Olexiy Zhivora from the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation has completed the picture of the modern Ukrainian political nation.

The degree of Ukrainian resistance surprised many, except maybe for the Ukrainians themselves. The determined reaction to the Russian invasion became the next logical step, the last piece of the puzzle that completed the modern Ukrainian political nation. But what of the other pieces? When, why, and how did the external analysis miss the obvious? This has been a recurring question over the past few weeks.

Let us go back as far as ‘glasnost’, the Gorbachev era informal Soviet policy of increased transparency among the party cadre and the public. The idea was to reduce corruption, to somehow circumvent the inbreeding of the political elites that were caught up in a vicious cycle of propaganda. The move, as we know, came way too late to preserve the empire. Instead, the immediate effects turned the controlled and measured stream of information into an unbridled deluge of the subconscious.

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