A recap of a public discussion on the sidelines of the Black Sea Security Forum about Ukraine’s postwar social settlement: How Ukraine can retain and return its people, social cohesion and political trust.
Kyiv Post
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At the end of May 2026, Ukrainian Cosmopolis, an independent civic-intellectual collective based in Odesa, organized the international forum “Recovery After Total War,” with Ukrainian and foreign speakers. Kyiv Post has summarized the main thesis, presented in the two days of debate.
Gennady Druzenko, volunteer serviceman, founder of the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PDMSh) and Center for Constitutional Design
Every war comes to an end, but no war passes without leaving scars. And long wars are dangerous because they fundamentally change both sides.
When I speak of Ukrainians, I mean a political nation, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, language, or cultural background. Everyone who has chosen to be Ukrainian – because I deeply believe that Ukraine is, above all, a choice.
People have often become Ukrainians by choice. In the Sheptytsky family, for example, one brother considered himself Polish and the other Ukrainian, because Ukrainian identity is, above all – at least for me – a moral choice. I unfortunately see that the only thing uniting Ukrainians today is that they do not want to become Russians. But it is also an enormous danger. When the war ends and we emerge from it, the external pressure that has consolidated us will disappear, and we will find ourselves facing a profound question.
The Ukrainian football community has mixed feelings about the upcoming 2026 World Cup due to the realities of the war and the absence of the national team. Some call the expansion of the tournament to 48 participants an absurd and purely commercial decision. Among the favorites, specialists highlight France and Spain, while Artem Dovbyk surprised with his personal choice. Most analysts predict the elimination of the Swedish national team from its difficult group, where they see the Netherlands and Japan as leaders.
What unites us, apart from the fact that we do not want to be Russians and are not Russians? Why should we live together? Do we truly share a common vision of the future, given that, for any thoughtful person, it is obvious that we do not share a single common past? Such a past exists only in a mythical realm.
Ukraine is so diverse that we desperately need an honest and open conversation, not only about the past, because the past easily turns into propaganda, and an Institute of National Memory can become an institute in the image of Goebbels.
What is this war being fought for? It is being fought for the right to determine our own destiny. But that is only a prerequisite. What kind of country should Ukraine become? How inclusive should it be? Where are the boundaries of Ukrainianness? What does it ultimately mean to be Ukrainian?
Volodymyr Minenko, War Veteran, Ukrainian theatre and film actor
At the beginning of 2023, I volunteered to join the military. I joined the Air Assault Forces, passed the selection process, and out of 600 candidates only 14 were chosen for reconnaissance. I was one of them. I became a reconnaissance soldier.
I joined the 132nd Reconnaissance Battalion of the Air Assault Forces. There, I completed intensive unit training and integration with the battalion before we were deployed to the Zaporizhzhia sector. I took part in combat operations. I sustained several wounds during that time.
Eventually, I was medically discharged from military service. Now I am here, having returned to civilian life and to my profession as an actor.
We stage performances, raise funds through donations, and collect millions for the Armed Forces and other charitable causes.
I can talk about how the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TRCs) operate in the Chernihiv region – who they recruit, how the process works, and whether corruption exists within the system. In my view, corruption exists at many levels and in many institutions.
When I was trying to join the Armed Forces, there was a queue of about 200 people outside the recruitment office. By the third time they saw me, they said, “Turn around and go home. We don’t need you because you don’t have the required qualifications, such as a driving license category and similar skills.”
That was the situation in the second month of 2023. Today, unfortunately, things have changed somewhat. As we can see, there are no queues anymore. What we see instead is what people call “busification” on the streets.
Yes, people have to fight, but the question is how mobilization is being carried out. And when you see corruption and injustice...
We are not Israel, where everyone serves. Here, it is mostly the poor who end up fighting. It has become a poor man’s war. The villages in Ukraine are empty.
Anastasia Piliavsky, Reader in Anthropology and Politics at King’s College London and founder of Ukrainian Cosmopolis.
There is a very hard truth to tell. Millions of Ukrainians now fear their own state more than they fear Russia, which sounds obscene from afar, but it’s precisely this fear, how it warps political judgment and corrodes legitimacy, that will decide, I believe, more than weapons or attrition curves, the outcome of this war.
Russian drones continue to leave homes burnt out to kill. But more than four years of bombardment have made explosions and sirens rather routine. A permanent kind of natural disaster.
Since 2022, the dread has migrated from the sky to the streets. The dread in the rear. Ukraine’s latest word of the year is “basification.” The state-run abduction of men by mobilization squads in minibuses. Every day, hundreds of Ukrainian men are seized in broad daylight by masked men, beaten if they resist, forced into unmarked vans, stripped of their phones and cut off from the world.
This is not a society refusing sacrifice. I am not busting the myth of the brave Ukrainians. We are bloody brave. Surveys conducted in 2021, when Ukrainians still felt free to speak on the streets and when surveys were still reliable, showed that 62% of the men said that they would fight the Russians. And we actually see the outcome. In Western Europe, rates of readiness to defend their countries vary between 13% and 26%.
Now all total wars require coercion. So, when I say this to my friends in the West, they say, look, but every war has required coercion. No state fighting for survival can rely on consent alone.
But long wars in which losses accumulate while promised end slip beyond credibility, cross a threshold where death is no longer born as sacrifice, but is judged as waste.
