From a Youtube video by Alexander Shelest. About 21/8/26
Link: Ukraine’s Missionary Posture: Crooked Souls, Crooked Hearts,
Crooked Minds Andrei Baumeister in conversation with Alexander Shelest
Editorial note
This is a clean English fair copy made from an automatic Russian transcript. Repetitions, false starts and verbal filler have been removed, and obvious recognition errors silently corrected. A few proper names and topical allusions are badly mangled in the source; where certainty was not possible, the English avoids pretending otherwise. The meaning and progression of the discussion have been preserved, but this is formatted for reading rather than as a word-for-word stenographic record.
Translation
A country between two fires
Alexander Shelest:
Friends and guests of the channel, hello. The Ukrainian philosopher Andrei Baumeister is with us now. Andrei Olegovich, good morning.
Andrei Baumeister:
Good morning Alexander.
Shelest:
It was a terrible night and a very difficult morning. Twelve people have been killed in Kyiv, and tomorrow will be a day of mourning. The capital was struck; one of the missiles was not intercepted. This inferno continues to flare—the fire beneath the cauldrons of hell.
An MP recently made a striking remark. He said that the task was to help Ukrainians “burn more comfortably in hell.” He later apologised for the metaphor and added qualifications, so I am not saying that this sentence alone represents his whole understanding of events. Yet there is a portion of truth in a slip of the tongue.
When one considers last night and what preceded it, the authorities appear capable of doing nothing in the most acute moment, yet remain perfectly capable of voting as instructed. The scandals, recordings and revelations had no effect on the vote. Let us therefore begin with the nature of Ukrainian power at this catastrophic moment. What thoughts does it prompt in you? Some say that all authority is from God. If so, is this authority from God so that Ukrainians may burn more comfortably in hell?
Baumeister:
First, I want to express my sincere support for the people of Kyiv. They are living not simply in hell but between two fires: Russian missiles on one side, and on the other the madness, irresponsibility and constant internal scandals of their own authorities.
As you spoke, a poetic line spontaneously came to mind: “We live with neither earth beneath us nor country above us.” It was written in another context in the 1930s, but the resemblance is striking. The Ukrainian citizen now lives with neither a country nor, in any meaningful sense, a state.
We have said this many times: the state has practically ceased to exist. The citizen must solve every ordinary and every fateful problem alone. The state appears in only three forms.
First, it appears as fear and the demand for obedience. Second, it appears as the tax system. Ukrainians continue to pay taxes, yet the money seems to disappear; despite constant Western assistance, we are repeatedly told that there is no money. Third, it appears as a state religion—a civil religion and official mythology. It is not merely building a pantheon of glory but constructing an extraordinarily powerful and, I would say, toxic mythology.
These are the three ways the citizen experiences the state: coercion and fear; fiscal extraction; and a permanent assault upon consciousness. The state attacks the citizen’s body, energy and mind, subordinating them to a supposed common purpose which has little connection with the actual flourishing of either country or state. What a state’s common purpose ought to be
Shelest:
Then what is that common purpose?
Baumeister:
Consider countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. I often speak with people who travel there and work in education or business. They tell me how Kazakhstan’s capital has blossomed, how much Azerbaijan and Tashkent have changed since Soviet times, how Uzbekistan’s population is growing and its passport is becoming increasingly desirable.
These countries began in 1991 with limited resources and difficult circumstances. They certainly have their own political problems, which we need not idealise. Yet they used at least part of the intervening period in pursuit of a common purpose. They developed cities, architecture, education and domestic business.
Their politicians also had to manoeuvre between formidable centres of influence: China, Russia, the United States and the European Union. Kazakh politicians and businesspeople have told me: the EU matters to us, but so does China; the Central Asian states are our neighbours, and Russia is our neighbour, whose geopolitical position cannot simply be ignored.
That is what I call a common purpose: that the state should prosper; that its population should grow; that the country should develop its potential and international influence; and that politicians and diplomats should prevent it from being dragged into murderous conflicts and smashing its infants against the stones, in the biblical sense of that image.
Within that broad purpose, each person can pursue his or her own ends: raising children, creating a business, entering science, becoming a surgeon or a scholar. The state’s task is to make such life possible.
