Serhii Pashynskyi in interview with Berliner Zeitung: "Ukraine is more than recipient of aid. We contribute to our shared security"
The war is now in its fifth year, but its roots reach back well before February 24, 2022, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Orange Revolution of 2004, the 1991 independence referendum, and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, proclaimed in 1917 and crushed by the Red Army four years later. Moscow invokes history to justify its claims, drawing on everything from Kyivan Rus to Putin’s assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kyiv counters by invoking the Holodomor, the murdered generation of 1930s poets, and its own European history. A struggle over memory and identity preceded the war over territory.
Alexander Dergay writes about this in the Berliner Zeitung
Between these events lie three decades of unfulfilled security assurances. In 1991, Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, which it had transferred to Russia by 1996. In return, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom pledged under the Budapest Memorandum to respect Ukraine’s borders without committing to provide military assistance. In 2008, NATO held out the prospect of membership but offered no concrete path to it. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 failed to secure a lasting ceasefire. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine was left without binding guarantees of military protection.
Serhii Pashynskyi helped shape the course of these events at decisive moments. He was on the Maidan from day one and headed the Presidential Administration during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, in those weeks when there were too few vehicles even to redeploy a brigade. On one occasion, the head of the State Guard Directorate urgently demanded man-portable surface-to-air missiles from him. Russian troops were supposedly about to land by helicopter on the roof of the Cabinet of Ministers building. In November 2021, Pashynskyi predicted a large-scale invasion. People close to him thought he was crazy.
A conversation with an influential figure in Kyiv’s governing circles about 35 exceptionally turbulent years of independence.
Mr. Pashynskyi, Ukraine marked 35 years of independence. What strategic mistakes has it made since 1991 that cannot be explained by the actions of Russia or the West?
Looking back at 1991, it is important to understand one thing. Ukraine had formally held the status of a separate republic since 1919, but in practice it was a colony of the Russian Empire, which became the Soviet Union. The national elite was destroyed, while officials loyal to Moscow moved to the center. Ideologically, politically, and organizationally, we were unprepared for the task of building a state.
Recall George H. W. Bush’s address to our parliament, the so-called "Chicken Kyiv speech," a name it fully deserved. Three weeks later, we declared independence. It later became clear from interviews with advisers and from memoirs that Bush was more concerned about a Yugoslav scenario than about our independence. He feared wars through which the imperial center would try to hold its republics together.
The war did not start sooner because post-Soviet Russia was weak and independent Ukraine maintained close ties with the former imperial center. At first, Russia tried to gradually absorb us again. When that failed, Putin, the Milošević of the 2000s, resorted to military force.
"Our shock therapy lasted ten years"
Ukraine was independent but barely able to defend itself. Was this a failure of its political elite?
Our political and administrative elites failed to meet that challenge. Society, too, had yet to grasp what it meant to build a nation. Only a small segment of the elite retained a clear vision of Ukraine as a nation-state with a political nation. Moscow persecuted these people and had them shot, but it could not wipe them out entirely.
In the 1990s, Soviet institutions were dismantled with no thought given to building national ones. We lost almost all the vast economic potential we had inherited without ever using it to build a better economic model. Progress began only after 2000. Hyperinflation was halted, Western-style businesses emerged, and democracy began to take shape. Society began to aspire to a Western way of thinking, freedom, and Western forms of organization. People took to the streets to demand democratic rights.
This shock therapy, the transition to a market economy, took a year or two in Europe’s former socialist countries. In our case, it took ten. One reason was our dependence on Russia, particularly on its gas. Gas held back the development of an efficient, modern industrial sector. Moscow used the gas trade to fund the pro-Russian lobby. That is where many of our problems began.
The trauma of Soviet totalitarianism and authoritarianism left deep scars on society. Germany’s experience shows this as well. Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik laid the groundwork for reunification, but the social and economic integration of eastern Germany continues to this day. In the process, Germany has invested hundreds of billions in infrastructure, democracy, and the economy. Even Germany finds it difficult to deal with some aspects of the "Soviet legacy."
