Dialogues on War. Olesya Khromeychuk and Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash: I have been travelling, studying, writing about, and worrying about Europe for fifty years now, which is a period covered in my book Homelands. What I never imagined when I started writing was that it would go from one major land war in Europe to another. The war in Ukraine is, without question, the most important thing happening in Europe at the moment.

I have been on two unforgettable visits, one to Lviv in December and another to Kyiv in February, where I met, among others, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, Chief of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, and also many other intellectuals. In Lviv, I met Yevhen Hulevych, an editor and translator, who had seen the Ukrainian edition of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes through to publication. After 24 February 2022, he volunteered to fight, was wounded, came back to Lviv, got better, and returned to the front, week after week fighting in the terrible battle for Kherson, living in a foxhole he had dug out himself, wounded in the back and both legs. When I met him in December, he was just starting to get better and he was determined to come back – because his comrades needed experienced soldiers like him. ‘I hope I will see what my country is like after the war’, he said. Yevhen Hulevych was killed in the fighting near Bakhmut on 31 December 2022. I would like to dedicate this conversation to him.

Apart from this terrible suffering, there is volya [ed. – freedom and the will to fight for it] in Ukraine. This is a key Ukrainian word for me, symbolising will, courage, and fighting spirit. In many ways, it felt to me like 2022-2023 is for Ukraine what 1940 was for Britain – the moment of great national emergency, but also of great national solidarity and spirit, one that defines your country for centuries ahead.

Clearly, the big offensive coming in the next few weeks is going to be absolutely crucial. It is vital that it succeeds in taking a big chunk of territory and clearly inflicting a big defeat on the Russian side. Time is of the essence for Ukraine. What I saw in Bosnia in the early 1990s was that after a year the interest began to fade and the war slid down the news agenda. If this drags on, there is a real danger for Ukraine there. This is why I anticipate eagerly, but also somewhat nervously, this offensive. It is so important that Ukraine is seen to be winning this year.

Olesya Khromeychuk: It is important that we dedicate our conversations to those who are fighting in and out of trenches in Ukraine.

We have entered this strange period of anniversaries. On 24 February, many people revisited that day of shock, which marked the beginning of this particular brutality inflicted by the Russian army on the Ukrainian nation. There was also the anniversary of the Mariupol Drama Theatre bombing, and the anniversary of Bucha, or rather our realisation of what actually happened there during the Russian occupation. On 1 April 2022, we started to see the photographic and video evidence of the massacre that the Russians left behind them.

It is very important to reflect on what made this possible. Where did we go wrong as an international community? Why did we not realise sooner (I know Ukrainians did) that mass atrocities are part of the Russian military strategy? As historians, we both know that the Soviet army accepted mass rapes, looting, and war crimes as a way to wage wars, and that this culture was inherited by the subsequent post-Soviet armies. Ukraine has addressed this legacy. Since 2014, we have seen huge reforms and the Ukrainian army has transformed. It was the opposite in Russia. War crimes were normalised and encouraged; we saw them in Syria, Chechnya, and Ukraine. It is the idea of impunity, that Russians never had to face punishment for the perpetration of war crimes, that led to this normalisation of violence.

Ensuring that justice prevails is the only way to ensure that peace, which comes after victory, is lasting. Often people use post-Second World War practices, the Nuremberg trial in particular, or the experience of the Yugoslav wars as a blueprint. I would like to take inspiration from Oleksandra Matviichuk, Head of the Center for Civil Liberties, the organisation that was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, who says that we do not necessarily need to follow these examples. We are here to change the systems if the systems do not work. We need to ensure that justice prevails in Ukraine.

Timothy Garton Ash: Thanks to PEN Ukraine, I visited Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka, the famous sites of atrocities. In the imagination of the world, Bucha in particular has taken its place beside Srebrenica. It is the evident horror of people with their hands tied behind their backs being shot in the back of their heads. It is also the word that rhymes with ‘butcher’, which has become a synonym for barbaric ‘butchery’. This trip was all about documentation and accountability. Everybody in their different ways is working on it.