I deliberately chose countries which, like Ukraine, emerged from the Soviet Union in difficult circumstances and contain several ethnic groups. They too had tensions, including disputes concerning language. Yet Russian continues to have a place. A film may be shown in Russian to a full cinema in Baku; the same film may be watched in Russian in Israel. This does not mean that Azerbaijani or Hebrew ceases to exist. It means that languages occupy real social and cultural spaces.
I am not acting as an evangelist for Russian. I am pointing to something normal throughout the world. Francophone zones remain in Africa; Britain left English in India. In Ukraine, however, Russian is treated solely as a colonial mechanism. In reality, Russian and Ukrainian literary culture developed througha long, entangled history, each acquiring and elaborating its own characteristics.
Historical mythology and the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra This brings me to a recent official claim concerning the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. We are told to embrace the Lavra as a national shrine because its centuries of existence supposedly prove to Putin that Lenin did not create Ukraine. These are fragments of thought thrown together without coherence.
No serious historian disputes that Lenin and Stalin contributed decisively to the territorial form in which Ukraine entered 1991. At the same time, the Lavra was a centre of book culture, theology and political thought—including imperial political thought. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv churchmen helped create the ideology and institutions of the Russian Empire.
If “decolonisation” and “decommunisation” were followed consistently, the Lavra itself would become an early target: Kyiv hierarchs developed ideas of imperial monarchy and wrote texts addressed to Peter the Great. So what are we meant to say? That Lenin did not create Ukraine but imperial metropolitans did? That sounds no better for the current mythology. Lenin and Stalin then extended the system, adding territories including Galicia and Bukovyna.
This is characteristic of the official discourse: details are confused, contradictory fragments are combined, and invented myths are imposed upon the public. It is the third side of the triangle I described—an attack upon consciousness. A manufactured pantheon
Shelest:
But does not a pantheon of heroes at least give people clarity? Yevhen Konovalets has now been reburied at the National Military Memorial Cemetery; Symon Petliura is apparently to follow. Different historical positions are being gathered together. The state seems to be declaring: these are our heroes. At a time when people are struggling through blackouts, damaged infrastructure, burning warehouses and corruption scandals, this
ideological and heroic clarity is being imposed from above. What future does it point towards?
Baumeister:
First, no one elected Konovalets. If Ukrainians were allowed—without pressure, threats or intimidation—to vote for even ten important figures from their history, I doubt very much that Konovalets would appear among them. Nor, I think, would Andriy Melnyk.Konovalets belongs to a marginal episode of history. Between 1917 and the early 1920s, amid revolution and civil war, hundreds of figures emerged, organised detachments, attempted projects and failed. Let me provoke listeners by naming another colonel: Mikhail Drozdovsky, a Kyiv-born officer who organised resistance to communism in the south and fought the Bolsheviks. Why is he not honoured as a fighter against communism? Biographically, at least, he is a clearly delineated person with definite ideas which he attempted to realise.
The period was a boiling cauldron. Alliances shifted. The Sich Riflemen at times cooperated with Denikin’s forces after retreat and defeat. Konovalets
himself considered temporary understandings with the Bolsheviks. If we keep extracting isolated personalities from this confusion and turning them into
timeless icons, we shall never have a future.
A pantheon of glory ought to contain people who created significant models of conduct and achieved something in literature, science, music, art or other fields—names written in great golden letters. Instead, we are constructing a pantheon of failures and defeated marginal figures.
How many people actually followed Konovalets? How many were attracted by his leadership? After the failure of the Ukrainian projects of that period, he represented a small nationalist ideological group from which an even smaller group later arose. Other leaders in this territory were supported by millions of Ukrainians—rightly or wrongly, but millions nonetheless. Writers and composers gained millions of readers and listeners, some reaching world stature; yet they are excluded as “not ours.” A man followed by hundreds or thousands is elevated, while people embraced by millions are cursed.
Our national myth is not of world stature. It was made by narrow, envious people with a militarised imagination, perpetually oriented towards struggle.
And while one group directs society’s attention towards military struggle, another can steal in peace. Under normal conditions there would be little place for either.