At the same time, Ukraine has historically been part of Europe. Before Russia absorbed much of eastern Ukraine 400 years ago, 200 towns here had Magdeburg rights. Our state was already integrated into the European political system before Moscow subjugated part of our country. In regions that had been outside Russian rule since the 17th or 18th century, people were more likely to vote for pro-European, democratic, and reformist parties after 1991.
Did the West make promises to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum and at the NATO summit in Bucharest that it never really intended to keep in a crisis?
The West made mistakes, too. Both in Budapest and at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Russia was seen as a democratic part of Europe rather than as the heir to an empire. Even Putin’s Munich speech and the war against Georgia did little to change that. The thinking was that Europe had simply grown larger with Russia as part of it. So why not give Ukraine guarantees? There would never be a crisis that would require anyone to honor them.
As late as 2016, many European politicians believed that all they had to do was reach an agreement with Putin. Only in 2022 did they realize that what Russia had needed since 1991 was time to rebuild its empire in a new form.
Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire
Did Kazakhstan assess its position as Russia’s neighbor more wisely than Ukraine did? Would military neutrality have bought Kyiv more time, or was that an illusion?
No. Putin has never called Russians and Kazakhs one people. In Russian imperial thinking, however, Ukraine is the core of the empire and a springboard for controlling Europe, through further wars if necessary. Russia needs our economy, our soldiers, our people, and our geographic location.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was quite right when he said that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian imperial power.
A political nation with a shared worldview began to take shape in 2014, when we saw Russian tanks in Crimea and then in Donbas. That process was completed in six hours, starting at 3 a.m. on February 24, 2022.
Our nation took its final shape under Russian missile and bomb attacks.
Previously, many Ukrainians had regarded Russians as a people close to their own. Moscow spent decades systematically erasing the memory of the Holodomor, the world wars, and the tens of millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives in the 20th century alone.
"All the aid we got was Nuland’s cookies"
How do you assess the Maidan in light of the current situation? Did the opposition underestimate Russia’s response and overestimate Western support?
By 2013, a generation that had grown up without being shaped by Soviet propaganda had come of age. They knew about the Holodomor and the millions of Ukrainian victims, and they wanted Ukraine to have a voice of its own in Europe.
The Maidan was a classic European national revolution. The trigger was Yanukovych’s refusal, after a meeting with Putin, to sign the Association Agreement with the EU. I don’t know what they discussed, but Yanukovych left Putin’s office with $3 billion. He then went to Vilnius, where he was supposed to sign the road map for European integration, and announced that there would be no integration.
I was on the Maidan from day one. Whether we had miscalculated did not matter. The Maidan was the Ukrainian people’s response to Yanukovych’s decision to turn toward Russia instead of pursuing integration with Europe. As the opposition, we had no moral right to leave young people to face Yanukovych’s brutal regime on their own. Even then, Putin was already flying in equipment to break up peaceful demonstrations.
Without the Maidan, Ukraine today would be a copy of present-day Belarus, and Yanukovych would be Putin’s vassal, like Lukashenko. Putin might have expanded into Moldova via Transnistria and attacked the Baltic states.
"There were no explosives"
What did your own generation get wrong in 2014? You were involved in decision-making. Were there compromises that could have curbed Russia’s escalation?
To understand the Maidan, you have to consider the pace of events. They unfolded very rapidly, with almost no influence from external factors, and were driven entirely by developments within Ukraine.
In 2013, Ukraine already had a political tradition of peaceful democratic demonstrations and Maidans, a civilized form of nonviolent confrontation.
Then Yanukovych crossed a red line when his security forces brutally beat students. After that, around a million people took to the streets in Kyiv to protest. When the protests began to die down, he escalated the violence to the point where demonstrators were being shot dead.
Meanwhile, Putin was planning the annexation of Crimea. Only later did we learn of military plans dating back to August 2013. He began putting them into effect on February 20, 2014, when Yanukovych was still president, and shots were being fired on the Maidan.
Even after Yanukovych fled, we kept in contact with Russia. We were ready to compromise. As Russia was occupying Crimea, Russian battalion tactical groups were stationed along the border with the Chernihiv region, right by the road to Kyiv.
