Ukraine refused to be a herd. We have not — yet

Ukraine and Kazakhstan started from the same point in 1991: $1,483 per person there, $1,442 here. Both countries were taken apart by their own elites, and at the very top nobody answered for it — not there, not here. The real difference between us is a single one, and it is not about money: in Ukraine power gave way to the street; here it never has. At the end: what this has cost Ukraine, how it ends, and why refusing to obey is only half of what is needed.

A note before I begin. This is analysis, not a verdict and not advocacy. Russia’s invasion is a fact, not a point of view, and I call it one. But the article is not about who is right at the front; I have written about that separately. It is about a state and its leadership. Everything checkable carries a source at the end; the rest is my assessment, and it can and should be argued with.

One more thing. Looking at this from the bell tower of your own country is the surest way to get it wrong. So I have tried to climb higher: what looks like a Ukrainian peculiarity usually turns out to be shared — ours too.

Part I. Three hundred years of other people’s decisions

The place to start is neither 2014 nor 1991.

The central fact of Ukrainian history is not its sequence of wars. It is that for three hundred years the question of this land’s sovereignty was settled outside it. In Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin. By anyone at all except the people living on it.

1654, the Pereiaslav Council. Bohdan Khmelnytsky concludes an agreement with Moscow — and the two sides read the text differently from the first day. The Cossack elite saw a military alliance that preserved self-rule. Moscow saw an oath of submission. The original document has not survived; the argument proceeds from copies.

Thirteen years later the Truce of Andrusovo divides the land along the Dnieper — without the participation of those being divided. A century after that, Catherine II abolishes the Hetmanate.

1917–1921. The Ukrainian People’s Republic declares independence twice. It is crushed between the Bolsheviks, Poland and the White movement. Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and Riga in 1921 again partition the territory over the heads of its inhabitants.

1939–1945. The territory changes hands three times.

1954. Crimea is transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR by a decision of the Party Presidium — that is, once again by a decision taken in Moscow.

And only on 1 December 1991 do the people of this land decide for themselves. 90.32% vote for independence on an 84% turnout. And here is a figure neither side of today’s argument likes to recall: in Crimea 54.19% voted yes, in Sevastopol 57.07%. Narrow, but a majority. There was a majority everywhere.

The famine that was not only Ukrainian

The 1930s deserve their own section, because this is where the single-bell-tower view goes wrong most often.

Ukraine’s Holodomor of 1932–33 cost, by various estimates, between 3.5 and 5 million lives — roughly 13% of the republic’s population. More than thirty states have recognised it as genocide; Russia has not.

But something else was happening in those same years, and we in Kazakhstan are the ones obliged to remember it first. The Asharshylyk of 1930–1933 followed the forced settlement of nomads, which stripped Kazakhs of their livestock — that is, of their income and their food at a single stroke. Estimates of the dead run from 1.3 to 2.3 million; the figure most often cited is 1.5 million, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs.

That is 38–42% of the entire Kazakh people.

The Kazakh share of their own republic’s population fell from roughly 60% to 38%: a people became a minority in its own land and remained one for decades. Proportionally this was the deadliest famine anywhere in the Soviet Union — deadlier than Ukraine’s.

And here is why it belongs in this article. It was one and the same policy, of the same years, by the same authors. Not a Ukrainian tragedy and not a Kazakh one, but what happens to people who stand in the way of a state nobody can say no to. Only the numbers and the manner of dying differed: there, grain was seized; here, livestock.

Nobody answered for the Holodomor. Nobody answered for the Asharshylyk. Goloshchekin was shot in 1941 — but for something else, in the general current of the purges, not for a million and a half Kazakhs.

Remember this. It will turn out that in ninety years nothing has changed on this particular point.

Part II. Three papers in one day

5 December 1994, the OSCE summit in Budapest. Three effectively identical memoranda are signed — on Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The guarantors are the same: Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom.

Ukraine gives up roughly 1,900 strategic warheads on 176 intercontinental missiles — the world’s third-largest arsenal.

Kazakhstan gives up roughly 1,410 warheads, including 104 SS-18 missiles, the heaviest ICBMs in the Soviet inventory — the world’s fourth-largest arsenal.

By 1996 everything has been shipped to Russia.

The word that was lost in translation

The English original says security assurances. Not guarantees. This was not a translator’s carelessness but a deliberate choice by the lawyers who drafted the text.

A guarantee creates an obligation to intervene. An assurance does not. An assurance is a promise about one’s own conduct, and nothing more.

In the Russian and Ukrainian translations the distinction dissolved: both words became “guarantees”. For thirty years, in three countries, people believed they held security guarantees. They held assurances. The legal paper that examines precisely this is titled “Assurances Are Not Guarantees”.