The meaning of the torches
Imagine present-day Berlin. At night, in a park outside a Lutheran church, several dozen uniformed men holding burning torches bury an extreme-right political figure from the 1920s. A priest stands by while they announce: we were defeated here, defeated there, defeated in this year and that year—but we shall continue the struggle through the centuries.
What would the German, Brussels and American press say the following morning?
Now imagine Moscow: uniformed men emerge at night from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, or from the dark military cathedral built by the Ministry of Defence. Priests accompany them, torches burn, and they proclaim a centuries-long mission of struggle. Western newspapers would immediately recognise and condemn the militarism.
But when it happens in Ukraine at the burial of our colonel, it is presented as something entirely different. This was effectively a declaration of Ukraine’s future strategy of life. First a myth is created; then suitable heroes are selected for it; and under the myth and its heroes, the future is constructed. That is the three-stage operation.
By torchlight we heard a description of Ukraine’s mission: “our cause,” which “we must complete.” My question is simple: what cause? What is our country’s mission?
There is the Ukraine of unprotected citizens in Kyiv and other cities. Then there is another Ukraine—a minority which declares a great mission and an eternal Ukrainian cause. It is not a scientific school, music, paintings or films watched throughout the world. This version of Ukraine creates none of those things.
The theft of Ukraine’s future is already present in these narratives. Put the disputed history to one side and look at the aesthetic: torches, military marching, a heroic future and imagery derived from Germanic mythology. It turns Ukraine away from being a country of the future. Germanic heroic mythology ended in Valhalla, and nothing good comes from reviving its political forms.
This artificially narrowed history was made by limited minds—people like the official historians and ideological entrepreneurs who were funded from abroad in the 1990s, while impoverished local humanities scholars eagerly ran ahead of the locomotive, sometimes trying to be more Canadian than the Canadians. They chose heroes to fit the scheme.
The issue is not really the living or the dead. It is symbolic. One group is offering its diminished image of Ukraine as the image of the whole country’s future.
In that mythology war never ends. War is normalised, because the “Cause” with a capital letter does not permit long, peaceful construction. Someof those proclaiming it have been at war, politically or literally, for eleven years. In a new country where the task was to build rather than fight, their importance would dissolve. Two camps—or a third possibility?
Shelest:
A political conflict now seems to be developing. On one side are the people around the presidential office and the official symbolic programme you have described—Zelensky, Budanov and others walking behind Konovalets’s coffin, elevating the ceremony to state level. Zelensky has continued what Poroshenko began when he made these greetings, symbols and gestures official.
On the other side are younger activists and figures such as Mykhailo Fedorov, who spoke about elections and political renewal. Yet the protest placards quickly came down, and some of the same activists wished the newly appointed officials good luck. If their opposition evaporates so easily, has Zelensky simply won? Which of these two groups do you support?
Baumeister:
either. I hope for a third possibility which is not presently visible, and whose form we do not yet know.
Take Fedorov’s recorded address. Here is some advice from an older intellectual to a man raised in advertising and public relations: if you want to make a sincere appeal, do not stage it like a Hollywood production. There were several cameras, carefully arranged lighting and evidently a prepared text. His facial expression and rather boyish voice did not match the mission and ideas he was pronouncing. He tried to appear forceful, but his gestures and
expressive range were limited.
A myth has been created around him as a great IT specialist, digital reformer and almost a Ukrainian Elon Musk. Yet, before the camera addressing citizens, he was unconvincing. The production was too visibly mediated.
Perhaps the protest organisers felt that they had to raise the stakes. A limited demand concerning a ministry would no longer sustain attention, so they oved towards the subject of elections. But even that was delivered apologetically and evasively: the authorities should change, corruption is bad, perhaps parliamentary elections are needed—but it remained unclear exactly what he proposed.
The feudal character of the system is visible here. One person can be sanctioned, threatened and denounced as a Kremlin agent merely for mentioning elections during wartime. Another—a fashionable favourite of progressive young people—may say almost the same thing directly to camera and be treated gently.
And how did Fedorov justify elections? As an anti-Russian act. Russia, he said in effect, is depriving Ukrainians of democratic politics; therefore, in defiance of Russia and the Kremlin, elections must be held. It was not presented as opposition to our own authorities or even to Zelensky, but as another way of opposing Russia.
