rivals for power and to consolidate his largely undemocratic rule,” says University of Ottawa political scientist Ivan Katchanovski.
March 3, 2022 saw the Ukrainian criminal code amended to include significantly harsher punishments for treason when committed under martial law — imposed the day of the invasion — and adding the new offenses of “collaborative activities” and “assistance to the aggressor state,” meant to simplify the law and speed up investigations and trials. Such changes had been introduced earlier but failed to get off the ground until the war.
Under the new law, “collaborationism” includes a broad range of activities, from supporting aggression against Ukraine, to spreading propaganda in education, to protesting or handling information in ways that help the enemy. Mykyta Petrovets, a lawyer at the Kyiv-based Regional Center for Human Rights, acknowledged that how responsibly the new laws are wielded comes down to how authorities interpret them.
Since the law’s passage, treason and collaboration cases have exploded. According to data from the prosecutor general’s office, while 663 criminal proceedings for treason were recorded over the period 2014–2021, that number ballooned to 1,062 over 2022 alone. From February to March that year, the figure shot up more than fivefold, to 278. The number of collaborationist offenses, meanwhile, reached 3,851 between June, when they were first recorded, and the end of the year, with over six hundred referred to the courts.
For Chemerys, these changes are a way to silence Ukrainians with the “wrong” views and to make “speaking anything other than official propaganda in Ukraine” an imprisonable offense. Kotsaba charges they’re a way to keep society “scared and obedient” and to distract attention from Ukraine’s internal problems. Others point to Zelensky’s markedly weakened prewar approval ratings.
As reports of the arrest of dissidents began spreading early in the war, Zelensky and his party first suspended and then banned eleven opposition parties over “links to Russia.” Alongside the suspension of two of the 2019 election’s top vote-getting parties, most prominent was the ban on Ukraine’s second-largest bloc, the pro-Russian Opposition Platform — For Life (OPZZh). This occurred even though most of its major figures took a pro-Ukraine position in the war and have since become reliable backers of Zelensky’s policies in parliament.
OPZZh held nearly 10 percent of seats in parliament and, in 2020, achieved a major upset when its candidate beat a member of Zelensky’s party for the mayoralty of the president’s own hometown. A few months later, the two parties were running neck and neck in the polls, shortly before Zelensky began targeting OPZZh with sanctions and banning several of its media outlets on the basis that they were spreading Russian propaganda. In the process, he broke a previous explicit promise never to do such a thing and earned a scolding from the EU.
“We never know what’s the basis of these accusations, what’s the pro-Russian link, because there’s no proof that any of the workers of these TV channels worked for Russian intelligence,” says Ukrainian journalist and press-union leader Serhiy Guz, who adds that many of the anchors from the shuttered outlets went on to get jobs at pro-government channels. “It starts to look like a political accusation rather than a genuine crime.”
Since OPZZh’s ban in 2022, a number of its leaders — including cochairman and close Putin friend Viktor Medvedchuk, but also officials who have made no pro-Russian statements since the war — have been arrested, exiled, and stripped of their citizenship. Some, including the OPZZh candidate who became mayor of Zelensky’s hometown, have been killed.
“Medvedchuk is an odious figure,” says Olga Baysha, author of Democracy, Populism, and Neoliberalism in Ukraine. “However, one should not forget that Medvedchuk’s television channels represented the views of different groups within Ukrainian society that opposed Ukraine’s war against Donbas, the prosecution of dissenters, or Zelensky’s neoliberal reforms.”
“Public opinion polls before the Russian invasion showed that pro-Russian parties and politicians had strong support in many regions in the east and south of Ukraine,” says Katchanovski. “But pro-Russian sympathies primarily involved support for closer relations with Russia.”
Also banned were a collection of left-wing parties, like the Union of Left Forces and the Socialist Party of Ukraine, once an important force of leftist opposition that by 2022 had fallen into disarray. Since then — at the SBU’s “initiative,” according to the agency — the courts have upheld the ban on all these and three other parties, as well as upholding the earlier ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU). Part of a wider “decommunization” effort launched after the 2014 Maidan uprising, the KPU’s 2015 ban was condemned by Amnesty International as a “flagrant violation of freedom of expression and association” that “sets a dangerous precedent.”
Meanwhile, Zelensky has also centralized nearly all of Ukraine’s national TV channels into one government-controlled platform. Late last year, he further tightened government control of Ukraine’s media, signing into law a widely criticized bill that had earlier been considered too extreme by journalists, MPs, and media experts, with one press-freedom activist calling it “extremely toxic.” The law gives unprecedented powers to Ukraine’s state broadcasting regulator to fine and revoke the license of media outlets, block publications without a court order, and force social media platforms and search engines to remove content. Combating Russian propaganda was again the stated basis for the measure.
