Volodymyr Yermolenko Interview | Alex Gilbert #266

Volodymyr Yermolenko, Ukrainian philosopher, journalist and editor in chief of UkraineWorld.org, published Ukraine in Histories and Stories in 2020 and Eros and Psyche: Love and culture in Europe, in 2023.

Could you share an update on your book with Tetyana (Ogarkova)? When is it expected to be published, and what are the key themes you explore?

Volodymyr Yermolenko: We have finalized the book. It will be released in the spring in Ukraine. We are also translating it into French and English and will see what happens. I hope that this year, we will at least have agreements with publishers abroad. I am thinking about Poland, the Polish language. I am thinking about French and English. Maybe German and Italian later. The key topics—I think it is an interesting book with an interesting approach. We call it a philosophical reportage or a book of ideas, which is very much based on reality, on empirical reality.

It is based on our trips to the front line with my wife, Tetyana. Since the beginning of the invasion, I think we have already made 50 trips to the front line, in the north, south, and west. Sometimes, we were very close to the front line, 2 kilometers from the enemy. Sometimes, it was farther, 10 or 15 kilometers away. We do not go to zero point, nor into the trenches. We are civilians. But we help soldiers a lot by providing them with various vehicles, which we purchase thanks to donations from many people, from Ukraine and abroad. We also help civilians by providing books and organizing cultural events with PEN Ukraine in frontline towns and cities. There is a lot of experience in talking with people, asking them questions, and listening to their stories. There are many stories in this book, but at the same time, there are also many ideas.

It is an attempt to understand how the world changes through human experience, how it brings us back to the fundamental aspects of being human—how we perceive ourselves, our lives, our love, our hatred, our time, our space, our losses, our death. All these fundamental aspects of human existence are present in this book as a reflection on reality. That is why we call it a philosophical reportage. I think it is an interesting approach because it has always been my dream to combine the world of ideas with the world of reality. I think these two dimensions of our existence, these two parallel lines, do not often intersect. So, we see many interesting books of ideas that are very far from reality, from physical reality. Physical reality, in catastrophic times, reveals something very valuable about human beings. On the other hand, we have classic reportage, which is too focused on facts and sometimes lacks a horizon of thought. So, we try to break these two realities.

With the withdrawal of USAID, what consequences can we expect, particularly in regions where it has played a critical role?

Volodymyr Yermolenko: It is crazy to see how much the USA has done very good things. The Trump administration tries to show that the United States was doing things they did not like, such as supporting LGBT rights or fighting disinformation. But honestly, the USA often had the idea of working at the local level and helping grassroots democracy and self-organization develop locally.

You cannot imagine how many USA posters I have seen in very small villages across Ukraine. These were not posters saying America is great or displaying the USA flag. They often contained very concrete advice on what to do during COVID or how to avoid mine explosions during the war. I do not remember exactly, but there was a lot of guidance on health issues, for example. It was a very human approach that really worked at the local level. Of course, there was a lot of humanitarian aid, a lot of reconstruction aid, and a lot of support for local media to tell local stories and help people understand their own reality. Because if people do not engage with local news, they might be tempted to believe conspiracy theories and stop thinking about their own subjectivity and responsibility on the ground for local matters. The danger now is that many of these very beautiful and good civil society initiatives may die out, be downsized, or be replaced by other types of funding. That could mean Chinese money or covert Russian money, for example. Because influence can and will always be replaced.

So, in short, this withdrawal makes Ukraine very vulnerable from within. One of the miracles of Ukraine’s development in recent decades is that a generation of Western-oriented, democracy-oriented people has emerged. And they do not necessarily work on USAID projects. USAID sets an example for other donors—European donors, Japanese donors, for example—or those who help local businesses grow, which in turn helps fund these initiatives independently, etc.

If you have fewer people working on this kind of effort, promoting good things—human dignity, local development, accountability, quality journalism, fact-checking, etc.—and at the same time, money starts flowing in with very cynical ideas about how to influence public opinion, how to run a Telegram channel that claims everyone is corrupt and that no one deserves trust… That is what the Russians do all the time. They destroy trust in society. That is their main goal. Of course, this leads to very sick societies, and I think that is a serious problem.

In your interview with Timothy Snyder, you discussed about Bloodlands and the historical roots of the anti-Ukrainian sentiment. How does this history shape current narratives about Ukraine?

Volodymyr Yermolenko: I think Snyder’s point is that Ukraine has been at the center of many global events, mainly the two world wars. But it was never recognized. It is as if something was happening around a territory, but that territory had no name. No one understands why these historical events—like hurricanes or geopolitical shifts—occur around such a central place. One explanation is that it was so important because it was a land rich in resources. During the First and Second World Wars, the key resource was food. The general movement and thus the increase in birth rates and improvements in mortality rates meant that feeding a much larger population became necessary. And it is true. Today, we can say that rare earth materials, minerals—these are things that lie deep in the land. But that is only one explanation.

