Ukraine and Democracy in the Global World – with Aman Sethi
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Democracy is fragile today, yet it is not confined to a single place, a specific country or a particular political system. The democratic promise remains far from fully realized. Still, we can find hope in the idea that when democracy retreats in one part of the world, it may go stronger in another. You're listening to Thinking in Dark Times, a podcast series by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet focused on Ukraine.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today is Aman Seti, an Indian journalist and the editor-in-chief of Open Democracy, an independent international media platform based in London. We're recording this conversation during the Lviv Media Forum in May 2025 in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine.

You can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. Your support is vital as we rely heavily on crowdfunding. You can also contribute to our volunteer missions to frontline areas in Ukraine, where we deliver aid to both soldiers and civilians. Donations are welcome via PayPal at ukraine.resistinggmail.com. You will find these links in the description of this episode.

This episode is produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, the country's leading institution for cultural diplomacy. So let's begin. Amon Seti, welcome to this podcast. Thank you, Vladimir. It's always so good to talk to you. And I think what I'm excited about is we're having this conversation in Lviv, in Ukraine. Exactly. So welcome to Ukraine. I know it was a long trip from Britain, right? Yes.

And you're an Indian journalist who is working right now in Britain. And I would like to talk that we talk a little bit about the world because in Ukraine, you know, we're trying to reach out to the wider world. And as we reach out to the wider world, trying to pass our message, tell our story, we also understand that we know very little about the world. And it's very interesting to discover those topics.

First, what do you think about the very concept of Global South that sometimes is used? Some people say it's a bad concept, some people say it's a good concept. I personally believe that it is a bad concept because it's so diverse and...

Sometimes you find very little commonalities between different continents even or different countries within some continent. And I see how, for example, we recently had a press tour of journalists from different countries. And for example, the Philippine perspective and Indian perspective on Ukraine are completely different. How would you estimate this concept?

So I think that with all concepts, it's one of those which is hard to kind of define, right? I think we started off calling it the third world. I think people got really upset about it. I think it was before the launch of the tech industry, because if we called it world 3.0, I think people would actually be quite excited about the idea that it's the most recent form of the world. So I actually, I think that

And then the other word that I think people use a lot is majority world, which is actually not a bad phrase because it is, numerically speaking, it is at least accurate. The complex question here is, for example, where do we place China in something like this, right? So it...

Or even India. I mean, where do we place India? Well, I think India one could place the idea of the majority world or the global south. Essentially, what we're trying to say is non-rich countries, right? And I think that the other thing we're trying to say about this space is formerly colonized countries. Yeah, I think it's more accurate. So we actually, we're trying, so the idea of global south is to say, okay, we

We are speaking about some world which is non-Western, but we are not using the word non-Western because it's a kind of a negative concept, but we're still having this in mind as if we're talking about the colonized world. But then the big question for us Ukrainians is where you put Central and Eastern Europe, which was a colonized part of Europe, right?

And I think that, which is why I think it sometimes is a potentially unhelpful phrase, but I think what we do, I guess the intention is good. I think the intention suggests that all of us from our very diverse worlds, we have a certain commonality of experience could be one way of thinking about this, which is the feeling of having felt at some point culturally inferior. Now, I understand people want to put a positive spin on these things. Yeah.

But I think that sometimes it's not a bad idea to just call a spade a spade. So the way that I often engage with this phrase is just to say, okay, somebody's just trying to find a common word to talk to me about something. And let's just...

work on it. And at some point when the contradictions in that word become clear, then you find another word, right? So I think if we were to try and find a Venn diagram of the Ukraine-India experience, maybe instead of global south, one could say countries that were part of the Soviet sphere, the Soviet intellectual sphere, right? And I don't use the word, I use the word intellectual as a value neutral phrase, right?

but I think it is an accurate description of how the intelligentsia of India grew up in, say, the 60s and the 70s. And of course, as I'm learning, but still very far away, learning more about the Ukrainian experience, one understands that Ukrainian intellectual life and cultural production was hugely impacted by Sovietization, and obviously not in a positive way, but that could be one way of us thinking in terms of

tactical groups, right? And when we think about power, there's a G20, and then there's a G7, and then there's an OECD, and then there's a, you know, ASEAN. So maybe that's how civil society needs to find these languages as well, where we create lots of fluid ways of finding commonality.