“All opposition figures previously promoting the peaceful resolution of conflict with Russia have either fled or are in prison,” says Kotsaba. “Any thought about peace talks is perceived as playing for Putin, as the work of enemy agents.”
“Mass media that could present different points of view were closed in Ukraine and the majority of Western mass media also ignored information about political persecution in Ukraine,” says Chemerys. “Therefore, the only way to report on what is happening with human rights in Ukraine was obviously to create a Telegram channel.”
The Hunt for Traitors
One of those Telegram channels was “Repression of the Left and dissenters in Ukraine,” which from its creation on March 15 documented the deteriorating state of political freedoms and human rights in wartime Ukraine.
“Charges of state treason and collaboration are often trumped up and used as a form of political repression without any evidence of actual treason and collaboration,” says Katchanovski.
Some of the cases highlighted in the channel bear this out. On April 14, Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation announced it had taken into custody a Mariupol city council member and leader of the local OPZZh branch, charging he had spoken “in favor of restoring economic ties with Russia” prior to the war, and “that on the eve of the military invasion, the collaborator on his official page in Facebook wrote a call for the overthrow of the current Ukrainian government.” The latter is a highly questionable interpretation of the culprit’s February 22 post, which read simply: “The authorities that failed to restore peace in Ukraine and reintegrate the Donbas must go.”
A week later, the SBU announced it had “neutralized” the Workers’ Front of Ukraine in Odessa, a Marxist organization founded in late 2019, charging the group was “coordinated and funded by the occupiers.” Though providing no evidence for that charge, the SBU cited as among the group’s subversive activities the printing of “anti-Ukrainian materials,” trying “to spread the forbidden communist symbolism with calls for the resuscitation of the Soviet Union,” and planning “mass rallies.”
The outlets reprinting the SBU’s charges added that the group had also written “anti-capitalist posts.” They pointed to one published in the war’s second week, which lamented that the war had rehabilitated Ukraine’s oligarchs and political elites while strengthening reactionary extremists, and that it wouldn’t have happened without the “diligent efforts of both domestic and foreign big capital.” The organization told Jacobin that the member detained in Odessa was released, and that accusations of Kremlin links are a “way to discredit the organization” that “was used before the war” to widespread ridicule, but has become more effective since the invasion.
Drawing particular international attention has been the arrest and prosecution of communists Mikhail Kononovich, leader of the KPU’s youth wing, and his twin brother Aleksander. Ethnic Belarussians with Ukrainian citizenship, the brothers were accused by the SBU of working for both Russian and Belarussian intelligence and of holding “pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views.” The Kononoviches say that the accusations are fabricated and politically motivated and, in a recent statement, charged that they had been beaten and tortured while detained for seven months, stating that “now in Ukraine, ‘communist’ means death.” Before the war, they had campaigned against Zelensky’s push to allow private sell-offs of Ukrainian farmland and sparked controversy for a variety of views, including advocacy for the rights of Russian speakers and against fascist movements in the country.
They’re far from the only leftists targeted. In March, a Telegram news channel approvingly posted images of an alleged “saboteur” being arrested in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The figure was identified as left-wing activist Oleksandr Matyushenko. In the past, Matyushenko has charged that “after Euromaidan, the right[-wing] consensus fully dominates Ukraine,” and that government and right-wing opposition “compete with each other in anti-communism and xenophobia.” He has also criticized far-right militias like the Azov Regiment and the oligarch bankrolling them. One of the photos of his arrest shows a man’s hand hovering over a bloodied Matyushenko, holding the Nazi-inspired Azov emblem.
Matyushenko’s wife later told the German left-wing newspaper Junge Welt that SBU members had entered and searched their apartment, confiscating computers and other property, while another man in military uniform — the one brandishing Azov’s emblem — spit in her face, cut her hair with a knife, and beat her husband for hours. The two were later taken to SBU headquarters, she said, where officers interrogated them, threatening to slice off their ears.
Kharkiv activist Spartak Golovachev, a critic of the Ukrainian government who had earlier been detained for taking part in anti-Maidan protests in the region, was likewise reportedly arrested in March, when he was delivering humanitarian aid to local residents. His last Facebook post said simply that people were “break[ing] down the door armed in Ukrainian uniform. Goodbye.”