Another explanation is that the fact that great players, great empires, were fighting for these lands means that they never actually conquered them. And so, for the Russian Empire, despite all the genocidal acts it has committed since the early 18th century, since the time of Mazepa, the Russian project of exterminating the idea of Ukraine has existed for a very long time. I think it dates back at least to Peter I and Mazepa and the Battle of Poltava. But the fact that it did not succeed in completely exterminating it shows that there is something very strong in the resistance of these people, even despite the horrible things that happened at the beginning of the 18th century.

The extermination of Ukrainian culture that took place in the second half of the 19th century, with the suppression of the language and the deportation of cultural figures. The genocidal acts, or at least the war crimes, during the Bolshevik struggle against Ukrainian independence in 1918-1919, in the early 20th century. Then several famines, not only in 1932-1933 but also from 1920 to 1940. And then the extermination of Ukrainian resistance in the 1950s. Then the extermination of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s. And then another extermination in the 1960s-1970s. And then the war of 2014 and the war of 2022. The list can go on. Despite everything, Ukrainians regenerate.

After a few decades of silence, some people start saying that we must return to our identity, and then, at some point, it’s dozens of people, and then suddenly, it’s tens of millions. And on the other hand, the Germans also tried to colonize Ukraine in 1918 and extract all the necessary resources. And the Austrians perhaps considered a milder version. Then the Nazi Germans came back and really saw Ukraine as a territory without subjectivity.

It’s the same story: the great powers deny Ukrainian subjectivity. They consider Ukraine an empty land, a vast desert, a Russian table, a wild territory. And Ukrainians oppose this. Ukrainians resist this interpretation of Ukraine as an empty land that can be colonized, whose resources can be extracted, that can be populated because supposedly no one lives there, and that can be moved around at will. This is the key story. This is the key struggle.

It is a struggle between a group of people who have a very strong sense of subjectivity, a strong sense of themselves, and who assert this subjectivity and the right to exist, despite immense efforts from various parts of the world to exterminate them. For me, it is always a paradox. For example, if we look at Trump, it is always a paradox. It is a heroic story. And not just heroic—it is also a bloody story, because all this resistance involves violence and sometimes very cruel things. And this is also something Ukrainians will reflect on when all these events come to an end—when they reflect on the pogroms against Jews, the crimes against Poles, the violence against Poles in Volhynia and other regions. And vice versa, because there was also Polish violence against Ukrainians.

There were many Jews in the NKVD who participated in the extermination of Ukrainians, etc. These are very difficult questions, and these struggles for existence involve a lot of violence. And when it is over, we can reflect on it. And this is Snyder, and this is also the reflection of another Ukrainian historian who says that violence has been and remains too present in this region for centuries. It is completely different from societies where violence is suppressed and confined to a ghetto, a prison, a cage.

And then there are outbursts of violence, but everything returns to normal. Here, it was a different story. We return to this narrative that Ukrainians do not exist—a Russian narrative that is very poisonous for other countries in the world and that is now being perpetuated by the Trump administration. But I am sure they will lose because Ukrainians have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for regeneration.

What are the key stages in the transformation of the narrative surrounding Russian cultural “uniqueness”? How has this narrative evolved, and what forces are driving this shift?

Volodymyr Yermolenko: I don’t know what Russian cultural uniqueness is. For me, I am not saying everything, but many aspects of Russian culture serve as a vehicle for imperialism. It is truly a function of imperialism. It is the way imperialism, which is very cruel when viewed from a military, political, and social perspective, operates. Russian imperialism is built on the idea of violence. Violence must be at the core of imperialism.

The imperialist, the tsar, must be someone capable of extreme violence. The key figures in Russian history are Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible), Peter I, Catherine II, Nicholas I, Lenin, Stalin, and then Putin. The key figures of the Russian political project are those capable of extreme violence. And often, they are capable of violence against their own relatives. Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible), Peter I killed his own son. There are very strange stories about Stalin’s sons. There are very strange stories about Putin’s family. Catherine II killed or organized the killing of her husband. I think that is the story.

That’s why I always say that at the center of the Russian political project, there is the figure of the executioner. An executioner who is not pushed to the margins of society, as in the European way of life and worldview, which has existed since antiquity. This idea that the executioner is a marginal figure, that he should not be touched, that he lives outside the city, that he is impure. For the Russian world, the executioner is not on the margins—he must be at the center.

