TheproportionofRussia’s120-125battalion
tacticalgroupsnolongerfittofight.
Source:Westernofficial,April11th30%
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notcontrol Sources:Instituteforthe
StudyofWar; AEI’s CriticalThreats
Project; RochanConsultingUKRAINEMarch th The seventh week of war: The military situation Human rightsRussia has completed its retreat from
northern Ukraine as it prepares for
thebattle for Donbas in the east. But
airstrikes continue at the rate of over
30 per day, targeting Ukrainian supply
linesand air defences.The un General Assembly voted to
suspend Russia from the organisation’s
human-rights council by a solid two-
thirds majority, thanks to a huge number
of abstentions. Members felt its atrocities
in Ukraine disbarred it.18 Briefing The war in Ukraine The Economist April 16th 2022
rent shape. But without something extra it
will never make the country as impressive
in peace as it has proved itself in war.
Andrei Zorin, a professor at Oxford Uni
versity, says that the unifying myth behind
today’s resistance, the two Maidans and
much more is that of the Cossacks of the
Zaporozhskaya Sich. The Cossacks were, as
Andrew Wilson, a professor at ucl, in Lon
don, writes in his book “The Ukrainians:
Unexpected Nation”, “‘Free men’ who took
advantage of the ‘wild field’, the noman’s
land in the open steppe, to establish auton
omous farming and raiding communities
beyond the reach of the formal authority of
the main regional powers—Poland, Mus
covy and the Ottomans.”
The Sich was the selforganised mili
tary democracy through which some Cos
sacks asserted their autonomy in the early
modern era. Its capacities have been ro
manticised and lionised ever since. “[The
Zaporozhian Cossacks] were not a stand
ing army,” Nikolai Gogol wrote in “Taras
Bulba”, a 19thcentury novella. “But in case
of war and general uprising, it required a
week, and no more, for every man to ap
pear on horseback, fully armed, and in two
weeks such a force had assembled as no re
cruiting officers would ever have been able
to collect.” In the 1920s Nestor Makhno, an
anarchist who found common ground
with peasants who hated all kinds of state
control, created a similar armyto resist all
those who sought to claim the wild field
between Donbas and Kryvyi Rihwhere the
Zaporozhskaya Sich had once held sway. Such tales resonate because, for most of
Ukraine’s history, the state has been some
thing foreignfor the people to resist, ig
nore and get by without. When their coun
try acquired a state of its own in 1991, those
who ran it were as unscrupulous and di
vorced from the people as the foreign rul
ers had been, providing little reason for a
change in attitude. Ukrainians continue to
have low expectations of the state and rely
instead on informal networks of friends,
neighbours and relatives. Political reforms
since 2014 have recognised this democratic
bottomupness, allowing local communi
ties to amalgamate into larger ones called
hromady as they see fit.Decentralised does not mean divided
Last year Arena, a project based at Johns
Hopkins University and the London School
of Economics, reported on what united Uk
rainians after 30 years of independence.
The researchers concluded that the most
important things were not attitudes or val
ues, but “shared, nearunconscious behav
iours that have been shaped by the many
centuries of Ukraine’s pluralistic history.”
In his book “The Gates of Europe”, which
has become a standard text in Ukraine
since its publication in 2015, Serhii Plokhy
describes a nation defined not by its peo
ple’s preexisting identities as by its will
ingness to negotiate them, crossing and re
crossing the “inner and outer frontiers” be
tween regions, faiths and ways of life.
As well as distrusting states imposed on
them by others, the Ukrainians have notbeen very keen on states dominated by any
one faction within the country. Mr Plokhy,
who teaches history at Harvard, points to
the way that, after the fall of the Russian
empire in 1917, the primacy some national
ists placed on the Ukrainian language and
its associated culture lost them allies
among Jewish and Polish minorities wor
ried by such ethnonationalism. In 1991, on
the other hand, Ukrainian sovereignty was
supported by all the country’s people. Sovi
et repression had forged an alliance be
tween Ukrainian nationalists and Jewish
dissidents, among others.
Attempts to make capital out of the
country’s regional and ethnic differences
since then have ultimately proved fruit
less, whether encouraged by Russian pro
vocateurs or by factions in Ukraine itself.
When Viktor Yushchenko, the president
who was brought to power by the Orange
revolution, hailed the mid20thcentury
nationalist, antiSemite and sometime Na
zi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a Ukrai
nian hero he alienated not just the Rus
sianspeaking east but also the liberal in
telligentsia across the country.
The war is laying all thought of division
to rest: as Sergei Rakhmanin, a journalist
and politician, wrote recently, it “has
stitched us together without any anaes
thetic”. Russianspeakers, Jews, Crimean
Tatars and Ukrainianspeakers are fighting
as one for survival and their right to be who
they want to be on their own land. It is Rus
sian speakers in the south and east who,
stalwart in resistance, are paying the