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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
I don't know what the country will be like in ten years. The last 35 have shown that forecasts in our country don't come true.
Each time, looking back, we succumb to the temptation to describe the path we've taken as the only possible one. History seems to us like a logical straight line that connects our yesterday with our today. But if a time machine allowed us to return to the past, no one would believe our description of the future.
Imagine you go back to the summer of 2013. You say that in a few months the country will be gripped by protests. That security forces will kill more than a hundred people. That Maidan will triumph, Yanukovych will flee, and Russia, taking advantage of the chaos, will annex Crimea. You'll say that an ATO will begin in the country. That the Russians will shoot down a passenger Boeing. But the moment you say, "and a former Georgian president will head the Odesa region," your friends will call an ambulance. The only thing you could do in the summer of 2013 would be to buy dollars at eight.
You might object: they say the prewar us and the present us are separated by the Russian invasion. That it reshaped our sense of what is permissible. That the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas changed Ukraine and Ukrainians. And that after February of 2014 it's much easier for us to face reality.
Then imagine the time machine transports you to the summer of 2016. And you start telling your friends that Nadiya Savchenko, who has just been released from a Russian prison, is not at all who they think she is. You could then tell acquaintances who will become the country's next president. You could even turn on the TV and show them the future head of state. After that your friends will again call an ambulance.
You don't have to go far: imagine fate brings you to the summer of 2021. And you ask your loved ones to guess who the West will name next year as the face of freedom and a symbol of democracies' struggle against dictatorships. Hint one — it's a president. Hint two — it's not the U.S. president. And again you'll be urged to call an ambulance, because only someone who read European headlines in 2022 could believe the image metamorphosis of the Ukrainian president.
We often search our past for the crossroads that separate the recent us from the present us. The watershed after which the future stopped surprising us. That point of phase transition after which events began to seem logical and inevitable. But the thing is, such a point doesn't exist. Our heroes and antiheroes swap places. Our reality disproves our yesterday's forecasts. For us in the present there's no point in traveling to the past, because no one there will believe us.
In the year 1991 those who wanted freedom and democracy voted for Chornovil, and those who wanted a rebranded USSR voted for Kravchuk. In 1994 supporters of freedom voted for Kravchuk, and proponents of the USSR voted for Kuchma. In 1999 in the second round supporters of Ukraine voted for Kuchma, and their opponents voted for Symonenko. Our country is a land of tricksters. Every hero is ambivalent, and you never know which side he will take at a critical moment in history. Maybe even yours.
Predicting ahead is the privilege of countries on rails, whose trajectory is clearly visible. Ukraine is a ship in a storm. Our future depends on how well we do our homework. And also on hundreds of thousands of factors we cannot influence. We don't know who will win the next elections. And it's not only that they will be possible only after the war; we don't know when it will end.
The thing is also that war becomes an anesthetic for society — and it is this that gives us the unanimity we see in polls. The end of the war will plunge us back into the usual disputes and divisions. Postwar we will be as unlike our present selves as our present selves are unlike our prewar selves. Our postwar reality will depend on whether we see the scenario of the war's end as a victory or a defeat.
Victory is inclusive — it can have many parents, and under its umbrella there will be room for everyone. For those who fought and those who paid taxes. For those who stayed and those who left. With defeat it's exactly the opposite — that feeling plunges a country into frustration, forces people to look for scapegoats, and leads to "Orbanization." That is why, if Russia cannot defeat us on the battlefield, it will do everything to convince us that it has won.
We don't know what our streets will look like after the war. How many new accents and skin tones they'll have. Our depopulation will require difficult decisions from us, and we'll have to choose between migration and a half-empty country. Our future challenges will generate debates we are not even thinking about now because we're preoccupied with survival. We don't know what the future holds for NATO. Once we dreamed of membership in that organization. And in the past four years our country has been able to destroy the Soviet tank fist designed for a thrust to the English Channel. In a situation where the most powerful army on the planet is ready to turn away from Europe, the only thing left for Europe to hope for is the continent's strongest army. That is, ours.
We don't know what the future holds for the United States. For decades we were used to seeing them as a beacon of democracy and an example to follow. And in the last two years we're getting used to the idea that there are no longer adults in the room. That the only adults are us.
The only thing the last 35 years can teach us is that we are capable of surprising ourselves. Circumstances aren't static, people change, coincidences ruin plans. Sometimes I even envy conspiracy theorists, because in their worldview everything that happens is predetermined. But in reality our world is ruled by black swans. Only in our country the black swans are ourselves.
Source: Pavlo Kazarin / Facebook
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Чорні лебеді для України – ми самі". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Gordon.
