The biblical story of David and Goliath is used here as a metaphor to discuss one of the key aspects of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, the clash between democracy and autocracy. The essay discusses the development of Russian and Ukrainian political cultures as the two countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union, considers democracy as a factor of international relations on the eve of the Russo-Ukrainian War, and treats it as one of the key issues over which the all-out war launched by Russia in February 2022 has been fought. It concludes by assessing the impact that the war has had and will continue to have on the development of democracy in Ukraine and beyond.
In the biblical story of David and Goliath, the young shepherd David defeats the giant Goliath with a sling and five stones. Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s aggression, resulting in the destruction of most of that country’s military potential, seemed as unlikely as David’s victory over Goliath. The stones that Ukraine keeps flinging at the aggressor come from Ukraine and abroad, but the sling that propels them is made exclusively in Ukraine. It is woven from Ukraine’s dedication to the ideas of freedom, independence, and democracy.
Democracy is a key value that Ukrainians defend today in this latest incarnation of the duel between David and Goliath, which is also the largest military conflict that Europe has seen since World War II. The defense the Ukrainians are putting up matters not only for the future of Ukraine and for that of international relations, but also for the future of democracy. More precisely, how the Russo-Ukrainian War is going to end is a fateful question for democracy itself.
In the minds of many of us, history had reached its end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We may not have gone as far as Francis Fukuyama in seeing that fall as the ultimate victory of liberal democracy over all alternative forms of political order, but we were at least convinced that despite continuing great-power rivalries, invasions and territorial annexations had become things of the past. There had been clear signs to the contrary — postcommunist wars of succession in Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia, U.S. willingness after 9/11 to send forces into Afghanistan and then Iraq, Russia’s military conquest of part of Georgia in 2008 — but we preferred to ignore them. The rise of populism and authoritarian regimes, as well as authoritarian tendencies in democratic nations, suggested parallels with the 1930s, but most of us brushed them aside.1
The fall of the Soviet Union, far from being a universal triumph of democracy, as was imagined back in 1991, was a victory not only for democrats but also for nationalists and former communist apparatchiks, with their roles and ideologies varying from one ex-Soviet republic to another. In some cases, it was the most conservative elements of the Soviet elite that consolidated power. Democracy succeeded fully only in the three Baltic states, where it turned out to be more durable and resistant to authoritarian pressures than it did in some of Eastern Europe’s old communist-bloc countries, most notably Hungary.
Democracy in the form of competitive elections survived in Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and, to a degree, in Kyrgyzstan. It never took off in Kyrgyzstan’s neighbors, the four republics that formed the rest of what had been Soviet Central Asia. In Belarus, the slide into authoritarianism began after Alyaksandr Lukashenka won the 1994 presidential election. His regime had become a virtual dictatorship by 2020, when he used unrestricted violence against peaceful demonstrators who protested his government’s widespread use of electoral fraud to keep Lukashenka in office.2
Russia’s Presidency
In Russia, which was the beacon of democracy for the more conservative Soviet and post-Soviet republics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, authoritarianism began to gather strength after the political crisis of October 1993. That month saw the largest armed conflict to break out in the streets of Moscow since the Russian Revolution of 1917. On the morning of October 4, armored vehicles of the elite Taman Guards Motor Rifle Division took positions near the Russian Federation’s parliament building, known as the White House. Then they opened fire, aiming at the floors housing the parliamentary leaders who were opposing Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation’s elected president since June 1991. These Yeltsin foes had barricaded themselves inside their upper-story offices.3
This was the second time in slightly more than two years that Yeltsin had waged a battle to control the White House. During the August 1991 Soviet hard-liners’ coup against Soviet first secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the weapons had been words. President Yeltsin (then governing what was nominally still a republic within the Soviet Union) had led the defense of the building. Yeltsin had climbed onto a tank (also from the Taman Division) to give a speech denouncing the attempted putsch and its goal of restoring Soviet power. The episode — with Yeltsin, the tank, and the White House looming just behind them — made headlines around the world and became a dramatic symbol of Russian democracy.