The speech walked a tightrope: against corruption but not necessarily against the president; perhaps about parliamentary but not presidential elections; not destabilising Ukraine but strengthening it; not weakening the country during war but preventing Russia from triumphing over Ukrainian democracy.
If the initiative collapses tomorrow, this will have been merely another amusing carnival and the speech will be forgotten. If sponsors, European structures and other political forces gather around it, it could later be remembered as the first fateful step of a new Ukrainian politics.
The analyst must therefore be cautious. An apparently ridiculous meeting or gesture may prove historically decisive. The early congresses of Russian revolutionary émigrés consisted of a few quarrelling people in small rooms in Brussels or London. At the time no one could know whether this was another meaningless émigré squabble or the beginning of something momentous. Yet from those meetings came the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet Union and some of the great geopolitical changes of the twentieth century.
We cannot predict which kind of event Fedorov’s intervention will become. We can only analyse what is visible now: a potential leader who is not yet ready to lead; a man afraid of his own declaration, planting escape routes in every sentence. To my intellectual and aesthetic perception, that is not a leader.
Political gestures, courage and manufactured heroes
There are moments when a true political gesture establishes authority. During the August 1991 coup attempt, Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank, took a sheet of paper and addressed the public. I have a very negative view of Yeltsin, but at that moment people still carried an image inherited from Soviet power: a leader ought to appear publicly, stand upright and say, “We do not recognise these people. This violates the constitution. They are not a
government but conspirators.”
That act became the foundation of Yeltsin’s subsequent legitimacy. His fate could have gone in any direction: he might have been killed or isolated. Yet at the necessary moment he found the necessary gesture and words. Soon afterwards Gorbachev returned by aircraft, still formally president of a still existing Soviet Union, but everyone could see that his time had passed. Such is the force of a political gesture.
We should also distinguish courage from manufactured heroism. War produces many courageous and self-sacrificing people. But official heroism is often a state-made idol. Konovalets and Melnyk are “made” heroes. There is also a third class: servants of the authorities who receive the title Hero of Ukraine from one president or another.
Do we need heroes at all in the twenty-first century? The archetypal hero belongs to the ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages. Soviet cinema manufactured the heroic worker who collapses in the mine but continues working, the milkmaid who labours to exhaustion, or the soldier who supposedly holds off ten German tanks. The war and the Blitzkrieg certainly called forth genuine courage in millions; courage is real. But what states label
“heroism” is usually an ideological construction.
Scoundrels shelter behind heroes, and therefore scoundrels need heroes. That helps explain why our supposed new leaders cannot make a clear historic gesture: there is nothing behind them—no coherent biography, accumulated authority or demonstrated courage.
For a time people invested hope in General Valerii Zaluzhnyi because, while he was commander-in-chief, Ukraine did regain territory in the Kharkiv region and on the right bank near Kherson. Whether or not he is suited to politics, the aura of wartime achievement follows him. Oleksandr Syrskyi does not possess the same public image. Nor do the other names being discussed automatically become political leaders merely because technologists devise speeches and campaigns for them. Leadership requires intuition, judgement and a sense of the fitting gesture at the fitting moment.
Biography as destiny
Look closely at the biographies of people around power. When scandals erupt and one consults the Ukrainian and English Wikipedia pages, clarity often disappears rather than increases. Husbands, citizenships, family connections and whole stages of careers are missing or described differently. A person born in a village studies at one institution, and then suddenly—after a blank—appears in a position of influence. There are prestigious foreign internships,but no intelligible account of how one stage led to another.
A proper curriculum vitae should have a visible sequence: university, diploma, postgraduate study, dissertation, employment, books and other work. This is not vanity; it allows a public person’s formation to be understood.
Heraclitus said, ethos anthropoi daimon—usually rendered as “character is destiny.” I would put it this way: a person’s character is his biography. Anyone who wants to become a future leader or politician ought consciously to form a coherent biography and worldview. Why, then, do we have no genuine heroes? Because in thirty-five years we have created a space of crooked souls, crooked hearts and crooked minds. No whole, open, sincere, thoughtful and honest person could have entered this system of power. Those who do enter bring in people like themselves people of crooked thought, soul and heart—and choose equivalent figures for their pantheon.