So when we speak about India and Ukraine, you probably know that there is a fashion for Indian culture everywhere in the world and in particular in Ukraine. So there are lots of people fascinated with the deep Indian philosophy and mythology and religion. But at the same time, it's like an India fairy tale. It's like an imagined India,

At the same time, we have lots of commonalities which are very difficult to maybe to verbalize. And we talked with you about it. And for example, for me, there is a big difference of colonization, of British colonization of India, which was driven by the idea of racial difference and cultural difference, while Russian colonization of Ukraine was driven by the idea of

cultural sameness. But at the same time, the British colonization of India, as far as I understand, was primarily capitalistic, is driven through companies primarily, and only then by the state. Well, in our Ukrainian case, Russia was always thinking in terms of a state primarily, and only after, be it in the Russian Empire or be it in the Soviet Union. But there are commonalities, and one of the commonalities which connects, for

maybe broadly the colonized elements of the European continent and like colonized countries and nations of Asia is that the First World War was a kind of a driving point because Indians were forced to battle to fight in the British colonial imperial army and Ukrainians were forced to fight in the Russian and Habsburg colonial armies and this was the point of this national protest which

finally produce the national movements. Would you agree on this parallel? I think this is a very interesting parallel. I think that where the parallel may fall apart, and I'll be honest that I don't know enough about this, but I'm not sure if the participation of Indian sepoys in the colonial army was a major breaking point in World War I.

I'm not sure if that actually kind of fed into Indian nationalism. I'm sure it did, but at this point, I must apologize, but I don't know enough about that specific aspect of it. But tell me, we face it from time to time, when Ukrainians try to talk with Indians or with some nations in the African continent and talking about this colonialism, right?

The people don't buy it. They don't agree. So it's very difficult to pass this message. And my idea is that, look, colonialisms are very different. So we should actually work on this map of different imperialisms and see commonalities and differences. But why this message doesn't pass?

Okay, I think one, there is, of course, a question of whiteness and people of color. And I understand that Ukraine is an incredibly diverse country. I also understand that

Now I understand that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is also, when from the outside, seen from Asia or seen from Africa, it is all one shade of white. I understand that there are gradations of whiteness. You know, as my Georgian friends tell us that

the Russians often referred to them as the people of color of the Soviet empire. Oh, black. They're called blacks. Yes. But I think that there's also a lived experience of people in India, for instance, where...

When Eastern Europeans come to India, they act white, right? So the performance is of whiteness, even if back home, the experience may not be commensurate. So that's one kind of, like at a very, very basic level, right? There is that question of when Eastern Europe says, well, we were colonized, there's an idea of, but wait, the experience of being colonized is an experience that is claimed by people of color, right?

And is this now white people want colonization too? Is that where we are? So there's one kind of really, and I speak frankly with you because I think we've talked for a long time. So that's one kind of instinctive space where I think people are like, hold on, you know, like at least leave this one for us. I think at another level, and this has taken me a journey, it's hard to overestimate the

and emotive power of the concept of the USSR, the practice of the USSR. It's a bit like the American dream, right? So we can keep talking about how the American dream is lived only in exception. Almost very, very few people live the American dream, but it has a tremendous emotive power. My sense is that if you were growing up in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and you lived outside of the Soviet Union, you would have a lot of

you actually only experienced the Soviet Union as a benefactor. I was talking to a colleague of mine who works with me at Open Democracy, and they are our Africa editor, Ayodeji. They pointed out to me that the US did not back the boycott of apartheid South Africa. Now, across the continent, that's a huge position to take.