The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the WorldSerhii Plokhy delivered the twenty-first annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World on 11 December 2024. The title of his lecture was “David vs. Goliath: Democracy and Autocracy in the Russo-Ukrainian War.” Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006) was one of the most influential social scientists and scholars of democracy of the second half of the twentieth century. A frequent contributor to the Journal of Democracy and a founding member of its Editorial Board, Lipset taught at Columbia, the University of California–Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and George Mason University. He was the author of numerous important books, including Political Man, The First New Nation, The Politics of Unreason, and American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. He was the only person ever to have served as president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–80) and the American Sociological Association (1992–93). Lipset’s work covered a wide range of topics: the social conditions of democracy, including economic development and political culture; the origins of socialism, fascism, revolution, protest, prejudice, and extremism; class conflict, structure, and mobility; social cleavages, party systems, and voter alignments; and public opinion and public confidence in institutions. Lipset was a pioneer in the study of comparative politics, and no comparison featured as prominently in his work as that between the two great democracies of North America. Thanks to his insightful analysis of Canada in comparison with the United States, most fully elaborated in Continental Divide (1990), he has been dubbed the “Tocqueville of Canada.” The Lipset Lecture is cosponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Munk School, and the Embassy of Canada in Washington, D.C., with financial support this year from Johns Hopkins University Press, the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the Embassy of Canada. To view videos of the Lipset Lecture from this and past years, please visit www.ned.org/seymour-martin-lipset-lecture-on-democracy-in-the-world. |
In 1993, the weapons were not words, and President Yeltsin was not defending the White House. Instead, he sent tanks to attack it even as his top lieutenants from August 1991 were trying to stop him. On both occasions, Yeltsin prevailed; Russian democracy was not so lucky. Saved from the fire of Soviet tanks in August 1991, it was all but destroyed by Russian tanks in October 1993.4
In December 1993, Russian citizens voted on the new constitution that Yeltsin’s aides had drafted. “I won’t deny it, the powers of the president in the draft are considerable indeed,” Yeltsin told a reporter in November 1993. He then added:
Аnd what would you want? In a country that has got used to tsars or chiefs; a country in which well-defined interest groups have not coalesced, and their leaders have not been determined, in which normal parties are barely embryonic; a country in which executive discipline is exceedingly weak, where nihilism with regard to the law is completely rampant — in such a country, could one bet only or mainly on parliament? In half a year, if not sooner, the people are sure to demand a dictator. Such a dictator will be found quickly, I assure you. And perhaps in that very parliament.5
Yeltsin was declaring, in effect, that Russia was not ready for democracy, and was presenting himself as the country’s savior from the evil of dictatorship. He was right that Russia had little if any experience with democracy. In only about two years, Russia had all but ended its experiment with parliamentary democracy and laid the constitutional foundations for a strong presidential regime. In truth, it took less than two years, for throughout most of 1992 and 1993, President Yeltsin had ruled by decree. Born of the USSR’s collapse, Russian democracy foundered on the rocks of Russian statehood.
Yeltsin believed that he had the right and, indeed, the duty to choose his successor. The tryouts in what had become known as “Operation Successor” brought to power the former director of the Federal Security Service (or FSB, the KGB’s successor agency) and secretary of the Security Council, Vladimir Putin. In August 1999, Yeltsin named Putin premier and said that he should succeed to the presidency. On the last day of that year, Yeltsin resigned, making the 47-year-old Putin Russia’s acting president. On 26 March 2000, Putin triumphed over eleven other presidential candidates and was sworn in on May 7. Putin took full advantage of the existing political system, pushing it from hyperpresidentialism to autocracy. Neither Russia’s domestic politics nor its foreign policy would ever be the same.
