Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's nice to see so many faces.
I've just come in from up the road. I'm at another conference where we've been talking about Ukraine for the last two days.
So my head is sort of everywhere.
But what I noticed at the conference that I just came from and something that actually I think Brooke did a fantastic job in his talk,
was sort of the idea that Ukrainians are missing from this conversation.
And I'm going to do right now a little bit of what Luc just did is kind of push back against
my disciplines and question where the voices of Ukrainians are in these conversations,
and especially within political science and international relations, but also within many of his policy circles and media accounts.
The absence of Ukrainians is very clear,
at least for me as a member of the diaspora and as someone who's been working on Ukraine for the last ten years.
I've spent a great deal of my life in the country. And so for me, elevating the voices of Ukrainians is very important.
And I'm really glad to see not only many individuals on the program today, but many Ukrainians and some of my own collaborators in the audience.
So I think that these voices are really important and something that we really need to listen to whenever we are talking about peace in any capacity,
sustainable, even in a temporary sense, but especially in the country going forward.
The reason that I say this is because these are the images that have been dominating much of our media since the 24th of February 2022.
This is a map that was from the 24th of February. And as you can see, Russia invaded Ukraine in many directions.
Images associated with this have really been dominating our media.
But they have changed over time. And here's a map.
This is from mid-March.
So it's not necessarily the most accurate one, but it shows that we have seen new developments over throughout the country in the last year and a bit.
But still, we are still thinking about Ukraine, you know, kind of through this lens.
Many lessons.
Audience probably now know a lot more about Ukraine, including at the regional level, you know, probably where Kharkiv is, maybe a capsule and etc.
From these maps that we're seeing in the news, we're also seeing many of these images, many of which Brooks just painted for us.
Right. These women and children, these elderly people fleeing the country on foot by bus, many of them in buildings that have been attacked.
And they have been these these have been very much the images of what we've seen above Ukraine in the last year.
But also there have been other discussions dominating social media, especially Instagram and Twitter,
due to Ukrainians creativity and using social media for their cause.
We've seen some of these images. We've seen memes, in particular this one with the tractor and the tank, as well as just cities being liberated,
like have a son and the nationalist expressions when these cities have been liberated,
where these people are able to take back and move back to their cities and homes.
But with this, we don't really know much about what Ukrainians think or what they're experiencing amidst the war,
except for the accounts of individuals as they're leaving. But we can't.
And as political scientists, we have very significant difficulties in trying to research the country while the war is ongoing.
However, it is so important for us to know what they think in order for us to address or to help Ukraine in any capacity.
So for this reason, last year, in February, I received a John Bell Fund,
a research grant from the university for a completely different project in Ukraine.
I had the funds and believed it was no longer ethical to do the research that I had done.
And so what I did is I contacted a think tank in Ukraine who I was previously in touch with,
and I asked them what they thought was the most necessary for Oxford researchers to do at that time.
For them, there was no public opinion polling happening in the country and they believed it was really important to for us
to know how Ukrainians saw the war but saw themselves and especially the foreign policy ambitions of the people.
So with this well, I'll get back to a second.
As a scholar of mine or colleague of mine, the DPR decided to run a public opinion survey with this and also kind of motivating our
stance was much of the media that had been dominating the discussions about the war,
often framing the war as though it started on the 24th of February, but forgetting that this was something that had been happening for nine years.
And for many Ukrainians, many of them in this room, we can attest to the fact that 2014 was a significant turning point for Ukrainians,
not only from the Euromaidan in 2013, 2014, but the annexation of Crimea and then the beginning of the war in Donbas, the Ukraine.
The Russia-Ukraine war was an international and has been an international conflict backed by Russian separatists, by Russia and also Ukrainians.
And it's very, very complex and there's many different nuances here.
But it's not just been or has not just been a 12 month conflict.
It's been a 12 month plus eight year conflict or now even a 13 or 14.
Plus eight years. This is something that is really important for any conversation about peace
and that this is not something new that has come about in the last few years,
especially in the eyes of Ukrainians. This has been happening at a very local level.
I've worked with families of war and orphan children for five years in the country.
And this the horrors, the atrocities and these stories of trauma are very entrenched in very much a new
generation of people who are now have been living with conflict for going on ten years.
This is really important for us to remember when we're thinking about peace. And I threw up some numbers here.
Just estimates for us to remind ourselves that there have been significant losses.