And when you contrast that with the USSR positioning itself as, you know, in India, there is fresh memory of the fact that when India detonated its nuclear, kind of started its nuclear program, it was sanctioned by the United States. So I don't have a, well, I have a position on nuclear weapons, which is, you know, generally, I think they're a terrible idea. But we also know the experience that Ukraine has had with nuclear weapons. And

That's a whole other conversation. But if one just looks at these various points, the story is one where we find it hard to actually instinctively reject this idea. I fully understand it. It's like the same how Ukrainians perceive...

and America. Like, there is this stereotype that Europe is about non-violence, that it is about dignity, that it's so nice. But we all understand the story behind it. Like, Europe was actually, if you take 19th and 20th

one half of the 20th century, the most cruel continent of the world. So you see something as an external picture while not appreciating and understanding what is actually inside. But Soviet Union is also a big dilemma for Ukrainians because what is our relation to this tradition? Are we rejecting it totally? Are we cherry-picking? Are we saying, okay, this was good in Soviet Union,

This was bad. For example, can we identify ourselves with the Red Army that defeated Nazis? We cannot say, no, no, no, Red Army was occupational force because according to different figures, I think from 7 to 10 million Ukrainians were fighting in the Red Army and we lost about 10 million people during the Second World War. So our contribution on fighting the Nazis was huge.

At the same time, USSR. There are a lot of these Ukrainian elements in the USSR. And maybe it was Ukrainian engineers who helped people in India to do something or people in Africa, right? Exactly. And I think that the reason that

Let me tell you a joke, because I think sometimes jokes are a good way. This is a joke that I heard in the 1980s as I was growing up randomly. Like I was growing up in southern India. This was jokes people told each other. And the joke and there was a series. This joke is part of a series. But this one is an Indian, an American and a Soviet are in an airplane.

and there's suddenly a problem with the airplane, the airplane's going to crash, the pilot's like, I'm sorry, the airplane's going to crash, we have only two parachutes. And before anyone can do anything, the American grabs a parachute and jumps out of the plane. So the Indian and the Soviet are looking at each other, and then the Soviet very kindly hands the Indian a parachute, and says, here you go. And he says, but what about you? He says, no, I have a parachute as well. The American accidentally grabbed a school bag. Okay.

And that sums it up, which is that the Americans act without thinking, usually not in their self-interest. And the story of the joke is that the rest of us, we just hustle, right? Look, the name of that American was Donald. Okay, this is very funny. But it's interesting how these jokes, I also remember these type of jokes in my childhood. And it was also about the airplanes, etc.,

Let me ask you a more global question. So you are heading open democracy website and of course now everybody is rethinking what democracy is. I think it's also true that for Ukrainians it was located somewhere. Like the West is democracy, the rest we don't know. Maybe there is some democracy in Latin America. India is... Yeah, we were reading when we read the Economist or such papers like India is the biggest democracy of the world.

Now people are doubting it a little bit. So how do you see these democratic values shifting in today's world? Because we see a lot of democratic struggle in the global south and we see democratic retreat in the Western world. So I have a couple of positions on this. One, I vacillate, but these days I'm on the side that...

Kind of fears of democracy dying, at least in the global south, I think are overblown. In that I think, of course, there are lots of states and there are lots of countries where the governments are not practicing sufficiently democratic norms. But I think if you think about the people, people are hugely invested in the idea of democracy. And people understand instinctively that

It is perhaps the only way to keep a multi-ethnic, and most nation states are increasingly multi-ethnic, diverse country together. I think that we need to, a couple of things. I think firstly, we need to understand that just because the governments that are taking power right now aren't governments that many of us necessarily like,

That is not necessarily a failure of the democratic experiment. It is a failure of the government that's coming in and a failure of their agenda and a failure in some ways of an opposition. Having said that, I think the second layer that does concern me is that

The structure of the nation state itself is becoming more authoritarian. That is because I think on the one hand, technologies of state control have hugely expanded. And that's as much in Europe as much all over the world. It's the same set of tools, which is literally like, you know, not to get all Foucauldian, but it's about the exercise of governmentality. It is about the fact that

States can now really enumerate and identify and surveil and monitor citizens at a level that they could not previously.

So a country like India, when it was a little more democratic, it was described as a state bolted on top of a society. So there was a kind of disorganized society and then a state that tried to keep things together. I think as the powers of control of the state have increased, the amount of democratic space that citizens have has reduced. And so we end up in a situation where

The electorate is essentially choosing between various power groups who get to control an intensely powerful state apparatus. So I think the challenge for us is more a question of how do we make the state apparatus more democratic, rather than worrying too much about who's winning power, you know, and I can understand Romania right now is obviously a huge concern in this area, but

I think these are teething, not teething troubles, but these are challenges we can fight. I think the bigger challenge is when you build a state structure the way that it looks now, how do you still allow people or how do people still keep kind of liberty for themselves? It's a very good point. And it's interesting that you quote Foucault because I'm an admirer of Foucault, but at the same time, I'm a huge critique of Foucault because...

