This June, a massive flood led to the destruction of multiple homes and roads in western Ukraine, as well as the loss of several lives. The disaster elicited a less than empathetic response in Ukraine’s public sphere. A frequent reaction to the news has been to blame the victims, who allegedly provoked the catastrophe by cutting down trees en masse. “They, the locals, have been content with this situation for many years – they have all been active or passive participants of this devastation. In this situation there’s no point in calling on the state in case of new floods, washed away roads and destroyed villages,” says this blog entry, which summarises the attitude of a significant section of the Ukrainian internet.
Indeed, this reaction came on the heels of several similar discussions. The same tone accompanied a recent investigation into how western companies such as IKEA use illegally felled wood from the Carpathians. Many people felt it necessary to absolve the brands - idolised by the Ukrainian middle class as symbols of the European good life - of responsibility. Instead, they emphasised the role of local officials and, importantly, “the simple people” in ironic quotation marks. Likewise, president Volodymyr Zelenskyi, using his talent of striking a resonant chord in public, recently infiltrated a Ukrainian truck drivers’ chat group in order to scold them for using loopholes to avoid paying tolls for overloaded cargo – instead of blaming “the system” and abstract “corrupt officials”. And finally, when northern Ukraine was choking on forest fires earlier this year, a prominent nationalist journalist opined that “it is the population of Ukraine, which does not give a shit about its own country, who is the main saboteur” in the burning of dry grass.
This accent on individual “agency” as opposed to “structure” could be seen as a welcome correction to the default post-Soviet apolitical optics, in which “common people” are powerless in the face of the omnipotent “authorities”. It could be even understood as a healthy antidote to the paranoid search for signs of Russia’s “hybrid war” to explain any problem.