This is not at all to undermine what we've seen since February.
But just as a reminder that these losses are not new and they have been ongoing for a significant, significant period of time,
and that there have also been many, many people internally displaced and also displaced within Europe since 2014 and not only since 2022.
Still we've seen significant Ukrainian resistance.
And these are just some very simple visual for us to remind ourselves that when Russia did invade in 2022,
there was a significant imbalance between Ukraine's state, especially within its military, its combat capabilities and Russia.
But with this and as we've seen, Ukraine has continued to defend itself despite the significant losses, which we don't often talk about.
And this is a really important reality. We do talk often about the Russian losses, that there have been significant losses on the Ukrainian side.
Yes, they were.
And they began this counteroffensive in February 2022 with a significant imbalance in just inequality, but yet they have continued to fight.
Despite that, still, it's important for us to know what Ukrainians are thinking.
So my colleague Karl and I, at the time we ran a public opinion survey in 11 regions of Ukraine,
only the 11 regions we were able to get approval at the time because they were only under
Ukraine's control and they hadn't been directly affected within the first immediate months.
And so those are the places where they're highlighted in red. These are the regions that we had and were able to access.
What we were doing with this think tank is trying to compare their data that they are they've been collecting from February 2021,
a year before the invasion, December 2021, so three months before the invasion and then days before the invasion in 2022 in February.
And so I'm going to go through just some brief graphs for you to understand this.
Again, these this survey particular was conducted in May, so just about three months after Russia's invasion.
So the first question that had previously been asked in February 2022, before the invasion,
was, who do you think is primarily responsible for the growing threat?
Because this is what it was at the time. As you can see, the numbers there are significant in Russia.
But when the question was asked again in May 2022, we see a greater,
significantly growing increase in terms of it being the leadership of Russia and also the citizens of Russia.
This question is important because especially in the first few months post-invasion,
the rhetoric within the international community was very much about NATO expansion and EU expansion,
why that's who is guilty and that was responsible for this.
Yet in the eyes of Ukrainians, it was not. That, as you can see here, is actually in their eyes it was Russia and Russian civil society.
Again, similar question asking that your interpretation of the events we see here that the war is a consequence of Russia's foreign
aggressive foreign policy position rather than the consequence of perhaps NATO's expansion or Ukraine joining the EU or sorry,
I'm joining a similarly and I think this is a quite interesting one, the changing views and allyship.
So this is again from February 2022, before the invasion to May 2022,
we see significant growing support for it at the UK, the US, the UK, the US and Poland.
Again, this is not particularly surprising.
Poland is a very obvious reason and the help that they have given says so substantially the US being a significant ally.
But at this time Boris Johnson had been the first prime minister to visit Ukraine since the invasion.
And so we can't really deduce whether this was actually have Ukrainians felt or because
Boris Johnson had been so active in the news and he had been the first Western leader there.
In any case, it is interesting to see such significant growing support.
And if we were and I will be running this survey again in May, we will see what's been happening in the the last year.
Another interesting one is just seeing the significant growth in support for Ukrainian supports for joining the EU going up.
I believe it's 13 percentage points and which has gone up.
There's very much supports even though it was only in 11 regions.
There's the same finding that we several other teams of scholars, including a team based at Manchester, have found with more regions.
I included is that there has been if anything the.
War has actually increased Ukrainian supports for joining the EU and arguably NAITO, although we don't have that question in ours.
And this is again from that same group of scholars.
They've also seen a growing support for democracy and support of Ukrainians believing in Ukraine becoming a democratic state.
This is in my data, but I thought it was interesting and important to show because this is often a question that I'm asking.
You talk about this data and Belarus is also something we often think about.
What is Belarus's position here? Again, prior to the invasion and after May,
Ukrainians has suggested that there's a growing fear and that Belarus is playing a role in this and more so than they had prior to the invasion.
This might change now, and when I asked the same survey again, we might see a different result because Belarus hasn't been as active,
or at least is a location in which Russia can attack Ukraine.
However, they still have not been neutral. They have been active in this.
And so it's hard to say whether this will hold or whether we might see some changes here.
Finally, what I think is really important with this survey is around concessions,
because this is also a conversation that at the time in the first three months,
but especially now, we are still talking about what will Ukraine give up in order for peace?
What is what is Ukraine willing to concede?
As you can see in this survey, I mean, Ukrainians said 78% of them said they they will not support any concessions.