The heads of our security agencies were desperately looking for explosives to blow up bridges in Kyiv and stop Russian tanks. There were no explosives. Unlike in 2022, we had no way to stop those columns. Then the head of the State Guard Directorate called me. Russia was planning to land troops by helicopter on the roof of the Cabinet of Ministers building, and he urgently needed man-portable surface-to-air missiles. I was shocked. All this happened in the first few days after Yanukovych fled.
Despite this, we sought to reach agreements. We passed a law establishing a free economic zone in Crimea, made arrangements for coal supplies from occupied Donbas, kept water flowing through the North Crimean Canal, and did not cut off the electricity. We did not want to sever economic ties. The Minsk process was an attempt to reach agreements that were at times unpopular with the public. Unfortunately, in practice, Russia has always seen compromise as a sign of weakness.
Was your biggest mistake assuming that Europe and the US would come to Ukraine’s aid in a crisis?
We could not understand why the political elites in Europe and America remained passive. At first, we received no aid at all.
When I read that intelligence services and money were supposedly behind the Maidan, I don’t find it funny. I find it sad. All the aid we got was the cookies Victoria Nuland, then the US assistant secretary of state for European affairs, handed out on the Maidan.
"We did not fall on February 24"
After the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine had eight years. Why was it still dependent on Western weapons in 2022? Did Ukraine make less effective use of the time bought by the Minsk agreements than Russia did?
I fully agree with Angela Merkel that the Minsk agreements gave us time. In late 2022, she said she had wanted to use the Minsk process and her involvement in it to give Ukraine the most important resource of all, time. Time to prepare for a major war.
Whether we made the best use of those years is open to debate. But we did not fall on February 24, 2022, thanks to the work we had been doing since 2014. Putin expected to take Kyiv in three days and break Ukraine. He failed.
We had an army that proved its combat effectiveness in 2022. The generals holding the front line today rose from the ranks of the battalion commanders we had been training and mentoring since 2014.
By then, we already had an army that could fight. In 2014, by contrast, we had virtually no combat-ready forces to defend the country. I remember when we wanted to redeploy one of the four brigades to Mariupol. We did not even have enough transport. Yanukovych had weakened the army on Putin’s instructions and appointed a Russian citizen as defense minister. It was that very brigade, the 72nd, that defended Kyiv in 2022.
We developed new weapons systems. Half of the Russian tanks were destroyed by Ukrainian Stuhna and Korsar anti-tank missile systems. A Ukrainian Neptune missile sank the cruiser Moskva.
We needed economic resources to build up our defenses. Gross domestic product grew rapidly from 2015 onward. After the change in political leadership in 2019, priorities shifted. This weakened the country’s ability to defend itself.
What did Russia and the West fundamentally misunderstand about Ukraine, and where did Ukraine itself go wrong?
Russia underestimated our desire for independence. The West underestimated our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for freedom and democracy. And we Ukrainians did not understand that there was no limit to how many of its soldiers Russia was willing to send to their deaths in pursuit of imperial goals.
We were prepared to die for freedom. Russians were prepared to die for empire. Putin’s plans were thwarted by the lines outside military recruitment centers on February 24 and by the people who returned from Europe to fight. Today, many people in the West understand how brave Ukrainians are and how much they value freedom. I am very grateful to the German people for their support.
Strategic partners in defense
You shaped security policy and now work in the defense industry. What do you understand about national security today that you did not understand as a politician?
I understood even then how important it was to have a defense industry of our own and to cooperate internationally. But I saw firsthand how conservative the international mechanisms meant to help us with security can be.
That is why cooperation with Europe must be based on mutual benefit. Ukraine is more than a recipient of aid. Our manufacturers are partners who contribute to our shared security. Cooperation between Ukrainian and European defense companies should form the foundation of the European security order, regardless of shifting geopolitical interests.
Germany is our most important partner. Both sides benefit. Germany understands the advantages of jointly developed weapons and how they can help counter a possible Russian attack.
Once a peace agreement is reached, Ukraine will have to help soldiers who have suffered trauma return to civilian life, manage large stockpiles of weapons, and deal with population displacement. Could internal unrest, armed groups, and new conflicts emerge once the pressure of war that has united the country is gone?
The Ukrainian nation is more united today than ever. The vast majority of the population shares the same goals — EU and NATO membership and a strong, prosperous, peaceful Ukraine. That gives me reason for optimism.