Putin took control of the Russian State Duma in the December 2003 election, which saw his new party, United Russia, obtain three times as many votes as the Communist Party to become the largest party in parliament. He then exploited a hostage crisis produced by a group of Chechen radicals whom the UN had declared terrorists in March 2003.6 These radicals attacked and took over a school in Beslan in September 2004. On day three of the siege, Russian security services stormed the school amid explosions and a fire whose sources remain disputed, and there ensued a gun battle in which hostages died. The eventual death toll (excluding the terrorists) was 334, including 186 schoolchildren. This shocking incident gave Putin an opening to limit whatever remained of Russian democracy: Elections to fill regional governorships were abolished, and there were new laws curtailing the activities of political parties and nongovernmental organizations. Putin was eager to see a similar political system installed in Ukraine.7
Ukraine’s Democracy
The Gorbachev-era democratic experiment died in Russia, but it survived in the former USSR’s second-largest republic, Ukraine. The mid-1990s saw Russia and Ukraine part ways in political development: Russia became more authoritarian with each passing year, while Ukraine stayed democratic despite repeated efforts to follow the Russian model and make parliament subordinate to the presidency as an institution. Numerous factors drove these different outcomes, which would strongly affect relations between the two former senior partners in the Soviet project.
In 2015, political scientist Lucan Way could write that “Ukraine became the most competitive and democratic” among the ex-Soviet countries, “experiencing four electoral turnovers, a vibrant media, and repeated mass movements for political change.” He went on to call Ukrainian politics a form of “pluralism by default,” citing “underdeveloped ruling parties, a weak authoritarian state, and national divisions between eastern and western Ukraine” as reasons for this. Pluralism emerged because “leaders had little capacity to keep allies in line, manipulate the electoral process, starve opponents of resources, and violently suppress opposition challenge.”8
In June 1996, almost two decades before Way penned that analysis, the Ukrainian parliament had adopted a new constitution creating a mixed presidential-parliamentary system of government. Leonid Kuchma, the country’s second president, wanted more presidential powers, but leading lawmakers resisted. Following in Yeltsin’s footsteps, Kuchma threatened to put his own draft constitution to a referendum. Knowing from Russia’s experience where that could lead, parliament chose compromise. Russia’s impending presidential election added urgency: Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov seemed as if he might defeat Yeltsin, and with communists forming the largest faction in Ukraine’s parliament, fears grew in Kyiv that a Zyuganov win could open the way to an attempted resurrection of the Soviet Union.
Amid these pressures, Ukraine adopted a new arrangement in which the president could veto bills passed by parliament and even, in certain circumstances, dissolve it. But parliament gained a decisive role in appointing the prime minister and key cabinet members, including the head of the national bank. Parliament also placed its representatives on the constitutional court and the national bank’s board.9
The 1996 Constitution limits the president to two terms, and after some hesitation Kuchma decided to reject the idea of a third term despite the argument that his first term did not count because he had won it before the document’s adoption. Again imitating Yeltsin, Kuchma wanted someone to succeed him who would protect his assets and his personal safety. The choice fell on the governor of Donetsk oblast (province), Viktor Yanukovych, who led Ukraine’s largest regional “clan” and parliament’s biggest pro-presidential grouping.
The clash between Ukrainian democracy and Russian authoritarianism turned into a major crisis in late 2004. Yanukovych, serving as premier, claimed victory over Viktor Yushchenko in the October 31 presidential contest. Voters, however, refused to accept this falsified result. The West backed them — and Ukrainian democracy — strongly, and Yushchenko was ultimately declared the winner. The Ukrainian version of “Operation Successor” had been stopped in its tracks by the Orange Revolution.10
The era of would-be hyperpresidentialism that had begun with Kuchma’s April 2000 bid to increase presidential powers by means of a referendum came to an end in December 2004 with the weakening of those powers. During his last year in office, Kuchma published his memoirs under the telling title Ukraine Is Not Russia. After more than once trying and failing to implement the Russian model, he knew the truth behind the name of his book, which appeared in Moscow before its Ukrainian translation became available to readers in Kyiv. It sent a message that very few in Russia took seriously, and that no one in the Kremlin was prepared to accept.11
Russia versus Ukraine
Ukrainian democracy posed a major threat to the Russian political regime. Ukraine offered a nearby example of a functioning political system with a strong parliament, which encouraged and empowered Russian liberal opposition to the Kremlin’s growing authoritarianism. Moreover, the Ukrainian democratic tradition in general — and Ukraine’s parliamentary system in particular — promised to greatly complicate any attempts by Moscow to reassert control over the country. Finally, the West’s insistence on democratic rule as a prerequisite for good relations with post-Soviet states gave Ukraine an edge when it came to building long-term political ties with Europe and the United States.
