Putin’s war of aggression has brought the Ukrainian nation together as never before. Ukrainians have surprised the world by holding all the country’s biggest cities and fighting ferociously and skilfully for their freedom and independence. A recent Rating Group poll showed that 93% of Ukrainians think that Ukraine will win and 98% see Russia as an enemy; 280,000 Ukrainians have returned to Ukraine in the midst of the war, essentially men who want to fight for their nation.
Putin had expected a cake walk in Kharkiv and Kyiv with the Russian soldiers being greeted with flowers. How could he be so wrong? Is it because three of his closest cronies are formally Ukrainian, Yuri and Mikhail Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko? With them being Ukrainian by blood Putin might have thought that they really understood Ukraine, but in reality they are just crooks from St. Petersburg. Putin seems to have listened more to these half-wits than to the Russian intelligence services, if we are to believe anonymous Telegram channels.
Ukraine appears to have gone through a real national awakening in this war. Ukrainians knew that they were brave and skilful, but they have rarely considered themselves united and well organized, but that is what Putin’s war on Ukraine has proven them to be.
I saw such a transformation once before. In the summer of 1979, I worked as Scandinavian consul in Szczecin on the Polish Baltic coast. In June of that year, Pope John Paul II came to Gdansk. It was highly controversial that the Pope visited a communist country for the first time ever, and he was of course Polish, vehemently opposed to communism. I talked to many of the two million Poles who went there to greet their Pope. They were full of enthusiasm over how the Polish nation had proven itself. They had thought of themselves as anarchic and disorderly, but when the police disappeared their order was perfect.
One year later, Solidarity was born in these coastal towns. Its foundation was the new Polish self-confidence that the Pope had endowed in them. The Soviet Union was still strong enough to force the Polish communists to clamp down on Solidarity, but one decade later Solidarity liberated and reformed Poland, making it the fastest growing country in Europe for three decades.
Because of Putin’s war, Ukraine might have reached that critical level of national and popular consciousness. In Poland, the most important uniting force was and remains a common understanding of Russia as the main enemy. Today, almost all Ukrainians have arrived at the same view.
You might protest: But haven’t we seen this several times before? No, not really. The three previous relevant occasions were the independence of 1991, the Orange Revolution in 2004, and Euromaidan in 2014. Each was a promising start, but they did not suffice.
I visited Kyiv during the second week of August in 1991 together with the late Professor Oleh Havrylyshyn. George Soros had asked us to interview all the leading economists in Ukraine and evaluate them. I was shocked. None of the senior people had a clue. Their general idea was that they only need to cut loose from Russia then Ukraine would become wealthy. None of the senior people understood anything about market economics. The Ukrainian government became a coalition of the old nomenklatura and nationalists, neither of which cared much about institutional reforms.
The second apparent opportunity was the Orange Revolution in 2004. At that time, I had great hope. The UNDP had asked Professor Oleksandr Paskhaver and me to co-chair a blue-ribbon commission on a reform program for the new president. We did so with an excellent commission of a score of people, half Ukrainian, half foreign experts. After the revolution, alas, nobody wanted to listen. One wise Ukrainian told me: “Don’t you understand? They are all victors. They know that they know it all.”
Rather than carrying out any badly-needed reforms, the administration fell apart in internal quarrels. The Orange Revolution was too easy: It seemed like a fairy tale. The Ukrainian economy had grown by 12 percent in 2004, so there was no sense of crisis, and there were too few well-educated Ukrainians who could compete for the top jobs.
The Euromaidan was a much more serious event. The shock of 125 people who were killed on Maidan was severe. The economy was in severe crisis, and then Ukraine had a multitude of young well-educated people. The new leaders brought in heavyweight technocrats to resolve the economic crisis, which was successfully done. However, the political, judicial, and structural reforms stopped halfway. A remaining concern was that one-fifth of the electorate remained pro-Russian.
After Ukraine has won over Putin, Ukraine is facing a brave new world. A massive reconstruction of the whole country will be needed, but thanks to frozen Russian central bank reserves of some $400 billion that the G-7 countries can confiscate there will be plenty of funds to rebuild Ukraine. The G-7 will not release these funds for free. They will require that Ukraine carries out the judicial and structural reforms that it should have done long ago to minimize corruption. And now Ukraine has all the competent staff it needs.
For Ukraine, this should be the democratic and reform breakthrough that Poland so successfully undertook in 1989. Note that Poland would hardly have been able to do so without sufficient and timely Western financing. Now it should be Ukraine’s turn.