Crucially, when a state comes to police grief and treats dissent as treason, it squanders the moral capital of the citizen’s sacrifice. When a state acts as a violent occupier, blurring its distinction from the aggressor state to the point of erasure, it loses political loyalty.
Exhaustion turns anti-war sentiment into rage against the state and against broader systems that the state is perceived to be a part of. This matters a lot more than territorial loss in Ukraine.
President Zelensky has begun to acknowledge this. That war needs to be brought to an end.
Ganna Yudkivska, former Judge, European Court of Human Rights, Vice-President of the European Society of International Law
From the standpoint of jurisprudence, international law does not dispute that a state may require military service.
The Constitution of Ukraine, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights all recognize this. The state therefore possesses the legal authority to mobilize.
First, coercion exercised under the law and coercion exercised outside the law are fundamentally different things, and legitimacy rests precisely on that distinction.
Second, the burden of war must be distributed fairly among citizens. This is not merely a moral aspiration; it is a legal obligation of the state.
And war, contrary to what intuition might suggest, strengthens that obligation rather than weakening it.
One might assume that wartime is not the moment for legal meticulousness. First, we win the war; then we sort out legal questions later.
The heavier the burden of national defense becomes, the heavier it falls on those who bear it – and the more intolerable any unfair distribution of that burden becomes.
A soldier who has spent 18 months at the front without rotation carries not only his own burden, but also part of the burden of those who have been exempted without lawful justification.
Justice is needed not despite war, but precisely because there is a war.
Brendan Simms, Director of Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics
It is, I think, very valuable to start thinking about the situation after the war, even before the war has ended. That has been done historically over time. It was done in the Second World War, for instance.
First of all, in terms of the containment of Russia, if the way in which this war ends in Ukraine is such a way as to take Ukraine out of the defense of Europe, to render Ukraine defenseless in the aftermath. That will obviously be very consequential for everybody in Europe, not just for the Ukrainian people.
Secondly, the outcome of the war in Ukraine and the way in which the postwar settlement is organized will say a lot about the viability of the European project in general. If Europe abandons Ukraine, if Ukraine is in some way overrun, or even if it is not overrun, but the postwar settlement is oppressive or does not enable Ukrainians to live together in a viable way, then Europe itself will also be the loser.
But if the war ends in such a way as to damage the internal cohesion of Ukraine, to make it a weaker geopolitical actor, then of course there are many bad things that could happen in Ukraine that haven’t happened yet.
Piotr Kulpa, Former Undersecretary of State, Poland, EU Adviser on Ukrainian Reform
The only true source of wealth for countries is organization, not natural resources, capital or work. Those countries who are better organized can transfer the burden of their own crises onto those who are less organized. Those who are better organized can take resources away from those who are less organized.
The struggle on this earth is fundamentally about differences in levels of organization. And there are only two strategies. Either you raise your own level of organization, or you undermine the organization of the country you wish to defeat.
Ukraine became the victim of a meta-institutional aggression. The attack on the Ukrainian state was effectively completed in 2004, after the oligarchs had plundered the country and 52% of the economy had been privatized.
Let me put it this way: throughout the entire history of privatization in Ukraine, roughly 10 billion dollars reached the state budget, while assets worth vastly more changed hands. In reality, privatization income was less than 1% of the assets’ value. It was a looting operation. Those who enriched themselves wanted to destroy the state, and they did so in cooperation with Russia. According to this interpretation, the architect of that project was Viktor Medvedchuk.
In 2004, the constitutional compromise adopted on Dec. 10 deprived the president of the authority to dismiss ministers at the request of the prime minister. As a result, Ukraine became the only country in the world where removing a minister required a parliamentary vote. The center of coordinating authority disappeared. The country ceased to function as a unified executive structure.
Just as Yaroslav the Wise once divided Kyivan Rus territorially, Ukraine was divided vertically into 26 separate islands of power. It became a loose federation of ministerial offices.
In order to coordinate such a system, an informal network inevitably emerges. Thus, Ukrainian statehood took on the form of a mafia-like structure. Power began to be exercised through corruption, informal arrangements, political pressure, and parallel institutions.
A state that acts as a single fist can resist both oligarchs and multinational corporations. A state fragmented into islands of authority cannot.
Yuriy Romanenko, political analyst, Khvylya, The Romanenko Show (Youtube)
The first point Europeans fail to understand about Ukraine is this: Ukraine is a visitor from the future, showing Europe what may well be its own near future.
For more than 30 years, Ukraine ignored all the warning signs that history was sending. As a result, it lost time. Time is the key factor in determining what kind of future you will have. When you lose momentum in time, your range of opportunities continually narrows, while new threats emerge and multiply.
The entire history of the Second Ukrainian Republic is, in essence, a story of lost time, lost opportunities, and an expanding corridor of risks generated by the transformation of the world unfolding before our eyes. Ukraine is therefore sending Europe a crucial message: Do not repeat the mistakes we have made over the past 30 years, because that path leads to the threat of total defeat.
The old order cannot be preserved. No miracle is coming to restore it. Russia and China have already understood this.
Those who recognize that the old international system is ending naturally gain advantages over those who continue trying to preserve it. The more one clings to a collapsing order, the more one strengthens those who are already preparing for the next one.
Ukraine has learned this lesson through hardship and necessity. Under these conditions, Ukraine becomes a crucial component of any future European security architecture.