I would like to nuance the issue of justice. It is great that Vladimir Putin is indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, but it is a long way before you get him to The Hague. For me, as someone who witnessed the war in former Yugoslavia, the fact that Slobodan Milošević ended his days in The Hague and Radovan Karadžić is serving his life sentence in a British prison, is a fantastic achievement for justice and international liberal order. I pray it will happen for Ukraine one day too.

Everything that Russia has done has had a thick bodyguard of lies. My view is that as well as looking for judicial accountability, we should also be going down the route of documenting the truth as something of value in itself. I spent three weeks in South Africa in 1997, looking at the truth commission headed by Desmond Tutu. One of the things South Africans said at that time was, ‘If we cannot have justice, at least we can have the truth, and truth itself is a kind of justice’. Particularly because of the role of lies in what Russia is doing, we should think of creating something like an International Truth Commission to ensure that the facts are documented beyond any reasonable doubt and publicly acknowledged. Of course, Russian propaganda will still deny the whole thing and so will the ordinary Russians.

Olesya Khromeychuk: I could not agree with you more. When people say that we cannot rely on surveys and polls from Russia because people are too scared to answer honestly, what we can rely on is anecdotal evidence that exists in Ukraine from people who used to speak to their relatives in Russia.

Timothy Garton Ash: The same thing was true of Germany in 1944-45. At the beginning of Homelands, I go back to the village which my father’s British gun troop occupied in 1945 and talk to the old Germans. One of them, who was in the Hitler Youth during the war, said that he had believed in the German victory until the very day the British forces arrived. A tragedy for Russia is that it is unlikely to experience that kind of total, undeniable defeat. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, German president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered a speech in which he said that defeat was the best thing that happened to Germany; it was a foundation for their freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Olesya Khromeychuk: I think a sufficient defeat for the Russian population would come with the understanding that the imperialist project is not working for them. And for that, all we need to do is make sure we liberate Crimea.

Timothy Garton Ash: Exactly! I am so glad you mentioned that. In the next few weeks, if things go well and the offensive goes south to the Sea of Azov, the West is going to be confronted with something that it simply has not faced up to.

Short and long-term strategic arguments are important here. Short-term, this is something that really matters to Putin in Russia, and it can be pressurised quickly. While Donbas is a long, long grind, if you cut the Kerch Bridge, Russians will end up encircled in Crimea.

The long-term strategic argument, in my view, is two-fold. Number one: Ukraine can never have proper security if you have Crimea, this huge terrestrial aircraft carrier, threatening you. Secondly: the Black Sea can never be secure. Whereas if you have NATO-member Ukraine on the north, and NATO-member Turkey on the south, then it is protected – and all of this, of course, is a lesson for China.

Olesya Khromeychuk: For more than eight years, whenever I raised the question of Crimea in public debates, I was called naive and emotional. Crimea was a done deal. Then I started to hear less and less of those conversations, and now, at least, there is some discussion and contemplation.

It is not pragmatic to allow Crimea to continue being occupied by the Russians for all the reasons you just identified, but also because it will continue to be an already highly militarised launching platform against all Ukrainian territory, which will rely on resources, such as freshwater, from southern Ukraine.

We should not brush the ethical reasons away too. We have been watching – and accepting by not doing anything – the genocide of Crimean Tatars since 2014. Again, as historians, we know that it had already been attempted once by Stalin in 1944, and the fact that Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea after the collapse of the USSR is a sign of their will – and a little bit of a miracle. We know that the vast majority of Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia are Crimean Tatars. What moral right do we have to accept this?

Those who discuss concessions often talk about territory. They do not talk about people. If you do not have personal connections to a place, you are unable to apply identity to it.

Ukraine has suffered from this idea in people’s heads of it being either a complete black hole or a small country (when, in fact, it is the largest country within Europe) that has no identity, something of a buffer zone between Russia and Europe.

When teaching my students your article, ‘The Puzzle of Central Europe’, written in 1999 for the New York Review of Books, I have always been slightly taken aback by your references to Ukraine there. When describing the difference between the two types of Europe, you wrote about going across the border to Uzhhorod and being met by ‘post-communist mafiosi’ there, short-haired men in leather jackets. And that is not completely untrue, of course; that is exactly what you could find in 1999 Ukraine. But Ukraine that I remember is different. It is the country of exciting theatre and fantastically brave literature, and yet lots of people associated it with darkness and fear. Has it changed? Have people discovered this terra incognita?