It echoed the final post of Odessa-based newspaper editor Yuriy Tkachev (“They have come for me. It was nice to talk”) before his March arrest by the SBU. A prominent blogger attacked in the past for spreading “pro-Russian narratives” — like backing the 2014 anti-Maidan protesters in Odessa and investigating far-right involvement in a deadly 2014 fire there that left dozens of them killed — Tkachev was initially accused of “high treason” for allegedly producing “combat propaganda in the interests of the Russian occupiers” and giving out sensitive military information. Yet the evidence supposedly backing this charge is tenuous at best: screenshots show Tkachev asking members of his Telegram channel for information about what kind of fighting, if any, was happening where they were located.
After searching his home, the SBU claimed to have found explosives. Both Tkachev and his wife both vehemently rejected the charge, saying that the explosives had likely been planted. Among other things, Tkachev has questioned in court why he would keep explosives in a laundry basket with his linen, where the SBU says they were found. Prosecutors also noted a batch of items with Soviet iconography they found in the couple’s apartment.
“Repression, without a doubt, created an atmosphere of fear in society,” says Chemerys. “Ukrainians are afraid to express their opinions — probably more than in the time of the USSR, which I, as a dissident at the time, remember.”
“All Ukrainian journalists and bloggers who did not want to promote Zelensky’s version of ‘truth’ had to either shut up (voluntarily or under duress) or, if possible, emigrate,” says Baysha.
One such journalist is Vasyl Muravitsky, who has found asylum in Finland as his prosecution — which began before the war — has continued in absentia. Muravitsky has been charged with, among other things, high treason and violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity, though the specific accusations of the SBU, the press, and others are that he disseminated “anti-Ukrainian” content, and that he was working on orders from Moscow.
His case was widely criticized. Amnesty called it “unfounded” and declared him a prisoner of conscience, while the head of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine said authorities hadn’t provided any evidence. Reporters Without Borders argued the details of the case “indicate that he was arrested above all for working for Russian state media.”
“A lot of journalists self-censor now,” says Guz, who argues that the press keeps not only military information secret, but general criticisms of the government. “The danger is that when we stay quiet about the problems, we eliminate the ways to solve things.”
A Rash of Blacklists
This crackdown has been assisted by the spread of private blacklists of alleged traitors. One of the most notorious is Myrotvorets, or “Peacemaker” — founded in 2014 by interior ministry official and former MP Anton Gerashchenko — which the UN high commissioner for human rights recommended Ukrainian law enforcement investigate six years ago. As far back as 2015, days after the site posted their personal information, a journalist and a former MP who had both taken part in the “anti-Maidan” movement were gunned down outside their homes, with a nationalist group taking credit.
Over the years, as the site’s list of names ballooned to more than 130,000, it has included everyone from NGO activists, foreign politicians, and pro-Russian separatists, to Orthodox priests, Western celebrities, and even Kremlin critics — anyone who happened to take the “wrong” position in the eyes of the country’s nationalists. At one point, it featured the more than two hundred people who survived the 2019 crash of a Russian passenger jet headed for illegally annexed Crimea.
These names are added by a secret panel of unknown administrators, and the blacklist’s use as a resource for law enforcement — along with the involvement of a former SBU officer and its listing of the CIA’s headquarters of Langley, Virginia as an address — has prompted much speculation.
The site may be most notorious for labeling as “terrorist collaborators” and doxing more than five thousand journalists and others who applied for press accreditation to work in separatist areas in 2016, sparking threats against them and their families. Despite this, Gerashchenko was later appointed under Zelensky to head journalist safety, of all things, at the interior ministry. He has since become a prominent Ukrainian voice in the West since the invasion.
While Myrotvorets’s scandals have diminished its standing, a liberal alternative has appeared in the form of Chesno (“Honestly”), a prominent NGO originally focused on fair elections and good government that had played a leading role in the Euromaidan revolution. On March 17, it announced it was launching a “Register of Perpetrators of Treason” focusing on politicians, judges, media figures, and law enforcement officers.
At the time of writing, it listed 1,118 names, many of them sporting rap sheets as dubious as some of those targeted by the SBU. Chemerys (a “propagandist of leftist views”) is among them, with his alleged crimes including “condemn[ing] the struggle against collaborators,” running a telegram channel “where Marxism was justified,” demanding the far-right Azov Regiment disband, and advocating for implementing the Minsk agreements.
Chesno allows Ukrainians to anonymously accuse “potential traitors” through a web form and submit evidence (while also giving them the option of not providing any). Charging that “treason has become a family affair,” it has urged Ukrainians to submit family members of accused traitors, and has promoted and lauded the “guerrilla glory” of the successful assassination of alleged collaborationists in territories like Kherson retaken by the Ukrainian military.