What this means for us in Kazakhstan. The same document sits in our safe, of the same date, signed by the same guarantor. Not a similar one — the same one. Its worth stopped being a theoretical question in 2014. The only reason we have not had to test it on ourselves is that our turn has not come.

Worth keeping in mind when reading what Tokayev says to Putin, and in what tone.

Part III. The catastrophe of peacetime

Ukraine’s principal catastrophe did not happen in 2022, or even in 2014.

Ten years of decline

Ukrainian GDP growth by year, World Bank data:

Ten consecutive years. Not a single year of growth in the entire decade. The economy roughly halved — without a shot fired and without occupation.

For comparison: the catastrophic war year of 2022 was −28.8%. Worse than any single year of the 1990s. But there were ten of those.

Seven million before the war

Ukraine’s population, in millions:

Look at 2019. Between the 1993 peak and the last peacetime year the country lost 7.4 million people. Before Crimea, before the Donbas, before the invasion. More than half of the entire thirty-year decline occurred in peacetime.

That is not bombs. It is deaths exceeding births, and emigration — people left because there was no work at home.

An honest caveat: the figures after 2014 exclude Crimea, and those after 2022 depend heavily on how refugees are counted, so the 2022–2025 numbers deserve caution. But the pre-war series, 1993 to 2019, is untouched by those caveats — and it is the central argument.

One starting point, three trajectories

The table that made me write this article. GDP per capita, current US dollars:

Read the first row again. In 1991 Ukraine and Kazakhstan stood at the same point — the gap is under three per cent. Poland was ahead by half.

Thirty-four years later Poland is ahead of Ukraine by a factor of 4.8, Kazakhstan by 2.5.

And Ukraine had everything Poland lacks: black earth, metallurgy, aviation, shipbuilding, a space and missile industry, the world’s third nuclear arsenal. Poland had almost nothing — except one thing: it joined institutions that constrained its own bosses.

Part IV. The difference that isn’t one

The difference between Ukraine and Kazakhstan is usually described this way: there, several competing clans did the looting — hence chaos, poverty and permanent turnover of governments; here, one family did it — hence order, predictability and four times the GDP per head. From such a description one conclusion suggests itself: that the second arrangement is the better one.

That conclusion is false, and the reasoning behind it will not do.

Theft is theft. The difference between a plural oligarchy and a single one is a difference in the number of hands on the same machine, not a difference between bad and good. The Ukrainian model cost the economy more. The Kazakh model more reliably foreclosed any possibility of change. Both left behind the same thing: a country where nobody answered.

In Ukraine the privatisations of the 1990s handed Soviet industry to Akhmetov, Kolomoisky, Pinchuk and Firtash for a fraction of its worth. From then on the state worked for their interests: they owned not only the plants but the television channels and parliamentary factions.

In Kazakhstan the same mechanism assembled itself around a single family. I have set out the result in detail: money circulating inside the state while the reporting calls it development.

And here is the main similarity, visible only from altitude.

Neither in Ukraine nor here in Kazakhstan did anyone at the very top answer for it. There, the people who took the country apart in the 1990s largely kept their fortunes. Here, the family kept its assets and the first president kept his immunity. Criminal cases in both countries ran through the second and third ranks; the first rank was left untouched in both.

Exactly as with the famine of the 1930s. Exactly as with everything in between.

So the correct formulation is neither “Ukraine is bad and Kazakhstan is worse” nor the reverse. The correct one is this: after 1991 everyone received the same machine — a state that belongs to whoever runs it. Only the settings differed.

Which leaves one question: did anything appear inside that machine capable of stopping it.

Part V. Twice into the street

In Ukraine, something did. Not a court, not a parliament, not a party. The street.

2004, the Orange Revolution. Viktor Yanukovych is declared the winner of the run-off. Allegations of mass fraud, protests in the millions. But the resolution does not come on the square: on 3 December 2004 the Supreme Court annuls the result and orders a re-vote. On 26 December Yushchenko wins, 51.99% to 44.20%.

Note precisely what happened: a court annulled a falsified result, and power complied. For our part of the world that is a rare event indeed.

How it ended should also be said plainly: Yushchenko fell out with his allies, carried out no reforms, left the oligarchy untouched and in 2010 polled 5.45%. The revolution changed a surname, not a structure. The presidency went to that same Yanukovych — lawfully, this time.

2013–2014, the Maidan. In November 2013 the government suspends the association agreement with the EU. Protests begin; dispersing them only enlarges them. In February 2014 there is shooting in the streets: around a hundred protesters are killed. On 21 February an agreement with the opposition is signed; on 22 February Yanukovych flees Kyiv, and parliament votes to remove him.