Timothy Garton Ash: What we see here is two things layered on top of each other. One I call ‘intra-European orientalism’, the othering of Eastern Europe as a whole, which goes back to the Enlightenment. On top of that, you see the failure to see Ukraine as anything other than a part of Russia. You are up against this double-layering, which persisted for so long. To answer your question, yes, things have changed dramatically but there is still a long way to go. I myself plead guilty to identifying Central Europe and sometimes stopping at the frontier to Western Ukraine in the 1990s.

I saw the new Ukraine in Kyiv during the Orange Revolution, and then, of course, in 2014 and 2022. I think everybody now knows that Ukraine is a large, important, independent, sovereign, and distinctive European country. For me, the Ukrainian version of volya is particularly fascinating. But there is still a way to go to overcome the stereotypes and ignorance.

Frankly, I am not sure there is all that much you could have done about it. Unless your oligarchs and billionaires were really prepared to put a hell of a lot of money into funding chairs in Ukrainian studies, history, and culture at great Western universities, which is now beginning to happen.

Olesya Khromeychuk: But not thanks to oligarchs. Going back to my time at Oxford, when considering doing my PhD in Ukrainian history, I fell between the cracks: I realised that the Russian and Eurasian Centre did not have the necessary expertise, and the European Studies Centre did not have it either. Ukraine did not fit into either of those places.

Frankly, I have not seen a massive shift yet, even though there is a lot of will around among our colleagues and grassroots initiatives, and a lot of pressure coming from Ukrainian scholars who are now in the West as scholars at risk. How do we turn situational interest in Ukraine, caused by Russian genocidal attempts to wipe Ukrainian culture, nation and statehood, into structural change? How do we make this epistemological shift irreversible?

Timothy Garton Ash: There is a huge problem of inertia in the structuring of academia – because whole careers have been made, buildings dedicated to, and funding steered towards something called Russian and East European studies. This relic of empire builds not only on institutional interest but also on intra-European orientalism.

You are absolutely right. Bringing on structural change is going to take a hell of a lot of work. We need the chairs and the courses in Ukrainian studies. My way forward would not be operating with terms like ‘Central European’ or ‘East European’, my way would be just to say ‘European studies’. We want not to develop a new subdivision to replace an old subdivision, but to move on to studying Europe as a whole.

Olesya Khromeychuk: Perhaps we should think about decentring our focus, moving away from Western Europe in European studies and starting to value voices that have the experience of volya and fighting for it.

These voices that come from Poland, the Baltic States, and Central and Northern Europe, have been dismissed for so long. They have not been valued as credible voices because they do not come dressed in outfits that speak authority to us.

Why do we still have this imperialist gaze on other parts of Europe and why do we continue to maintain it? We have to decentre our attention. How do we do that when for so many people to understand this part of Europe it had seemed sufficient to read Dostoyevsky, to know a few Russian composers, and to explore the so-called ‘great Russian culture’ completely uncritically? There was a lack of anti-imperial critique of Russian culture through which the entire region was seen. This has to change. This is not just about Ukraine. And I think that this is the work that we need to do in the West; it is not necessarily the job for Ukrainians, Poles or Estonians.

Timothy Garton Ash: I think it has to be a joint enterprise.

I sometimes talk about the decolonisation of the Western mind. When we speak about decolonising the German view of Ukraine, we do not mean that they see it through the lens of German colonial history, although there was one. They see it through Russian colonial history. The subject of empire is back big-time in our culture because we, in countries like Britain and France, have not sufficiently faced up to our own colonial past.

There is a lot to be done by people outside Ukraine. But Ukrainians have to tell their stories in ways which penetrate colonial mindsets. We have to take those voices seriously.

There is going to be a really critical moment which I call ‘the day after’. As long as the war is going on, there is going to be a focus on Ukraine. But I saw what happened with Bosnia, with Poland after 1981, and with Czechoslovakia after 1968. Every publisher now wants their Ukrainian book, every producer wants their Ukrainian programme, and every theatre wants their Ukrainian piece. This lasts for about six months and then everybody moves on. Preparing for the day after, I think, preparing to have the more lasting influence is something worth thinking quite hard about right now.