West confident about Ukraine's victory, doesn't understand what Russia's defeat looks like

The main word that defines the situation around Ukraine today is uncertainty.

No one in the West doubts Ukraine's victory anymore. But no one understands what a Russian defeat looks like. There is no picture of a post-war world, and no one wants to go into uncertainty, especially in the face of China's rising activity and other global concerns. (This is why Western discourse paradoxically combines the belief that there will be democracy in Russia after Putin with the realization that democracy is impossible in Russia.)

“There is no picture of a post-war world, and no one wants to go into uncertainty, especially in the face of China's rising activity and other global concerns.”

I repeat once again: the war cannot end until there is a picture of the post-war world order. The Russian-Ukrainian war is not local, it is global, both because of the involvement of dozens of global players and because of the destruction of the international system that emerged after the previous major war (World War II). The outcome of our current war will determine the world order for the next 50-70 years.

“It is Ukraine, strange as it may sound, that is the only country in the world that can offer a picture of the future. Because we are closest to the edge.”

Strange as it may sound, Ukraine is the only country in the world that can offer a picture of the future. This is not because we are so smart (after all, we are a peripheral, economically backward postcolonial country that no one has ever reckoned with, that lags behind in any global rankings, that appeared on the front pages only a year ago, and billions of people learned about its existence for the first time, just as they learned about Vietnam after the American defeat), but because we are closest to the edge. From our vantage point, everything is visible much better. Now it remains to be seen how to explain this to those who are further from the edge, and who also have optics that are inadequate to the situation, and a speed of internal change that is inadequate to the speed of external change (however, we ourselves are not keeping up with our internal changes).

“Time is now on our side, but this treacherous substance called 'time' has already passed back and forth several times.”

The outcome of the war now depends on how well Ukraine's voice is understood by the West. The West started by pacifying Russia, then moved on to containment, then to weakening... and now it does not know what to do next. And we at the state level do not know yet. This uncertainty slows us down, gives Russia a chance to slip through. Time is now on our side, but this treacherous substance called 'time' has already passed back and forth several times. The only way to make time your ally for a long time, forever, is to get ahead of it.

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About the author. Valerii Pekar, lecturer at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

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