The executioner is someone who commits violence against the weak, the unprotected. It is not violence that occurs in battles between equals—it is violence against those who are already damaged. So it is violence against the weak. This is a major difference from the symbolic figure of the hero, which is truly a hero in ancient Greek culture. It is also present in Jewish culture, with the story of David versus Goliath and other stories. The hero is someone who challenges the stronger opponent.

So, you have these two symbols: the executioner, who exercises violence against the weak, and the hero, who challenges the stronger adversary. Ukraine has often centered itself around this hero narrative because we are very often in situations where it is necessary to fight against a stronger force. That is why this resistance against the Russians was so decisive. Russia has focused on this, and that is why violence is a key tool for communication, governance, and politics. To rephrase Clausewitz, who said that war is politics by other means, one could say that in Russia, politics is war by other means.

Every night, we have drones attacking children. At 10 PM, we put them to bed, and then we have drone attacks. This has been happening every night for three years. And I believe this is the foundation of the Russian political project. Russian culture often creates different myths. For example, the idea of immense kindness and infinite warmth. There is also Leo Tolstoy and his philosophy of nonviolent resistance against evil, which is actually a mask for this idea of violence. Or we have saintly characters like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Or idyllic literature by Pushkin and other romantics. I think there is a deep abyss between these two aspects. On the other side, there is another major trend in Russian culture called “chernukha.”

It is deeply pessimistic and hopeless. Russian literature is very dark. It does not construct idyllic scenarios but rather pessimistic, bleak, and hopeless ones. That is another abyss—the abyss of human capability to change anything. Either you depict an illusory reality that does not exist, which is just a façade for a very cruel reality—the reality of the Russian political project, which is imperial in a bad way. It is about expansion. It is not about valuing what you already have but about conquering what you do not have.

So, you are left with either an illusory reality or an absolutely pessimistic and hopeless aesthetic that tells you there is no way out. It is always either one illusion or another. Life is just a choice between different kinds of illusions. That is why I am quite skeptical about Russian culture, about the Russian cultural narrative. That does not mean there are no good things in it. I am not making a blanket judgment, but I am pointing out certain tendencies. Regarding uniqueness, the point is that Russia has built its history—at least since the 19th century—on the idea that it is not the West.

Paradoxically, even Russian intellectuals, the so-called Westernizers, starting with Herzen, and earlier with Chaadayev, but especially Herzen, paved the way that isolated Russia from the West even more. They paved the way for Russian Marxism, and Russian Marxism and Bolshevism isolated Russia from the West. Is that really uniqueness? I think it is just a mindset of negativity. “We are not the West,” and they build their identity on the fact that they are not the West. But who are they? They do not know.

Because everything in Russian culture depends on the West. Pushkin is just a continuation of French Rococo and French libertinism. And then you could say that Pushkin and Lermontov were trying to create an alternative to Byron. Then you could say that Dostoevsky continues the work started by Victor Hugo and Balzac in France. The idea of the regeneration and rehabilitation of a fallen human being—this is also very dependent on the Catholic tradition of redemption and regeneration. I have studied this in depth.

And then you could say that Leo Tolstoy was heavily influenced by Joseph de Maistre, Proudhon, and others. And Russian Marxism is entirely dependent on German Marxism. Even modern ideologues, like the Eurasianists, are also dependent on the idea of poly-civilizational approaches developed by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and later by Huntington.

And it continues. And that is normal. Cultures depend on one another. That is okay. But they must acknowledge and understand this dependence, and accept it, instead of saying: “Okay, we take ideas from the West, flip them upside down, and claim they are our own ideas, with which we now fight against the West.” Many so-called “organic,” “non-mechanical,” “non-atomistic” ideas that emerged in Russian culture actually came from Germany. Because it was the German Romantics, in the 19th century, who started developing these ideas in opposition to the French and the British.

And then they ended up with Nazism. And then they realized that “the Western zone” was nonsense. But the Russians took a different turn and began applying these same ideas against the Germans themselves. That is why you have people like Vladimir Ern, who wrote From Kant to Krupp during World War I, claiming there was a direct link between German rationalism and militarism, industrial production, and weapon manufacturing. Which, of course, is nonsense—utter nonsense.

Dugin supports Trump’s claim that Ukraine “started the war” as a “satanic” attempt to divide Russians, qualified his election in his last book The Trump revolution, as an “eschatological event” signaling the collapse of the “globalist deep state,” aligning with his vision of a multipolar world questioning state survival in a Hobbesian sense. He portrays Zelensky as a “parasite to exterminate” echoing Nazi dehumanization tactics and blending pop culture references with religious metaphysics. How do you explain this paradoxical rhetoric ?

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Dugin is an absolute marginal lunatic, and an immoral bastard who believes Ukrainians do not exist and are just Russians. He’s just fucking stupid. Ukrainian music is different from Russian music and Ukrainian language from Russian.