The authorities then take a courageous person or group, deceive them—as young people have repeatedly been deceived—send them to their deaths, wash their hands of responsibility and construct a cult afterwards. That myth-making mechanism has survived from the revolutionary period to the present.
Has the decision for continued war already been made?
Shelest:
Let us end by considering the present stage of the war. Russia says there will be no ceasefire or frozen conflict, although the press reports secret and public proposals conveyed through Turkey and other channels. There are contacts over prisoners, humanitarian parcels and wounded soldiers. Even cordial handshakes and conversations in Russian surprise people only because the public narrative has become so dehumanising. In reality, this is normal and necessary work.
It now appears that Kyiv is required to make some decision—perhaps concerning ithdrawal, territory or other steps. Listening to Zelensky’s latest address, one might conclude that the decision has already been made: the war continues. Is that your impression, or is there still room for manoeuvre?
Baumeister:
A decision of this kind never exists in a single sentence: “We shall fight for two or three years,” or “Russia will fight us for two or three years,” or “Tomorrow we shall sign an agreement.” There is always a package or fan of possibilities. Official statements contain references to 2026, 2027 and 2028, together with many other and sometimes contradictory signals.
What I see above all is a prohibition on discussing the future. A guard of propagandists stands ready whenever anyone proposes thinking through intermediate models—a moratorium on certain strikes, followed perhaps by a ceasefire. The immediate accusation is: “You are proposing capitulation.”
But “capitulation” is a propagandist’s word in this context. No one is suggesting unconditional surrender. Ukraine has the EU and the United States behind it, and China also exists as a major actor. The word is used to frighten people away from considering any non-military alternative for the immediate future.
If every alternative is labelled capitulation, what remains? Continued struggle—while Ukrainian cities and citizens remain exposed. No one in power appears to think seriously about the future. The main task is simply to survive one more day, to delay and prolong. This method has repeatedly worked for Zelensky, including after his notorious encounter at the White House and after other apparent crises. Yermak has now gone, yet the same political logic persists.
Why change a policy which is successful? It is successful, that is, for the group presently holding power. Its tactic is exceedingly simple: get through today.
During a single day they may suggest a moratorium on strikes in the Black Sea or attacks upon civilians, while simultaneously sending drones and striking targets in Russia. They say that they will not leave Donbas and will sign no agreement. Contradictory signals of different duration are emitted throughout the day. The tactic works for those using it.
But there is no strategy and no discussion of responsibility. No one calculates what this will cost in human lives, economic resources, territory, urban structure, infrastructure and logistics. Ukraine is treated as a wonderland in which destruction is somehow only an ethereal possibility. The authorities behave as though participating in a computer game: we apply pressure and demonstrate strength; when blows land upon us, those blows are themselves used to justify continuing the war.
This tactic has no central principle or scenario. It survives because of support from outside and from a small activist group within the country. Even that internal support is ephemeral. Activist intellectuals respond to Fedorov with carefully rounded formulations: elections would be dangerous, yet the absence of elections is also impossible. Each reader may discover whatever meaning he wishes.
The activists wait just as the authorities wait. They cooperate today and reassess tomorrow. Perhaps they will back Fedorov; perhaps something else will arise. If peace negotiations become advantageous tomorrow, they may be first to demand them, abandon Zelensky and announce that they were always doves. They will point to whichever half of an earlier ambiguous sentence suits them.
These are people of the day—half-hearted, crooked-minded and crooked-hearted. That leaves no one with whom to conduct a serious political conversation.
Ukraine’s repeated historical resets
If we imagine politics as an orderly laboratory in which leaders emerge, present programmes and compete in public debate, then Ukraine currently has no one: there are no programmes and no genuine discussion. But another political model exists, and it has often been ours. Much collapses; the process begins again from zero; fragments of old elites, business groups and intellectuals form new movements and parties in response to a transformed situation. As 24 August approaches, people speak of a single thirty-five-year history of independent Ukraine. Yet there has been no single script. Again and again
the country has started from zero.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Kravchuk and Chornovil spoke about a Ukraine and a future quite unlike today’s. Then Kuchma arrived and another set of processes began. The Orange Revolution reset the system and broke many of the arrangements being constructed. Yanukovych’s arrival pushed the Orange project aside and began another story. The next Maidan produced another reset. February 2022 reset everything once more: Zelensky had been rapidly losing confidence during 2021 and European colleagues had often treated him condescendingly; the invasion transformed his political position completely.
