More uncertainty lies ahead for Ukraine as it enters the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion

In this new episode of Eurozine's show Standard Time, Réka Kinga Papp and her guests take stock of eleven years of the war Russia waged to Ukraine, and three since the full-scale agression. Since then, Ukraine has been standing up and as guest Maksym Kyiak put it: Russia had thought they would conquer Ukraine in 3 days, but they haven’t managed to bring Ukraine to its knees in 3 years.

This surprised the international community as much as the Kremlin. But when it comes to international relations, Maksym Kyiak looks even further back, specifically to 2008, when Russian troops marched into Georgia. Kyiak thinks that the lukewarm international response this aggression has emboldened the Kremlin.

Some historians view this incident as a sort of green light for Putin’s regime, proving that they can get away with aggression without significant repercussions. 6 years later, in 2014, the invasion of Crimea prompted more substantial, yet still cautious and divided international reactions.

Over time, public attention dissipated and many seemed to entirely forget about this war – despite the fact that active violence persisted. Then, in 2022, as Russian troops started to amass on the Ukrainian border, many watched in shock and surprise as the heir to the former Soviet Union attacked its former territory, justifying its actions with false claims and historical lies.

What Putin had hoped would be a victorious Blitzkrieg turned out to be a blood-soaked, horrible fiasco that keeps claiming thousands of lives and has brought war crimes galore, as the Russian aggression deliberately tries to destroy and erase Ukrainian political and cultural independence.

The present and the future

Today we take stock of the past three years and the preceding 13, and we also look into the future. Ukraine now faces a world of uncertainty as the new Trump administration pedals Russian propaganda lines and even blames them for the war. The EU remains a major ally, yet weakened by the rise of far-right parties and ever broadening Russian interference.

How will they mitigate the losses, and who can come to their aid? Who is responsible for keeping Ukrainian culture and identity alive? Our guests talk about all this and more.

The guests

Kateryna Botanova is a Ukrainian curator, writer and cultural critic based in Basel, Switzerland. She is a co-curator of multidisciplinary biennial Culture scapes in Basel. Until 2015, she was a director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, as well as a founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Korydor. You can find her articles in Eurozine, one of which even nominated her for a European Press Prize.

Maksym Kyiak is a chief scientist at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies (Kyiv, Ukraine), Doctor of Philosophy, the Deputy Director of the Central European Institute. He worked at various academic and governmental institutions in Ukraine and abroad. He has represented Ukraine at the CAHROM Committee in the Council of Europe and was one of the co-authors of the research of the NATO StratCom. Research interests: global security, European integration, countering disinformation, foreign policy, sociology of religion.

Adam Reichardt is the editor of the Kraków-based specialist publication New Eastern Europe, one of Eurozine’s partner journals, who has been surveying and publishing on the politics of the wider region for a great many years. For us, he also brings in an American perspective.