Because what Foucault was thinking about is how a power controls everybody and how there is biopolitique, what he was called, how the power controls life.

But he didn't ask the question, where does power come from? So he takes the power for granted as if it is always there. And it is this thinking of the 1960s, you know, that considers power as something that is imposed on us. What I'm thinking about in the context of Ukraine, and I think in a lot of countries of global south, my hypothesis is that it's probably the same or similar, right?

An interesting question is how power arises, like how some people get authority, how they are trusted.

They can be leaders of the street. In Ukraine right now they are leaders of the army. Nobody put them there. They just, through their energy, through their activism, through their activities, you know, they became people of authority. Even take Zelensky. I mean, he's not imposed by somebody. You can... I think there is, of course, a lot of populism in the way how he came to power, etc. But...

It was not something that you could have predicted, probably. And it was very asystematic. And basically what we see in the Western democracies right now is that anti-systemic powers come to power that the so-called system doesn't know what to do with.

Even Trump is this phenomenon. So maybe we overestimate the capacity of control by the state. Maybe we underestimate the way how these grassroots or non-grassroots people can actually get a new authority and become... And it can be also dangerous for democracy because far right are doing precisely this. I think you're right. I think there is...

However, the existence of now a kind of semi-permanent bureaucratic structure of the state. And so in some ways, of course, you know, the Trump administration is paranoid about the idea of a deep state. But they're not wrong that a state structure exists. And what they did this time around was the series of purges because they are, it's

terrifying, but they kind of correctly identified the fact that there is this stratum which has fixed ideas and fixed systems. And liberals tend to be huge institutionalists, so they're like, it's there for a reason, it's there to prevent the worst impulses. But actually when you look at it, you realize it doesn't actually prevent the worst impulses. What it does is it gives a certain level

logic of governance, which is the Trumpian logic of governance, the freedom to act as they will. Whereas the liberals, because they're so profoundly institutionalist are trapped in their own institutions. So in the UK, for example, there is a huge amount of people looking at Keir Starmer and looking at Trump and saying Trump won finally a 51-49 or whatever, you know, 53-49, whatever election.

He has to go back for midterm Senate. He soon is going to have his hands tied. However, he is spending like a sort of like a sailor, you know, on payday. He is using his political capital. He is driving his agenda. They look at Keir Starmer. They say you have won a landslide election. You have five years. You can't go anywhere. No one can move you. But you are so tentative in your in your elections.

I spoke to, I mean, in your government's administration and in your agenda, I spoke to somebody who was part of Boris Johnson's wider kind of

And actually was working at number 10 for a while under Boris Johnson, the previous prime minister. And he said, I spent 10 years in governance looking for a lever of power, saying somewhere in this building in Whitehall, there is a lever of power. And if we pull it, we can do something. And I spent 10 years looking for it and I couldn't find it.

So I think that kind of sums up in some ways these two different crises of democracy. The crises of liberal actors who have chained themselves to defunct institutions and the crises of, let's say, authoritarian actors who have realized that the system can be twisted in a way that they would like.

And so I can understand on both sides of the Atlantic people being like, democracy is in trouble. Democracy is over. We need a new model. Whereas if you're Ukrainian or if you're Indian or if you're African, you're like, hey, guys, we just got to this party. So let's not now say this is done. It's interesting. Yeah.

But do you see hope of this democratic, new democratic impetus coming from, not from Europe, not from America, but from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America? Where do you see those spots of hope? I see spots of hope in, one, I think that having spent time in Europe now longer, I mean, in the UK, nominally Europe, longer, what is true is there's a lot of energy on the kind of

On the peripheries of governance, there's lots of people thinking imaginatively about how to make a more responsive state. I actually think that, you know, certain European... There's a huge push these days, for example, for ideas of proportionate representation, right, rather than first past the post. These are things that would probably happen first in small, relatively homogenous European countries.