Collaboration in the Eye of the Beholder
Yet the line between a collaborator and someone trying to survive can become markedly blurry under foreign occupation. When asked, in light of the new anti-collaborationist laws, what options Ukrainians in occupied territories had, Petrovets explained that they should either gather evidence that they were forced to cooperate with Russian forces — a “dangerous” act, he acknowledged — or opt for “the best option” and flee, something he recognized “not everyone can do.”
Indeed, one Kherson rabbi who, in line with his religious beliefs, stayed put when Russian forces rolled in so he could keep providing residents with food and medicine, later came under suspicion of collaboration when Ukrainian forces retook the city. His was just one of several similar cases documented by the New York Times.
Feminist activists from Ukraine’s south and southeast told Jacobin about similar blacklists being compiled in Russian-occupied towns. (The activists’ names are being withheld to protect their identities).
“There are no clear rules and algorithms for who should be on these lists and for which accusations,” one says. “A lot of these lists are done in an emotional way. This is usually done by a local official somewhere or through public groups and social media.”
Numerous Telegram channels exist to name and shame Ukrainians for collaborating with the occupying forces. Often posts can contain no specific accusations. When they do, most are unsubstantiated and can veer in troubling directions. One post accuses several women, one as young as nineteen, of having “intimate” relations with Russian forces. The lists contain full names, photos, social media accounts, and even phone numbers and addresses of the accused. For the “Repression of the Left” channel, which documented many such cases, these instances were ominous signs of the country’s drift toward “totalitarianism.”
Lists like these have also come from officials, with the southeastern town of Melitopol’s mayor publishing a list of ninety people, most of whom were women, the activists told Jacobin. While some residents did genuinely try to assist Russian forces, many of those accused “were just random people,” one of them says, such as those appointed as school directors and administrators.
Indeed, by October last year, twelve collaborator cases were opened into teachers in the Kharkiv region, who were held criminally liable for continuing to work under the Russian occupation and implementing Russian educational policies, or for accepting positions they were appointed to by the invading forces. One Telegram list is replete with lists of educators at schools and kindergartens named as alleged collaborators. One “junior teacher,” charges one, “went to work with the orcs as a school headmaster,” citing a Facebook post informing people about an upcoming medical examination at a local hospital.
It’s not just teachers. One elderly Kupyansk resident, the director of a local soccer stadium during the Russian occupation of the city, was charged with providing “assistance to the aggressor state,” facing as many as twelve years in prison. His crime? According to police, “the attacker organized and supervised the holding of football matches and competitions,” “hired employees for complex maintenance of the institution,” and “held cultural and mass events with elements of propaganda.” A railway official was similarly accused of treason for supervising, under the occupation, the repair of a station damaged in the fighting.
Likewise charged with “collaborative activity” is the man appointed by Russian forces to head the Izyum Central Hospital (which continued to operate and save lives during the occupation despite bombing and shelling), who at one point allegedly urged residents to cooperate with occupying forces. The official criminal complaint against him details as his crime that he “voluntarily took a position related to the performance of organizational and administrative tasks . . . in the occupation administration of the aggressor state.”
For some Ukrainians, “collaboration” hasn’t meant actual material assistance to invading forces, but simply holding the wrong views, often by expressing pro-Russian sentiment or support for Moscow’s invasion. This was the case for five accused collaborators in Zhytomyr, most of them in their fifties and sixties, whose crimes as detailed by police were saying such things on social media and in public spaces. Another elderly woman was charged for telling fellow shoppers that Russia was merely invading to “defeat Nazism.” In one on-the-ground report, a seventy-five-year-old woman in liberated Kherson was referred to the police as a potential collaborator for saying “it was better when the Russians were here” and that Crimea belongs to Moscow.
At the same time, Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine have seen a spate of killings of officials installed by occupying forces. This came after Gerashchenko’s disclosure in April that a “Ukrainian Mossad” (referring to the Israeli security service) had been created that “works in the occupied territories,” so that “when you hear that someone in the [occupied territories] suddenly died, this is the work of our special services.”
Arresting Authoritarianism
“The war is moving the society towards a more authoritarian life,” says Guz. As one example, he points to a newfound social acceptance of tying lawbreakers up outdoors in the freezing cold.
But there are others. Suspecting “pro-Russian” views and even collaboration with Moscow, the SBU has been carrying out raids on hundreds of churches and monasteries belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which falls under the patriarchate of its war-supporting Russian wing (though nearly three hundred Russian Orthodox clergy have condemned the war). Dozens of the UOC’s clergy have been either sanctioned or are being criminally investigated, even as the church has declared independence from Moscow, condemned the war, and supported Ukrainian forces. A draft bill introduced in December to ban the UOC and ensure Ukraine’s “spiritual independence,” in Zelensky’s words, caused an uproar.