Honesty requires naming the weak point: the removal did not follow the impeachment procedure the constitution prescribes. That objection exists, and it is not only Moscow that raises it. There is exactly one answer to it: by the time of the vote the president had left the capital, and there were already dead on the square.

What followed was the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas.

The conclusion from both episodes is uncomfortable for romantics. A street can remove a particular man. A street cannot build institutions. Across the ten years between the two revolutions the oligarchy did not go anywhere — only the surnames closest to power changed. The one thing the street confirmed each time was this: irremovability does not work here.

Hold on to that thought. It will turn round on us later.

Part VI. Zelensky

In 2019 the election is won by a man who had played a president on television. 73.22% in the run-off — the largest result in the history of Ukrainian elections. He ran as an outsider and promised two things: peace with Russia, and an end to the rule of the oligarchs. The first was cancelled on 24 February 2022 by Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The term that expired

Precision matters here, because there is no shortage of imprecision on either side.

The five-year term expired on 20 May 2024. No election was held.

• Article 103 of the constitution — a five-year term.
• Article 108 — the president exercises his powers until a newly elected successor takes office.
• Electoral law expressly prohibits elections under martial law.
• Opponents object: if a president cannot discharge his duties, the powers pass to the speaker of parliament.

The position of Western governments and of most Ukrainian constitutional lawyers is that the continuation of powers conforms to the constitution. Russia deploys the “illegitimacy” claim as an argument.

My assessment. The problem is genuine, and it is discussed openly inside Ukraine — it is not an invention of propaganda. But a genuine problem and a convenient pretext are different things, and merging them is dishonest. Besides, an election in a country a fifth of which is occupied, with millions of citizens abroad and at the front, is not a technical procedure: holding one whose result everybody accepts is physically hard.

What is far more interesting is what happens when Zelensky does exactly what everyone in his position does.

Nine days in July 2025

On 22 July 2025 Zelensky signs a law subordinating NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to the Prosecutor General — with powers to reassign cases and issue binding instructions.

The move is a classic. It is precisely how an anti-corruption body is converted into an instrument.

23–24 July. Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Dnipro take to the streets — the largest protests since the invasion began. People came out onto squares in a country under missile attack.

24 July. Zelensky submits a bill restoring the agencies’ independence. 31 July — he signs it.

Nine days from signature to repeal. For completeness: the EU privately warned Kyiv in those same days that funding might be suspended. The pressure was not only from the street — but the street came first, and it was Ukraine’s own.

“Ali Baba” and a hundred million

On 10 November 2025 NABU announces Operation Midas: a kickback scheme around the state company Energoatom worth $100 million. Named as its organiser is Timur Mindich — a long-standing business partner of Zelensky and co-owner of the Kvartal 95 studio.

On 28 November 2025 NABU arrives with search warrants at the home of Andriy Yermak, head of the Presidential Office — the second man in the country, described as the architect of the entire vertical that had been built. He resigns the same day. In the case files he appears under the nickname “Ali Baba”.

On 11 May 2026 Yermak is charged with money laundering: 460 million hryvnia, about €9 million, for the construction of a residential complex outside Kyiv. There is no verdict, and the presumption of innocence applies.

Part VII. July 2026: at war with its own minister

And now the episode that changes the whole picture.

In January 2026 Mykhailo Fedorov becomes defence minister — previously minister of digital transformation, the man behind the Diia app and the drone programme. In six months he takes on three things: reform of military recruitment, an overhaul of defence procurement, and scaling up drone supply. Alongside that: coordinating strikes on Russian logistics and work to deny Russian forces access to Starlink.

Against him stands the commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The dispute is not personal: Syrskyi favours rigidly centralised command in the Soviet mould, Fedorov favours decentralisation, technology and audit. It is an argument about how an army is built.

The chronology:

• 15 July 2026. Zelensky announces that Fedorov will not be part of the new government. The president’s formulation: there are problems and there is no unity.
• 17 July. The activist Serhii Sternenko goes live with accusations against Syrskyi.
• 18 July. Protests grow and the demand shifts: the crowd now wants not only Fedorov reinstated but Syrskyi removed. Fuel is added by the affair around the Skelia regiment — more than 25 non-combat deaths among recruits.
• 20 July. Yevhen Khmara is appointed acting defence minister.
• 21 July. After six days of protests, Zelensky dismisses Syrskyi.
• 22 July. Mykhailo Drapatyi is appointed commander-in-chief and Ihor Skybiuk chief of the general staff.

Fedorov was offered a different post — overseeing military modernisation. He refused: reinstatement as minister or nothing. As of 6 August 2026 he still hopes for it. He himself says the cause of his removal was not the quarrel with Syrskyi but the procurement overhaul, and drops a line worth a paragraph of its own: “There were a lot of people swarming around the Defence Ministry.”