Postcommunist and post-Soviet states that wanted to join Western institutions such as the EU and NATO would need democratic credentials to do so. Ukraine’s chaotic but viable democracy made it a genuine EU and NATO aspirant, yet the same could not be said of Russia as it failed one democracy test after another and lurched down the path of authoritarianism. The success and durability of Ukrainian democracy threatened Putin’s rule by giving heart to whatever prodemocratic forces remained in Russia. From Putin’s geopolitical perspective, Ukraine put democratic institutions squarely on Russia’s border — a situation that he saw as not merely undesirable, but unacceptable.12
The Orange Revolution “was our 9/11,” declared Putin’s advisor Gleb Pavlovsky. Putin had campaigned openly for Yanukovych and then secretly pushed Kuchma toward the use of force against demonstrators, failing on both counts. The Orange Revolution followed the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and came not long before mass protests in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, in the latter of which the 2005 Tulip Revolution unseated the local Soviet-holdover ruler. Georgia’s revolutionary leader and new president was the young, charismatic, and Western-educated Mikheil Saakashvili.
Thrown onto the defensive by these events, Moscow began to mimic “color revolution” tactics. The Kremlin created and funded numerous organizations of Russian young people. The most notorious was Nashi (Ours), an “antifascist” group devoted to defending Putin against the alleged schemes of foreign powers seeking to inflict revolutionary upheaval on Russia. Kremlin rhetoric targeted Ukraine, but behind Kyiv the Moscow ideologues saw the threatening shadow of the West.13
Failed Crusade
President George W. Bush’s “democracy crusade,” or policies designed to promote and support democracy on a global scale, put Washington and Moscow on a collision course. Putin’s regime found democracy promotion a threat to its stability at home and its political objectives abroad. The new Eastern Europe — the former western republics of the USSR — became the site where those competing interests collided with a force comparable to what the “old” Eastern Europe had felt during the Cold War. The focus of the new competition became Ukraine. In March 2004, seven East European countries, including the three Baltic states — all of them democracies — had officially joined NATO. At year’s end, the Orange Revolution advanced the cause of democracy in Ukraine. Might it be next on NATO’s membership list?
In February 2005, his face still pitted by the dioxin poisoning that had struck him in September, newly inaugurated President Yushchenko went to the NATO heads of state meeting in Brussels. There, speaking in the name of the Orange Revolution and the majority that had elected him, he publicly declared that Ukraine sought “European integration” in the form of both NATO and EU membership. He also went out of his way to call Russia the “strategic partner” of Ukraine and to vow that his country’s move toward NATO membership was not directed against Moscow’s interests.14
Ukraine was trying to solve its security dilemma as best it could. Since NATO had established a strategic partnership with Russia, the idea of Ukraine’s acceding to NATO without antagonizing Russia was theoretically feasible in the 1990s. But in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv faced a difficult choice: accommodate Moscow despite its longstanding claims on Ukrainian territory and interference in Ukrainian elections, or seek protection within the Euro-Atlantic military alliance. The threat from Russia was real and immediate, while membership in NATO was hypothetical and removed in time. After long vacillation, Kyiv opted decisively for NATO.15