I think in the, in the, in say India or, I mean, my knowledge of Africa recedes with every year I'm away from it. But I think the power comes from the kind of return of mass movements. I think that there is an understanding afresh that you need to go back to the people. You need to go back and craft

an idea of politics that you can then essentially present as a fair comply to a good opposition politician. So in India, we're seeing that, for example, around farmer protests that have been on for a very long time, which have been putting forward a certain idea of trying to bring the Indian farmer back to the center of political conversation. So post-independence, the Indian farmer was basically the most important person

symbolic figure of Indian democracy, which receded as agriculture became less important to the economy. But there's now a politics which is trying to bring them back. So I think in each country, this idea of opposition suddenly realizing, okay, the authoritarians have come up with basically this idea that the world is hell. Let's get the foreigners out. I'm your man. That's essentially everyone's agenda. I think there's now interesting opposition happening. And I think one thing I'll just introduce here, which is that

there's been a lot of concern about USAID kind of shutting down money around the world. And I think that's hugely problematic, particularly in spaces like health, right, in South Africa, where suddenly the HIV program has no money. But I think that in India, what we've seen or what people are telling me now is that over a five, seven, eight year period, the Indian government essentially made it impossible to get international money into India.

And there was a shock to the system. But what that's created is now a homegrown politics and it's created people's movements that are now thinking a lot more imaginatively and are thinking less bureaucratically and are less kind of NGO-ized. There was a period where people's movements almost entirely became NGO-ized. And now I think the pendulum is going to swing back.

So these are kind of weird things that I'm picking up. As I often say on podcasts with you, I treat this podcast as a place where I think through ideas that I may have to later recant. Yeah, absolutely. This is why we have this podcast and other podcasts. We need to have this thinking in process. So one thing that worries me about different people from whom I talk to, especially in Asia, is

and sometimes in Africa. They are very critical of the West, right? But very often, and I hear that from Indians, for example, or from other people, they're very critical of the West because of the West's hypocrisy. Because the statement is like, you talk about democracy, but you are imperialist, and then when you stop being imperialist, you still continue to be imperialist in a different way.

and then your ideas like freedom for all, equality for all, it's just utopia, it doesn't work. Therefore, you are hypocritical, you don't really follow your own values. But what should be a response? And response that I feel is that, okay, if you are really hypocritical, then I will be very cynical. You are hypocritical, I will be cynical. So I will not talk, I mean, I meaning the...

the people from the global south again. We use this term, which is bad, but we still use it. And it worries me a lot because I mean, I think that if you're saying, okay, I will be cynical, so I will be nationalist, I will cut the influence from foreign aid,

I will not believe your stories about civil society. I will rebrand them into external influences. And I will just, I will not talk about values. I will talk only about interests. And therefore, this is a logic where you say, okay, Indians should be friends with Russians because Americans are bad and blah, blah, blah. I worry about this because that means that the world we are going in

in the future, the next decades, will be the world of collapsed democratic ideas coming from the West. Nobody will believe in them anymore, especially when the West is not active in promoting it, like Americans are closing down, etc. And the world of Global South will be very cynical and saying, it's all about interests, we don't care about values. Do you have this worry too?

So I'm a annoyingly optimistic person. Okay. That's, that's one of my superpowers. I think that the mistake that we make when we, when, when we enter this, this exactly, I, this, this, this conversation of, you know, hypocrisy versus cynicism, and it's ultimately unhelpful is I think that we, as, and when I say we, I say the, the producers of, let's say, you know, knowledge, culture slash media, um,

We start thinking like states. We talk like states. We talk as if we are the foreign minister of a particular place. So you will ask me about this and I'll say, yes, but you know, India needs to buy oil and India needs to do this. But my opinion on these things actually doesn't count for anything, right? And I have no influence on any of these things. So I think what gives me optimism is it suggests to me that if we can stop people...

immediately deciding that when they're asked a question, that they're actually being asked a question as a person in power.

and saying, no, I'm asking you a question as just a thinking citizen, then I think far more interesting conversations are actually possible. And it allows for, you know, what people, what we now call civil society kind of engagements, right? And I think that's where a lot of the very interesting thinking emerges. And so I think that a way around this is when,

people meet not as representatives of their national positions, but rather as carriers of community or regional knowledge. So I meet you as someone who has some knowledge about what's going on in India, and you meet me as someone who has a lot of knowledge about what's happening in Ukraine. And then we find ways of essentially building a more

a more thinking community. And what that allows us to do is hopefully then create more responsive democracies where we can start holding our governments to account, right? I think one of the big...

