Possession of the Future: Ukraine as the Anti-Russia
The anti-corruption protests reveal conflicting philosophies of time, and the importance of controlling perceptions of the future
Like many people who know Ukrainians, I spend much of my nights when outside Ukraine following various Telegram channels and the Air Alert! app, and all of my mornings checking in with friends.
The past couple of evenings and mornings (I am not in Ukraine at the moment) I have been checking in about the protests and trying to gauge thoughts and responses.
I have argued with Ukrainians about the rights and wrongs of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to enact a law in effect removing the independence of Ukraine’s key anti-corruption agencies. There are excellent commentaries on that, to which it is pointless my adding here.
More worryingly, I have argued with Ukrainians about an age-old issue within Ukrainian political and social discourse: how to delineate organic Ukrainian concerns from Russian interference.
This has been a massive issue for many years, certainly from when I was in the Foreign Office. And it persists.
Despite concerns from some that the Russians might be behind the protests, Ukrainians at the actual demonstrations assured me that the decision to turn up was organic. I have high confidence in their assessment. I have observed many Ukrainian protests from around 2005, and spent a long time on the Maidan in 2013 and 2014, and have a good sense of what a natural protest looks like.
(I have observed many marches, pickets, and similar events in Russia, and have a good sense of what is natural and what something state-organised looks like.)
Many Ukrainians are very proud of the fact that they can go out and protest. One friend wrote this morning that they are the ‘opposite of Russians’.
Image: Screenshot from the Ukraine Instagram account, 23 July
Russians, unsurprisingly, both want to embrace and play down this characterisation, depending on how they want to accentuate division. Their messaging is fractious and consistently inconsistent: Russian President Vladimir Putin has often called Ukraine the ‘Anti-Russia’, playing on Russian cultural-social apophaticism obsessions and their fear of ends.
Aleksey Mukhin, head of the Centre for Political Information, told state television yesterday that the Ukrainian protestors are being manipulated to demonstrate—and protected by—a Klychko-Poroshenko-US bloc. This supposed American cover explains, for Mukhin, why the protestors are free to go out without being grabbed by the TSKs, the roaming military pressgangs.
Mukhin also said that Zelenskyy was not controlled by the Americans, and claimed that Zelenskyy was frustrating the Americans (a marked diversion from other Russian claims that Zelenskyy was only acting on behalf of the United States) through his capriciousness
Another clear delineation the Ukrainians are making is that their opposition to Law No. 12414 does not mean opposition to the state or its course in the war.
The Russians, on the other hand, appear determined to bring both these issues together, trying to push Ukrainians to expand their demonstrations to condemn the TSKs and by extension to Kyiv’s continuing defence against Russian savagery.
Whose future is it, anyway?
The thing that most excised me about Zelenskyy’s decision was that it was a temporal shock, grabbing me from my perception of Ukraine as a country on a forward course, despite the war, embracing philosophies of time as linear (or at least cyclical) and progressive. Instead I was engulfed with recollections of parts of Ukrainian politics that were content to embrace the past and reject notions of historical movement.
I was also swamped with memories of tents across the Maidan—some of my very first recollections of Ukraine—with banners reading ‘down with everyone’.
The developments over the past couple of days have brought those two concepts into conflict, a tension largely disregarded during the full-scale invasion.
They also reveal that Moscow’s war is one about visions of the future, whether time should be viewed as progressive and universal, or essentially halted and defined by vertical, paternalistic concepts.
This is a key point in messaging and information manipulation: much has been studied in Russia’s management and rewriting of the past, though less has been written about the way Moscow tries to take control of the future and shape understandings of and hopes for what will happen. Perceptions of the future are crucial in cognitive coercion and occupation, and the Kremlin does much to control how people conceptualise the future and the role that the Russian state will supposedly play in this.
This in turn should worry us. It suggests that Moscow’s war is not about Ukrainian territory or just about subjugating the Ukrainian people: it is about seizing control over Europeans’ perceptions of what their future will be. It is about dismantling our ability to have hope in our futures, destroying our cognitive, and then our wider, security. That war is already here, and—unlike the Ukrainians—I fear that we do not understand it, let alone know how to fight it.