Russia followed Yushchenko’s foreign-policy moves closely but said nothing in public. Instead, Moscow used Ukraine’s dependence on Russian natural gas, plus its role as a transit country for the export of that gas to Europe, to interfere with Kyiv’s westward turn. In March 2005, soon after Yushchenko’s Brussels speech, Russia hit Ukraine with a hike in the price of gas. There was a general policy to cut subsidies to the former Soviet republics, but Moscow-friendly Belarus received better terms. There ensued periodic gas crises in which Ukraine would struggle to pay high Russian prices, and Putin would then cut gas supplies to Ukraine (whose rates eventually became higher than those paid by Russia’s customers in Central Europe).16
In January 2008, Yushchenko and other Ukrainian leaders wrote to NATO requesting a Membership Action Plan. The main theme of their appeal was Ukraine’s full identification with “European democratic values” and “the Euro-Atlantic security area.” With U.S. support, the letter asked NATO for a plan as early as its April 2008 summit. Led by Germany and France, however, European member states had other ideas: They blocked Ukraine’s accession as well as Georgia’s. Berlin and Paris feared that Putin would treat NATO greenlights as grounds for making war on either or both of the two former Soviet republics. Thus stopped at the gates of NATO, each country would become a victim of Russian aggression. Georgia’s turn came quickly, when Putin invaded portions of its territory and set up two ethnic-separatist republics in August 2008. Ukraine’s turn would wait until 2014.17
The Crimean Referendum
In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych made a second try for the presidency, and won. Despite his pro-Russian alignment, Ukraine began talks on a free-trade and association deal with the EU in 2012. This was set for approval until Yanukovych, under heavy Kremlin pressure (including a trade war), rejected it in late 2013. A mass protest movement that became known as the Revolution of Dignity arose in response, and on 22 February 2014 Yanukovych fled his post for exile in Russia. Parliament voted overwhelmingly for his formal removal, and an interim government took over as constitutionally prescribed. Its officials signed the EU association agreement on March 21. Putin decried the events in Kyiv as a coup. On February 27, he had begun moving troops into Crimea, ostensibly to defend the rights of its Russian-speaking population. This move was highly reminiscent of Empress Catherine II’s destruction, beginning in the late 1760s, of the democratic liberties that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth extended to its citizens.18
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and launching of a hybrid war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine were accompanied by flagrant violations of both international law and basic democratic principles under cover of referenda staged under Russian military rule. In Crimea, frightened members of the peninsula’s parliament were dragooned into its building in Simferopol by Russian paramilitaries under the infamous former FSB officer Igor Girkin (alias Strelkov). The first order the lawmakers received was to call a constitutional referendum that would set up a federal arrangement between Kyiv and Simferopol — in other words, to make Crimea a broadly autonomous part of Ukraine. The Kremlin was still looking to gauge reactions both within Crimea and beyond, and did not want to go too far too fast. In Simferopol, members of Crimea’s Tatar ethnic minority gathered outside parliament to chant “Glory to Ukraine!” while Kremlin-funded pro-Moscow demonstrators shouted “Russia!” to drown them out.
