Aris Roussinos is one of the few Western journalists to actually embed with some of Ukraine’s right-wing nationalist militias. He’s done a stellar job of adding texture to his reporting. While having no illusions about the quality of Ukraine’s pre-war democracy, Roussinos makes a very important point in his latest dispatch for UnHerd: War changes the internal dynamics of a society and a state. A people may have tacitly accepted the rule of oligarchs in the past. But after the experience of volunteering and risking their life for the state, they are far more likely to take responsibility for whatever emerges from the war:
War has always been the father of innovation: a reset for societies forced to adopt whatever methods work just in order to survive. The outburst of voluntarism that has gripped Ukraine is a striking example: mutual aid groups, local volunteer organisations and local defence militias have cropped up, taking on many of the burdens of the overstretched state. We can almost term this a form of “war anarchism”, analogous to the “war socialism” that overtook industrial capitalism during the World Wars, paving the way for postwar social democracy. The relationship of the people to an often distant and dysfunctional state is being reset; new paths have perhaps opened up for postwar Ukrainian society, politically and socially more inclusive than the outward form of liberal democracy that came before, in which political power was in reality the plaything of rival oligarchs. The war against the invading Russians has many qualities of a revolution.
Read the whole thing.