Of course, there will be problems. Other countries have experienced problems such as "Vietnam syndrome" in the aftermath of war. I talk to service members and know what challenges lie ahead. Our military leaders command enough respect to influence the people they lead. The state must provide those who return with treatment, jobs, and a way back into civilian life. We hope the EU will support us in this. I am convinced we will manage.
What if soldiers return and the political elite continues to act as it did before? Is there a risk of a split between those who fought and those who did not?
Polls show a very high level of trust in the Defense Forces. President Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi are at the top, followed by Budanov, the former head of military intelligence who now heads the Office of the President, and by corps commanders. That trust extends well beyond the hundreds of thousands who are fighting. It comes from the Ukrainian population as a whole.
Parliamentary elections will be held after the war. I expect veterans and their interests to be well represented in those elections. In the next political cycle, military leaders will take on responsibilities to their troops and to the public. Israel shows how veterans can stand up for security and for their rights through democratic means. The party of Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of Israel’s General Staff, finished second in the elections in late October as a centrist rather than a far-right force. As a democracy, Ukraine will resolve future social conflicts through political institutions that protect veterans’ rights and through political representation for the veteran community.
"No elections while the war continues"
War requires swift decisions and a strong executive. Has too much power already been concentrated around President Zelenskyy? When does necessary centralization begin to threaten the democracy Ukraine is defending, and how can the country return to democratic normality after the war?
Over three decades, Ukraine has proved it can renew its political leadership democratically. But a change in leadership under martial law would weaken the country. That is why I support Zelenskyy’s position that there should be no elections while the war continues.
Our democratic institutions can no longer be destroyed. I look forward to the end of the war and the return of political competition. Ukraine is not Russia.
Zelenskyy, Zaluzhnyi, Budanov, Fedorov, Poroshenko — what kind of political future does each represent? And who has long been preparing for the postwar struggle for power?
I am neither a sociologist nor a political scientist. What matters is that no government has the right to weaken the military or the defense industry. We must remain prepared for any scenario. I am convinced that everyone you named understands this.
The memory of the fallen, the territories we lost, and the people who were maimed will endure for many generations. We will not repeat the mistakes of 1991.
You left politics but retained your influence. Can you imagine returning if circumstances allow? What changes would you make then that your generation failed to bring about before?
In my seven years out of politics, I have achieved a great deal in building up the defense industry, a sector crucial to our survival.
I can defend its interests more effectively outside political blocs and coalitions. I will reach out to all politicians and do everything I can to build a political consensus on developing the defense industry. None of them will be able to pursue a policy of destroying it. They will not be able to. Even if they wanted to. For me, building up the industry while staying close to politics matters more than becoming a politician again myself.
"There will be no peaceful coexistence without Russian repentance"
Germany and Poland went through generations of hostility and are now closely integrated European partners. Could something similar happen between Ukraine and Russia?
Our children and grandchildren, who are growing up under missile attacks and bombing, will not forget what they have lived through. There will be no constructive coexistence without Russian repentance.
Germany went through that difficult process. Willy Brandt’s act of kneeling in Warsaw became a symbol of repentance. Reconciliation between Ukrainians and Russians will likewise be possible only through repentance, and it will take generations.
Russia, too, will remember that this was the first time in 400 years that it invaded Ukraine and failed to conquer it. That experience should deter further aggression. Moscow must know that every attempt at conquest will end in defeat.
The main condition for peaceful coexistence remains the same. Ukraine must be strong militarily and politically. The moment we weaken, Russia will attack again.
Let’s go back to 1991. Would you have built up the military, handled the question of nuclear weapons differently, or returned to Europe sooner? What mistake must your generation avoid so that in 2050 no one can accuse it of ignoring all the warnings?
I knew as early as November 2021 that a major invasion was coming. With no political power, I prepared whoever and whatever I could. After February 24, people I was close to and respected admitted that they had thought I was crazy at the time.
If I went back to 1991 knowing what I know now, no one would believe me. I would end up in a psychiatric hospital or at the end of a rope. After all, Ukrainians back then would not have believed that Russia posed a threat.
We must end this war. We have been fighting an adversary five times our size for nearly five years. As long as they keep trying to destroy us, we will not surrender or stop resisting.