Putin publicly denied any plan to annex Crimea, but in Simferopol the now fully Russian-controlled parliament was told to revise the questions that voters would face in the referendum, now set for March 16. The main question now concerned Crimea’s “reunification” with Russia. Russian authorities banned journalists other than press figures representing Russia’s right-wing allies in Serbia and some European countries. Turnout was independently estimated at 30 to 50 percent. According to the same estimates, between 50 and 80 percent of those taking part voted for “reunification” (as of 2014, about 68 percent of Crimea’s 2.2 million people were ethnic Russians). Reminding many of Soviet-era elections, official results claimed 83 percent participation and a 96.8 percent vote in favor of reunification.19
On March 17, the “vote count” was complete and the Russian-controlled parliament asked Russian authorities to accept the peninsula as Russian territory. As March began, historian Andrei Zubov of the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations had published in the Moscow daily Vedomosti an essay titled “This Has Already Happened.” Zubov compared Putin’s impending annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss (joining of Austria to Germany) in March 1938. Putin’s “reunification” rhetoric, Zubov had noted, resembled Hitler’s vision of Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany). Moreover, just as Hitler at Munich six months after the Anschluss had demanded and received a portion of Czechoslovakia in order to protect an allegedly persecuted German-speaking minority (the Sudeten Germans) who lived there, so Putin was claiming that he had been forced to go into Crimea to shield Russian-speaking residents (who formed a majority on the peninsula but were part of a minority within Ukraine as a whole). Zubov closed by calling the staged Crimean referendum a sham meant as legal cover for forcible annexation. Zubov swiftly lost his prestigious job at the country’s top diplomatic school, but he did not lose the argument.20
In the Donbas, Russian and separatist propaganda mobilized votes for the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the two easternmost provinces of Ukraine. On 11 May 2014, each held a referendum (with even less lead time than had been allowed in Crimea), and the organizers declared that independence had won. Each province declared itself a “people’s republic,” harking back to the dawn of Soviet times and the short-lived Donets–Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic that the Bolsheviks had set up during the Russian Revolution. Soviet mythology resonated with the locals much more strongly than did more distant historical memories of the Czarist Empire.21
War on Democracy
As he began massing forces along the Ukraine-Russia border in the first half of 2021, Putin was working on a pseudo-scholarly tract about the historical ties between the two countries. Judging by its text, Putin was clearly upset with Ukraine’s democratic polity and its habit of producing leaders dedicated to Ukrainian independence. He complained that “presidents, members of parliament and ministers would change but the attitude of separation from and enmity with Russia would remain.” This allegedly resulted from a political system established by the “Western authors of the anti-Russia project.” Without naming Volodymyr Zelensky, the new president whom Ukrainians had elected in 2019, Putin accused him of lying to voters. “Reaching peace” was his main slogan, wrote Putin, but “the promises turned out to be lies . . . the situation in Ukraine and around Donbas has even degenerated.”22
Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine began on 24 February 2022 with a massive cross-border ground assault joined by missile strikes on Ukrainian cities deep in the rear. But Putin’s plans to capture Kyiv swiftly with airmobile units, topple the Ukrainian government, end Ukrainian democracy, and introduce a puppet as head of a rump Ukrainian state failed. Ukrainian resistance was instant and fierce, and aid continued to come from Ukraine’s allies, which almost exclusively were democratic states. Ukrainians united across ethnic, linguistic, and cultural lines to defend Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy. Putin attacked Ukraine claiming that he was seeking to liberate Russians and Russian-speakers from Ukrainian oppression. He was met with resistance not only by Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians but also by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and others. They risked their lives to stop the aggression and trolled Putin on social media, insisting that “one does not send slaves to liberate the free.” The slaves in this case were Russian soldiers, while the free were Ukrainians of various social and cultural backgrounds.23
In September 2022, with Russian troops falling back from Kyiv and the Ukrainian forces advancing toward Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, Putin decided to consolidate his early territorial gains by annexing the Donbas oblasts plus two more regions of Ukraine north of Crimea, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia (cities and their environs partly under Russian military control). As Putin’s draft boards scoured various corners of the vast Russian Federation (aside from politically sensitive major cities) for conscripts and sent them to the front without training, the Russian president oversaw a sham referendum in each of the four partly occupied oblasts mentioned above. Armed soldiers went to the homes of Ukrainian citizens in these places and forced them to vote for Russian annexation. It was rule by bayonets, not ballots. On September 30, Putin cited the “will of millions” as he signed decrees announcing the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia annexations — insisting on doing so even as some areas such as the last city and its populace of more than 700,000 remained under Ukrainian control.24
Despite the enormous human and material cost of the war, Ukrainian democracy survived the Russian assault, notwithstanding wartime limits on the media and the postponement of the presidential election that had been scheduled for March or April 2024 (martial law has been extended by presidential order every ninety days since the invasion, and there is a constitutional ban on holding elections under martial law). Contrary to their expectations, international observers found that polling data showed growing support for democratic rule and institutions in a country under assault. In October 2020, 54 percent of Ukrainians whom the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology surveyed said that they thought what Ukraine needed most was a strong leader, while only 31 percent gave a democratic political system the top ranking and 15 percent were undecided. By December 2023, in a country almost two years into an all-out fight for survival, those numbers had switched: Fully 59 percent valued the preservation of democratic institutions over a strong leader, and only 32 percent said that a strong leader was most important, with just 8 percent undecided.25
Growing support for democracy in Ukraine went hand-in-hand with growing intolerance of one of the country’s besetting problems: corruption. According to a Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) report, Ukraine has improved its standing by 11 points in the last ten years, registering the most significant three-point increase in 2022–23.26
What Are the Stakes?