examples of Western hypocrisy, but also this feeling of powerlessness is Gaza, right? It is something that not just the global South, there's a huge protest march happening today as we speak in the UK. It's an incredibly, on the one hand, resilient country,

civil society that spans the entire globe saying Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. And on the other hand, it illustrates the fact that there's only so much you can influence your national governments. So I seek optimism in the fact that

This is a long struggle that has been on for a very long time. And, you know, it has gone through many phases. But there is one thing that people are able to say, which is that the plight of Gaza, particularly today, is a kind of litmus test for where you stand. And I think that in many ways, the challenge is to then think about more issues. In the case of Ukraine, I think Ukraine has...

to a large extent, the Ukrainian cause has been incredibly successful in many parts of the world. And I think conversations like you've been having are a way of also continuing this conversation and building more alliances. Does that? I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, because I can explain to you why I'm asking this question.

Because for me, it's very important that we don't limit the ideas of liberalism, human rights to the Western civilization. For me, it's important to think about them as universalist values. And here I try to turn the criticism of these values back because my kind of a key opponent is Russia, of course. And the Russian argument was...

and still is, if you follow the Russian ideology today, it's the ideology of Eurasianism, which try to say Russia is Eurasia. Well, I'm asking, of course, what about other Asian countries in this sense? But what they are saying that we are not the West, and the Western ideas of democracy and human rights are just the Western ideas. It's their civilization. We have another civilization, a different civilization,

And I'm like, no, because these are universalist values, because it's a universalist values to value human life. It depends on each particular culture how you do it. But if you locate these values only to the West, you open the way to the cynicism and saying, OK, but I will not stick to them because they are Western values. And I'm really...

What interests me is how these values that are dear to you and to me and to many other people around the world can basically be rooted in places where they will not be rooted necessarily. Like Ukraine is not a country where you had function democracy like 300 years ago, right? So we are inventing things and we are looking in the future, not into the past. Because...

We know this imperialist discourse in the 19th century, European imperialist discourse, I studied it. And my problem with this discourse is not the very idea of civilization versus non-civilization. When Europeans were describing Russia as non-civilization, I would agree with them, right?

But my idea is that my problem with that discourse is the question of time. Because they were saying you're not civilized and you will never be civilized. But that is wrong. That is a lie. Because we see that people all over the world are capable of developing, of technological developing, and also of getting more humanistic values, I would say, internalized. So when you look into the future...

Do you see that even despite these problems in the Western democracies, democratic idea can really progress? Because now we can see that it is in trouble. Autocratic models are a stronger problem in today's world. I think that when I look ahead, I see kind of big two kind of strands, right, which I haven't been able to reconcile. One is if we...

think about, say, the situation of Ukraine, then we're seeing essentially communities that are being forced to fight with their hands for the right to live a fulfilling life, right? Where you're literally under attack, you have to protect the land before you can even move forward. The other is people who are voting with their feet.

And this is the millions and millions of people who are migrating, emigrating, using what academics call irregular routes, undocumented routes to cross national boundaries, usually into Europe or the United States. And these are also people who are dying for the right to live a better life. Many, many thousands of people die every year in these very difficult crossings.

That is also sending us a signal about the future of the nation state, right? Where for some, the nation state is a refuge, like in Ukraine. It's a way of, you know, again, please correct me, my Ukrainian history is one book and 48 hours long. But on the one hand, a kind of almost several hundred years of European influence

encroachment and on the other hand several hundred years of Russian occupation and so you're like we need to build a refuge and then there are other communities for whom the nation state is a cage we need to break out of this cage we need to get somewhere else and I think that the way that technology and I can't help it I am obsessed with technology I think it's going to really force us to rethink what this state form is

And I think it's something that Ukraine, for example, is really going to think in many ways could be a light for us to think about what is the idea of a modern, let's call it national community.