When Ukraine reaches its next historical turning point, everything may again be restarted. New groups may assume responsibility and create new movements, tendencies and parties. In 1991 no one could have predicted that a comic actor would be president thirty-five years later. Nor was it obvious that an adaptable Communist Party functionary would become the first president of an ostensibly new national state. Indeed, some Communist leaders changed colours and helped inaugurate the very nationalist mythology later associated with Yushchenko and Poroshenko. Much of it began under Kravchuk, who is now remembered in an idealised way. So I see another possible model of the political process: situational response to a radically new reality. Fragments of the old elites, business and perhaps groups of intellectuals will have to decide how to relaunch the country and create a new course of development. That judgement is based on Ukraine’s previous historical path. The future, of course, may surprise us entirely. We are not prophets.
Shelest:
Andrei Baumeister has been with us today—if the future exists, and if they permit it.
Baumeister:
Yes—if they permit it.
Shelest:
Thank you for your time and your thoughts.
Baumeister:
Thank you for the invitation.
Synopsis
Baumeister’s central claim is that the Ukrainian state has become almost absent as a provider of collective security, order and conditions for ordinary human flourishing. Citizens are left to solve both daily and existential problems themselves. The state remains palpable chiefly through coercion, taxation and ideological pressure: it commands obedience, extracts resources and manufactures a civil religion.
He contrasts this with the basic common purpose of a functioning state: preserving peace, enabling demographic and economic development, cultivating education and culture, and manoeuvring prudently among larger powers. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan serve not as ideal democracies but as post-Soviet examples of governments which have at least partly pursued development and avoided self-destructive geopolitical collision.
Much of the interview attacks Ukraine’s official historical mythology. Baumeister argues that it incoherently claims the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra while suppressing the Lavra’s role in Russian imperial thought, denies the Soviet formation of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and elevates marginal, defeated nationalist figures above Ukrainian writers, scientists and artists of genuine mass or world stature.
The torchlit reburial of Yevhen Konovalets becomes his principal symbol. In Germany or Russia, he argues, comparable military pageantry around a far right historical figure would immediately be condemned. In Ukraine it instead announces a state-sanctioned “mission” of endless struggle. A myth is created, heroes are chosen to fit it, and the country’s future is then forced into the myth. War becomes normal and peaceful construction almost
unintelligible.
Baumeister is equally unconvinced by the apparent reformist alternative represented by Mykhailo Fedorov. He sees a carefully produced but evasive appeal, full of escape routes and justified—like almost every Ukrainian political proposal—as another anti-Russian act. Neither the presidential camp nor its media-savvy activist critics displays the biography, courage, clarity or judgement required of genuine leaders.
On the war, Baumeister does not claim that Kyiv has adopted a single articulated multi-year plan. His more disturbing conclusion is that it has no strategy beyond surviving another day. Contradictory messages are tactically useful to the ruling group, while the long-term costs in lives, territory, economy, cities and infrastructure remain undiscussed. The word “capitulation” polices the boundary of permissible thought and prevents serious examination of ceasefires or intermediate arrangements.
His limited hope lies in Ukraine’s history of sudden resets. The present order may not reform itself, but a future rupture could bring together remnants of old elites, business and intellectual life in an unforeseen third force. This is not a prediction; it is the only opening he can discern beyond the two visible and inadequate camps.
Commentary
This is a substantial and unusually coherent argument despite the conversational form. Its strongest element is Baumeister’s insistence upon distinguishing the state as an instrument of national life from the state as a machine of extraction and mobilisation. His three surviving functions coercion, taxation and mythology—give the discussion a clear skeleton.
The formulation is polemically absolute, but it captures a real inversion:
institutions supposedly exist to preserve a society, yet society increasingly appears to exist to feed the institutions and the war.