The assistance that the United States has furnished to Ukraine has often been explained to U.S. voters by the need to support democracy. In his 26 March 2022 speech in Warsaw, President Joseph Biden established a sense of continuity between the current war and the Cold War battles of the past. “We emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force,” declared Biden. He went on to warn that the new crisis would not pass in a few days or weeks but would take years, if not decades, to overcome. “This battle will not be won in days or months either,” declared Biden. “We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.”
At the time Biden spoke those words, U.S. support for Ukraine was hovering around 80 percent, with Democratic Party voters above that mark and undecided and Republican Party voters slightly lower. By February 2024, after two years of Ukrainian resistance, overall support for continuing assistance to Ukraine had fallen below 60 percent, with Republican Party support declining to 40 percent. By December 2024, 50 percent of U.S. respondents wanted to see a quick end to the war, while 48 percent favored backing Ukraine until full liberation of its territory. This was the first time that “end the war quickly” had outpolled “support Ukraine.” Republicans favored “end the war” overwhelmingly (74 percent), while among Democrats that was still a minority position (30 percent).27
In his 20 January 2025 inaugural address, President Donald J. Trump declared his desire to go down in history as a peacemaker. During the presidential campaign, he had expressed his wish to end the war in 24 hours, and at the outset of his second term as president he committed himself to a speedy end, conforming to the expectations of most Republican voters and a slight majority of Americans overall. It is too early to say where the peacemaking efforts of the new U.S. administration will lead, given Russia’s refusal not only to remove its troops from the occupied parts of Ukraine but also to give up its desire to disarm and “denazify” the country, thereby changing its democratic constitution and political system. Coupled with Russia’s demands to reduce the strength of the Ukrainian armed forces and limit Western support for the country, this would leave Ukraine not only deprived of parts of its sovereign territory but also open to further Russian intimidation and likely new aggression.
Any peace arrangement between Russia and Ukraine must ensure that Ukrainian democracy has the means to protect itself against aggression from its authoritarian neighbor. At stake are not only Ukraine’s sovereignty and its internationally recognized borders, but also continuing democracy in Ukraine, the region, and beyond. Russia’s ability to undermine and threaten Ukrainian democracy after the end of the active phase of the war would embolden its autocratic allies from Beijing to Pyongyang, Tehran, and Havana, and undermine the democratic forces in Georgia and the democratic government in Moldova, which are fighting against Russian domination of their respective countries.
Ukrainians are fighting today for democracy not only at home but also abroad. It is in the U.S. national interest, as well as in the interest of democracy worldwide, that the David of Ukrainian democracy continue to stand up to the Goliath of Russian authoritarianism and eventually win the battle, not only for himself but also for the future of democracy in Eastern Europe and beyond.
NOTES
1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. See also his book-length treatment, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
2. Vladimir Gel’man, “Post-Soviet Transitions and Democratization: Towards Theory-Building,” Democratization 10 (Summer 2003): 87–104; “Eurasian Backslide: Democracy Has Declined in Former Socialist Countries for the 19th Consecutive Year,” Re: Russia, 29 May 2023, https://re-russia.net/en/review/284/.
3. Jonathan Steele and David Hearst, “Yeltsin Crushes Revolt,” Guardian, 5 October 1993, www.theguardian.com/world/1993/oct/05/russia.davidhearst.
4. Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 393–444.