Because you have, on the one hand, a very large emigre population who are, I think, after the full-scale invasion, but since 2014, have certainly been very deeply activated. I met somebody at the Lviv Media Forum where we're having this conversation who I think is an Australian-Ukrainian journalist who moved here immediately after the full-scale invasion because they said that

have always wanted to build a connection with Ukraine. I'm second generation, but I realized that after this war, the experience of being Ukrainian would change too much for me to be able to form a relationship. So I wanted to come now and they've been here, right? And then you presumably have people who have moved.

during the full-scale invasion and I want to think about what it means. But if you have 10 million people or 8 million people who are emigre and attached to the country and 35, 40 million here, you're essentially talking about an emigre population that's 20% of your national population right now. You could build something here and with the technologies of modern communication, of modern power,

something very fascinating could actually emerge here. So when I look to the future, it's hard to predict, but I think it's essentially going to be this tension between people who want to leave and are willing to die for it, people who want to stay and are willing to die for it. And how do we creatively resolve this tension? And it's not something we can do. It is something that is going to happen. And I think at various points, hopefully there will be moments where you and I feel like,

This is a tipping point where intellectual work done or, you know, other forms of work done, military work done, community building work done, can tip it one way or the other. That's very, very interesting. And of course, there are no universal answers to this. For me, a question of nation states is basically in today's world, actually, we don't have any other form of protecting human rights. Because, yeah, you have the international law after the Second World War, but it's still something that goes on top.

on top of the national law. And the Ukrainian case is difficult because you can say that, look, it's thanks to the fact that we have a nation, we're still alive because maybe my kids are alive because every night somebody with Ukrainian passport is downing a drone that goes onto my kids and I don't know the name of this person, I will never know, okay?

But then you can say that it's the other way around because lots of people go to the front line and die for others. And they rather lose their life and not protect their life thanks to a national community. So it's, of course, very, very difficult, but also very, very interesting and very important question. My last question to you, Aman. So you're in Ukraine and you came for several days. What...

What do you want to learn here? What questions do you want to find answers to? Yeah, I think what drew me here began with our conversations almost two or three years ago. I think what drew me here is realizing that there is a country, a people,

who are living through an incredibly intense moment, who are literally fighting for their lives, but at the same time are also producing an incredible amount of thought on how they are living, on how they are... Let me put this simply. I think that the classic question that I ask myself in my practice as a journalist and a writer is, I look at the people that I'm writing about and I ask, show me how you live.

And I think I succeed when I can turn that into an idea of show me how to live. And that's something that's informed a lot of my work over the years. And I think I've come to Ukraine with essentially that question. Because I think that when a community, a people, a nation are put in a position like this, they are forced to answer questions with a clarity that

that people who are not in this position don't have to. And I think it is a luxury when you don't have to answer that, but also luxury is good sometimes. And I hope for the people of Ukraine that they also then get that luxury very soon.

and that this war ends and the killing stops and the Ukrainian identity kind of, you know, and the Ukrainian people can continue their journey. Yesterday I had a conversation with one of your friends and I was asking them about the idea of Ukrainian identity. And this is Irina. And she said something incredible where she said, I think of identity in two ways.

One is belonging and one is becoming. And I think that when she framed it like that, I realized that... And then she said that in Ukraine, we have at this moment the opportunity to become whatever we want. And I can't think of any other people who actually have that opportunity at this moment. And I think that's an incredibly powerful thing for her to have said. And I think that...

It's something that I guess is informing why I'm here, which is to understand the limitless potential of people as well. That hopefully those fighting similar struggles around the world can learn from and say, we can, to quote your podcast, we can think in dark times while we act and we can build something. Aman Sethi, thank you very much for this conversation.

This was a podcast series, Thinking in Dark Times, by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet focused on Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Kermalenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine.

My guest today was Aman Sethi, an Indian journalist and the Editor-in-Chief of Open Democracy, an independent international media platform based in London. We have recorded this conversation during the Lviv Media Forum in May 2025 in Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine. You can support our work at Patreon. Your support is vital as we rely heavily on crowdfunding. You can also contribute to our volunteer missions to frontline areas in Ukraine via PayPal.

You will find these links in the description of this episode. This episode is produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, the country's leading institution for cultural diplomacy. Thank you for listening. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.