His most penetrating observation concerns the relationship between mythology and futurity. Official history is not merely an account of the past. By choosing particular ancestors, gestures and symbols, a government defines which future actions will appear honourable or even conceivable. A pantheon dominated by underground fighters, defeated military formations and unfinished national struggles does not simply commemorate war; it makes permanent struggle the natural condition of the nation. Peace then risks appearing not as success but as betrayal or spiritual exhaustion.
The counterfactual comparison with Berlin and Moscow is rhetorically powerful because it exposes a probable double standard. Torches, uniforms, priests, burial ritual and declarations of an inherited national mission would be read ominously almost anywhere else in Europe. Ukraine’s circumstances explain why some observers suspend that judgement, but they do not make the symbolism cease to mean what it ordinarily means.
Baumeister is also right to separate courage from official hero-production. Courage belongs to the person who acts under danger; a “hero” is often a public object manufactured afterwards. The distinction matters because political authorities can spend the courage of citizens, evade responsibility for the circumstances of their sacrifice, and then recover legitimacy by consecrating the dead.
There are, however, weaknesses in the argument. His assertion that the state “practically does not exist” is illuminating as diagnosis but plainly overstated as description. A state capable of mass military mobilisation, taxation, international diplomacy, digital administration and sustained war certainly exists. What he really means is that it has ceased to exist for the citizen in many of its protective and developmental functions. Stated that way, the claim is stronger because it does not confuse malign or distorted state capacity with absence of capacity.
His Central Asian comparison is likewise selective. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan have achieved visible development and pragmatic foreign policies, but their relative stability also rests upon authoritarian controls, resource endowments, different strategic locations and, in Azerbaijan’s case, its own intense military-national narrative. They are useful contrasts to Ukraine’s geopolitical recklessness, not clean demonstrations of an alternative model.
The historical discussion is deliberately iconoclastic and sometimes compresses too much. Lenin and Stalin plainly shaped the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet republic, but saying that they “created Ukraine” can obscure older Ukrainian political, linguistic and cultural continuities. Conversely, the fact that Kyiv churchmen helped articulate Russian imperial ideology does not make the Lavra alien to Ukrainian history. Baumeister’s deeper and more defensiblepoint is that these inheritances are entangled: no intellectually honest national history can divide them neatly into pure Ukrainian and foreign-colonial boxes.
His treatment of Konovalets is also intentionally prosecutorial. Konovalets was not merely an arbitrary nobody followed by a few eccentrics; he became an important organiser within the Ukrainian nationalist tradition. Yet Baumeister’s question remains valid: importance within one militant tradition is not the same as broad democratic representativeness, cultural greatness or fitness to serve as the state’s central moral exemplar. The public deserves an argument about the criteria of commemoration, not merely an official ceremony.
The most consequential part comes near the end. Baumeister does not simply allege that Ukraine’s leaders “want war” in an uncomplicated sense. He describes a political ecology in which continuation is safer than decision. War preserves offices, suspends electoral accountability, empowers ideological gatekeepers, attracts external resources and permits every failure to be attributed to the enemy. None of this proves that officials desire the destruction war brings. It does show how a system can become organised around continuation even when nearly everyone within it sincerely says that he desires
peace.
That is the interview’s darkest conclusion: there need be no secret council choosing endless war. Daily improvisation, institutional self-preservation, external patronage and a mythology that equates compromise with capitulation can produce the same result without anyone formulating it as a master plan. “Get through today” becomes a strategy by default, while the accumulated tomorrows disappear.
Baumeister’s proposed escape—a future historical reset—is much less developed than his diagnosis. He offers no mechanism, programme or identifiable constituency for the “third force.” In a sense, he succumbs to the same absence of future-thinking that he condemns, although he is candid about it. His hope amounts to the belief that collapse may disclose political possibilities presently invisible. That is possible, but a reset can produce something worse as readily as something better.
Overall, this is not merely another complaint about corruption or Zelensky. It is an argument that Ukraine’s ruling culture has substituted mobilisation for government, myth for history, mediated performance for leadership and tactical survival for strategy. One need not accept every historical judgement or every sweeping formulation to recognise the seriousness of that indictment