5. Boris Yeltsin, “The President of Russia Answers Questions from the Newspaper Izvestia” [in Russian], Izvestia (Moscow), 16 November 1993.
6. “UN After the United States Included Three Chechen Groups in the List of Terrorist Organizations,” NewsRU, 5 March 2003, https://palm.newsru.com/world/05mar2003/3_chech.html.
7. Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (New York: Vintage, 2015), 136–42, 231–46.
8. Lucan Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 43–44.
9. Paul D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 103–38. See also Serhiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov, “Ukraine’s Political Development after Independence,” in Mykhailo Minakov, Georgiy Kasianov, and Matthew Rojansky, eds., From “The Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991–2021 (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021), 9–52; and in the same volume Mykhailo Minakov and Matthew Rojansky, “Democracy in Ukraine,” 321–58.
10. Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Mark R. Beissinger, “The Semblance of Democratic Revolution: Coalitions in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” American Political Science Review 107 (August 2013): 574–92.
11. “Speech by President Leonid Kuchma at the Presentation in Moscow of the Book Ukraine Is Not Russia” [in Russian], 3 September 2003, http://supol.narod.ru/archive/books/cuchma.htm.
12. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 1–4.
13. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 133–37.
14. Viktor Yushchenko, “Opening Statement,” press conference, Meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council, Brussels, 22 February 2005, www.nato.int/docu/speech/2005/s050222g.htm.
15. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 12–13.
16. Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Boston Review, 2015), 41–44; D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 155–57; Margarita M. Balmaceda, Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to the European Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 91–104.
17. Illya M. Labunka, “Ukraine Seeks NATO Membership Action Plan,” Ukrainian Weekly, 27 January 2008; Walter Zaryckyj, “Why the Bucharest Summit Still Matters Ten Years On,” Atlantic Council, 4 May 2018, www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/why-the-bucharest-summit-still-matters-ten-years-on.
18. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 226; Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation from 1470 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 55–70.
19. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 228–29; Carol Morello, Pamela Constable, and Anthony Faiola, “Crimeans Vote to Break Away from Ukraine, Join Russia,” Washington Post, 16 March 2014; Jason Samuel, “The Russian Constitutional Path to the Annexation of Crimea,” Jurist, 25 May 2014, www.jurist.org/commentary/2014/05/jason-samuel-russia-crimea.
20. Andrei Zubov, “This Has Already Happened” [in Russian], Vedomosti (Moscow), 1 March 2014; Matthew Bodner, “Professor Says Sacked over Opinion Article Against Possible Ukraine Invasion,” Moscow Times, 4 March 2014, www.themoscowtimes.com/2014/03/04/professor-says-sacked-over-opinion-article-against-possible-ukraine-invasion-a32689.
21. D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia, 240–41.
22. Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” President of Russia, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
23. Serhii Plokhy, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023), 155–72; Ivanova Svetlanova Mykolayivna, “Slaves Came to Release the Free” [in Ukrainian], Vseosvita, https://vseosvita.ua/blogs/pryishly-raby-zvilniaty-vilnykh-69790.html.
24. Andrew E. Kramer, “Russia-Ukraine War: Armed Russian Soldiers Oversee Referendum Voting,” New York Times, 24 September 2022.
25. Jonathan Katz et al., “Ukraine Urgently Needs Support to Defend Democracy,” Brookings Institution, 19 April 2024, www.brookings.edu/articles/ukraine-urgently-needs-support-to-defend-democracy.
26. Anna Romandash, “Ukraine Can’t Hold Elections During the War. Does It Matter?” Journal of Democracy, April 2024, www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusive/ukraine-cant-hold-elections-during-the-war-does-it-matter; Anton Hrushetsky, “To What Extent Ukrainians Consider Ukraine a Democratic Country and a Democratic System a Priority” [in Ukrainian], Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 10 May 2024, https://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1406&page=1.
27. Megan Brenan, “More Americans Favor Quick End to Russia-Ukraine War,” Gallup, 20 December 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/654575/americans-favor-quick-end-russia-ukraine-war.aspx.
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