Crackdowns on Russian cultural heritage — one of the policies that fueled civil strife in the country where many speak and ethnically identify as Russian — has intensified. The war has seen numerous regional and local bans on Russian products, and speaking and even learning Russian, so that by November, there were nearly no schools left that taught the language. June saw the Zelensky government create a special council to coordinate “the country’s movement for de-Russification”; parliament passed several laws curtailing Russian books and music. Fines for speaking Russian, even for the mayor of a Russian-speaking city, aren’t out of the question, while a leading university outright banned the language from its campus. This February, the government celebrated purging the country’s libraries of nineteen million books, some written in Ukrainian but from the Soviet era, and eleven million written in Russian.
“The problem with Ukraine’s struggle against the so-called ‘pro-Russian agenda’ is that this has been an agenda of millions of Ukrainian citizens whose opinions were completely ignored,” says Baysha. “What is called ‘de-Russification’ is in fact Ukraine’s war against its own citizens for whom the Russian language is a mother tongue and the Russian Orthodox Church is a religion of their ancestors.”
Much of this is the lamentable product of wartime jingoism, which typically sees an upsurge in countries that come under attack. But some of it is also being driven by US and European policy.
While its 2022 financials haven’t been released, in 2021, Chesno (the liberal NGO now running its own blacklist of alleged traitors) received 42 percent of its funding from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), which contributed the lion’s share of that money. The NDI is one of the private NGOs aligned with one of the United States’ two parties, and is itself funded by the NED, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the US State Department, among others.
Meanwhile, Zelensky’s draconian media law wasn’t passed over Europe’s objections, but at its urging. When first introduced in 2020, it was with the express backing of EU bodies, its passage tied to Ukraine’s eventual accession to the union. Despite eventually stalling under a hail of criticism — and despite clearly violating the EU-Ukrainian association agreement’s provision on “respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms in the country, particularly media freedom” — the Council of Europe and the EU delegation to Ukraine called for its immediate adoption at the time. The EU delegation likewise gave its thumbs-up when the bill was resurrected last year, despite being condemned by press-freedom groups in both Ukraine and Europe.
US and European taxpayers, in other words, are unwittingly being made complicit in the country’s backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Western governments have strong influence over the Ukrainian government and its policies since Ukraine is a US client state and became almost totally dependent on Western support during the war with Russia,” says Katchanovski. “They can make the Zelensky government follow policies that pertain to democracy and the rule of law.”
Indeed, for years, the United States and EU have used a combination of financial aid, future EU membership, and political pressure to push Ukrainian leadership to enact various reforms. US analysts and commentators have already suggested using such aid to do everything from nudging the Ukrainian government to the negotiating table, to advancing anti-corruption and good governance efforts. Why not add steering the country away from the illiberal, authoritarian direction it has taken during the war to that list?
“It should be taken seriously, as seriously as the military aid, as it’s the defense of the democratic institutions,” Guz says. “The war is making the government much more authoritarian, because it’s a self-defense instinct of society. It’s precisely the role of the West to help Ukraine not to get to the same level of authoritarianism as in Russia.”
“And the West isn’t responding to the risks that exist nowadays,” he adds.
But that can’t happen if the Western public isn’t even aware of the country’s authoritarian lurch in the first place. Making sure it is aware is the task of the press, whose uncritical portrayal of Zelensky has exasperated Ukrainian human rights campaigners.
“Western media have not been presenting their readers and viewers meaningful accounts of what has been going on,” says Baysha. “Western journalists overwhelmingly take Zelensky’s words at face value.”
In the meantime, Chemerys continues to speak out against authoritarianism in Ukraine, despite a leukemia diagnosis that put him in the hospital for months. Though growing repression has driven Ukrainian leftists underground, he says, he’s certain left-wing movements will eventually return stronger than before, being, in his eyes, the only movements that can offer Ukraine a better postwar model.
He continues to be targeted for his efforts. In December, after Ukraine’s central bank withdrew a controversial order mandating that banks check the financial activities of those listed on the Myrotverts blacklist, the Vienna-based Raiffeisen Bank offered to do so in its place voluntarily — using the liberal, US-funded Chesno’s list instead. On top of everything else, Chemerys was soon ordered to explain the funds being credited to his account. He released a statement rejecting the notion that having Marxist views should require special justification and condemned “grant-eaters like Chesno, together with the Kyiv authorities and the ultra-right” for turning Ukraine “into a country where everyone should think, speak, and pray only as they and their Western masters want,” he wrote in a statement. “Marxism needs no justification.”
