War and democracy have always been more comfortable bedfellows than they should be. Our own history makes that perfectly clear.
During the second world war, the US sent Japanese Americans to internment camps. During Vietnam, the FBI surveilled and attacked anti-war and civil rights movements. And the “war on terror” led to a massive assault on civil liberties, especially of Muslim and Arab communities.
The longer wars continue, the harder it is to reclaim those lost liberties. More than 20 years after the US invasion of Afghanistan, the 2001 Patriot Act’s attacks on civil liberties remain and US police departments are more militarized than ever.
That reality is all the more true in an acknowledged fragile democracy like Ukraine.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s governments have often been marked by corruption and repression. And since Nato began its provocative eastward expansion, Ukrainians have also faced renewed Russian aggression, including the 2014 illegal seizure of Crimea and other parts of their territory.
The US, challenging Russian influence, has backed a set of political players in Ukraine including powerful far-right forces linked to neo-Nazi organizations, who were particularly influential within Ukraine’s military and to a lesser degree within its parliament.
The 2019 election reduced some of the influence of those rightwing extremists and brought to power a more democratic leadership headed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But challenges remain.
In 2020 alone, Ukraine’s Institute of Mass Information reported 229 free speech violations, including 171 physical attacks against journalists. In 2021 and 2022, Freedom House rated Ukraine at a low 39 on its democracy percentage for nations in transition. It noted that while “laws and strategies respecting civil society, ethnic minorities, and human rights” had been adopted, they were “accompanied by the imposition of sanctions on a record number of Ukrainian citizens, businesses, and media”.
Now things are much worse. Whatever democratic openings Zelenskiy’s election may have heralded, Ukraine’s democracy is clearly threatened – certainly by the Russian invasion, but also by the corrosive impact war has on all democratic structures.
Few countries mobilized for war, whether aggressive or defensive, have not faced losing many of whatever democratic freedoms had previously existed. In February last year, a year before the war, Zelenskiy’s administration banned TV stations, claiming they were part of Russian disinformation, and a month into the invasion banned 11 opposition political parties.
None of that is surprising for a nation at war. But it points to another reason for urgency in ending it: many analysts have already predicted Ukraine faces a long-term war of attrition, with neither achieving full victory. If accurate, what remains of Ukraine’s fragile democracy may not survive regardless of the final outcome.
The best way to ensure strengthened democracy in postwar Ukraine is to end this war as soon as possible, before more Ukrainians are killed, more Ukrainian cities are destroyed, and more of Ukraine’s already imperiled democracy is lost.
That means an urgent search for a diplomatic track. As Ukraine’s primary arms supplier and funder, Washington needs to call for immediate negotiations to begin that process.
This doesn’t mean twisting Ukraine’s arm to accept Moscow’s demands – decisions of what to concede or not in any negotiations is up to Kyiv, not Washington.
But the US could help diplomacy gain traction by immediately initiating its own direct talks with Russia on issues shaping bilateral relations between the nuclear giants. They could negotiate reopening all stalled or expired arms control and nuclear disarmament agreements. Washington could clarify that it will lift sanctions on Russia when a ceasefire takes hold. It could offer to discuss canceling, or at least pausing, work on the provocative new US military base currently under construction in Poland less than 100 miles (161km) from the Russian border.
There are many urgent reasons this war must be ended soon, and protecting the chances for Ukraine’s postwar democracy is only one of them. The war has been a disaster for the global economy, a danger to the environment as governments hunt for more fossil fuels as oil prices rise and a threat to millions facing famine as grain exports dry up. Militarization is rising in Washington DC, across Europe, and around the world. And the threat of a nuclear exchange between the world’s two primary nuclear weapons states has not loomed so close in 60 years.
Any one of those reasons, along with the need to stop the killing of Ukrainians, should be enough to end this war. Together, they demand an urgent call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations – diplomacy, not escalation, to end this war.
Phyllis Bennis is the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies