the Russian liberal ends where Ukraine begins

Thursday 5 October 2023

... I do not find Aleksandr Dmitriev’s response surprising. The issue is not that he will not choose a side – he has, in his own words, chosen the Western side. The issue is that among the constituency of people to which he belongs – incredibly intelligent people with liberal values and firm morals who came of age in the USSR – it is hard to find many that view Ukraine as part of the Western spectrum.

The disconnect between (some) Russian liberals and Ukrainians has caused bitterness. Nobody is more disappointed in, and less hopeful of, Russian capacity to rise up than the Ukrainians. Perhaps the Ukrainian saying that ‘the Russian liberal ends where Ukraine begins’ is a truism but it is one that has had frequent cause to be pronounced. Explanations that will convince a Western audience – that Russians cannot be expected to protest in such a frightening environment, all they can do is leave – are given short shrift by Ukrainians who have staged two revolutions over the last twenty years, in the face of brutality and snipers, and who returned to fight in their tens of thousands from working abroad. Sasha Danylyuk, adviser to General Zaluzhnyi, the Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and adviser to the head of the Foreign Intelligence Services of Ukraine, perceives many Russian liberals as sharing the Kremlin’s chauvinistic and dismissive attitudes towards Ukrainians as ‘little brothers. They are so arrogant and condescending, even among liberals, this is just their attitude, the Russian attitude, they do not see Ukraine as really abroad, as a real country, we are just a joke to them.’(Interview with Oleksandr Danylyuk via phone, 8 June 2022.) [Russia’s war, McGlynn] (my emphasis)