I'm still within this question. My colleague and I felt that it was a little bit too vague and that 78% is a very strong position.
But we wanted to tease that out a little bit more to see if there was perhaps anything in that.
So we added another another question in there.
And what we can see is that the only or the only bit of movement would really
be around humanitarian issues and specifically around humanitarian corridors.
If you remember back in May and April 2022, we saw a significant number of attacks on humanitarian corridors as Ukrainians are being evacuated.
So this does align with what was happening on the ground, and I'm sure Brooks can attest to that.
There was significant fear, and I do believe that this is where Ukrainian opposition came from.
Nevertheless, this really prompted us to think about what else is important to Ukrainians, because if we're going to talk about concession,
we also need to know what and how they feel about their country, their political autonomy, especially their territorial integrity.
So this led to a second, second conjoint survey experiment led by, again, my colleague and also another colleague at Nuffield.
I'm only going to go into this very briefly, but really the message that I want to take away is in the next slide,
as you can see, we were able to add some additional regions.
And again, these are only regions that individuals had not or that were under Ukrainian control.
And we only surveyed individuals who had not fled or left their homes since Russia's invasion.
This is sort of an understanding of that's how we chose our sample.
Any of these regions and these are the initial were the initial text where we had selected Sumi to highlight up there.
Sumi was originally in our sample, but during data collection we actually had to drop the sample because individuals there were
so sceptical of our enumerators on the grounds thinking they were acting on behalf of Russia.
So if anything, at this amongst many stories to articulate the challenges of any research being conducted in Ukraine at this
time and not even speaking about the ethics and potential re traumatisation that come with conducting research.
In any case, though, we were able to gather significant data,
and what we found in this through our experiment is essentially that Ukrainians are not trading off the costs and benefits of war,
as we've seen in every single context in which we can find in the literature,
in that there is not a threshold of civilian or military deaths or even a nuclear strike that would deter them from continuing to fight.
What we found, and it's 79% of individuals said that first and foremost for them is controlling their political system.
Controlling their government was first and foremost important. And the second is that the territory of their country, including Donbas and Crimea,
are fundamental to them and that they are willing to continue to fight until these are sustained.
This is really important for us as political scientists, as policymakers,
anyone really interested in the discussion to know that if Ukrainians are not going to fight
and thinking about or giving them the conversation or suggestion that they should negotiate
is off the table and that we need to think about creative ways to work with Ukrainians if
this is how definitively their position is still and I want to end on a positive note,
because I think that this is a conversation.
It's not entirely bleak. And I think Brooke highlighted this, too, in talking about the local level.
We have seen significant grassroots support in a way that perhaps would be unexpected in times of war.
This is again from my colleagues in Manchester. But we can see a significant number of individuals in.
Ageing and grassroots organisations donating funds, cooking, helping the military in many different ways, not just fighting on the front lines.
This is it continues to grow in their numbers here. They say 61% in the top blue, but it's even more in the more contemporary days.
The second survey was in May 2022, and they've continued to run a poll since then.
In addition, in my own work, I've been looking at you expressions of the nation and other.
I'm active, but perhaps different ways in which Ukrainians have been expressing their nation and fighting for Ukraine.
These are photos of music, the express underground in bomb shelters across the country.
We have professional violin players, for example, playing to keep the morale in the spirits up.
You know, puppeteers, we also see this incredible art being painted on to the size of the bomb shelters.
The one on the left is by children in Chechnya. As you can see through the colours, there is this view,
the sense of nationalism as expressions to support and fight for your nation, even perhaps in a different way.
Finally, these are just another example, including a famous Ukrainian musician who's travelled across the country.
This is in Kharkiv singing and really boosting the morale of citizens.
So this reminds us that there is much more happening than those images I showed you at the beginning.
And with that, I just want to leave us sort of with four final questions that perhaps can stimulate discussion later.
One, you know, how do we account for Ukraine's agency? We are talking about the war, as you can tell.
I believe this is fundamental to how do we talk about Ukrainians agency or give agency.
We talk about peace because Ukrainians need to be elevated in these discussions as well.
Three What does peace look like for Ukrainians when Russia will be and is always going to be Ukraine's neighbour?
How do we understand that and have Ukrainians understand that fundamentally?
And finally, keeping Ukrainians views in mind, what does support for Ukraine actually look like?
With that, I thank you for your time and hope we can continue this conversation later.