Removing a minister, or a rival?

This is where to stop, because it is the central question of the whole episode.

The official reason is a lack of unity in the military leadership. Fedorov names another: procurement. But there is a third, spoken aloud in Kyiv, and the numbers support it.

Before the dismissal Fedorov was not a rival. In 2024, by the Razumkov Centre’s measurement, 31.2% trusted him. By July 2026, 35%. A solid technocrat, a minister, not a politician. He did not appear in presidential polling at all.

Look at what happened in the week after his removal:

Thirty points in seven days. Of those polled, 72% opposed the dismissal and 5% supported it.

The trust ranking came out: Zaluzhnyi 70%, Fedorov 65%, Budanov 62%, Zelensky 59% — fourth place. In electoral preferences (Rating Group, 5–6 August 2026): Zelensky 25.2%, Zaluzhnyi 16.7%, Fedorov 12.5% — when a month earlier Fedorov had not featured on those lists at all.

And the figure that explains everything else. In a modelled second round Fedorov beats Zelensky: 63.8% to 36.2%.

In other words, if the aim was to remove a future obstacle, the result was the opposite: the obstacle was thereby created. The headline on the Kyiv Independent’s analysis says as much — “How Zelensky made a rival out of Fedorov”.

One detail completes the picture. According to Ukrainska Pravda’s sources, the administration had discussed elections in the autumn of 2026 — the calculation being that wartime would rally voters around the commander-in-chief; Zaluzhnyi and Budanov were reportedly urged not to run. That plan was, by the same sources, abandoned.

Lay one over the other: in the summer of 2026 the president’s circle is thinking about elections — and in July it removes the most successful minister in the government, whose programme (drones, Diia, a procurement audit) was its most visible success.

But carefully. I do not claim the motive was that one — there is no evidence for it, and the three explanations do not exclude one another. Fedorov was in the way of procurement interests. He was in the way of the general staff. And a president whose term expired in 2024 has no use for a popular subordinate either. The dismissal served all three interests at once — which is why it happened.

And one more honest caveat, made by Ukrainian pollsters themselves. The political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko notes that Fedorov’s surge is largely a product of the hype and appeared virtually overnight. Such surges often subside. The proof is close at hand: Zaluzhnyi’s rating fell 9% over the year from July 2025 to June 2026 — two and a half years outside politics eroded the figure once considered the only alternative.

And here is the mechanism that made all of this worth setting out.

Zelensky has now done this twice. In February 2024 he removed Zaluzhnyi — the most popular man in the country — and a month later sent him to London as ambassador. Zaluzhnyi is still first in trust today, at 70%. In July 2026 he removed Fedorov — and produced a second one.

This is not a run of mistakes. It is a property of the design. A system with no institutional way of transferring power turns every capable subordinate into a threat. And then the trap closes: you cannot remove him without creating a rival, and you cannot keep him, because he grows.

The difference with Kazakhstan here is not moral but mechanical. In Kazakhstan the problem was solved once and for all: nobody was allowed to become popular in the first place. In Ukraine the president keeps trying to solve it the same way and cannot, because he can neither jail them nor abolish the polling. Removing a rival in a country that holds elections means promoting him.

A year on: the same square, a different outcome

Now let us climb higher — because from here you can see what is not visible from the square itself.

In July 2025 the street defended an institution: the independence of the anti-corruption bodies. And it won; the law was repealed.

In July 2026 the street defended a person and demanded the removal of another person. And here is what the president did: he gave it Syrskyi in order not to give up Fedorov. He traded one head for another and released the pressure without conceding on substance. Fedorov’s team was counting explicitly on last year’s precedent — and miscalculated.

This is a very important change. The mechanism that had protected institutions a year earlier became, within a year, an instrument of personnel disputes — and the authorities learned to manage it by feeding the crowd a victim.

And here is the price: Ukraine is fighting a war without a full defence minister. It has an acting one, who cannot even vote at cabinet meetings. In two weeks the army changed its minister, its commander-in-chief and its chief of the general staff.

And here that thought from Part V turns round on us. The street is not an institution. As long as there is no other, it works both as a defence and as a weapon in someone else’s hand. A country whose only functioning check is the square is defenceless against anyone who learns to use the square.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of peace

From the polling above follows something an honest analysis is obliged to name, even if it sounds unpleasant.

Martial law, imposed in February 2022, expressly prohibits elections. Which means a ceasefire automatically opens the way to elections — there is no other way to call them. And the polling as of August 2026 says the incumbent loses the second round.

That is: the end of the war very probably means the end of Zelensky’s presidency.

Let me be as clear as possible, because this argument tends to be picked up from the wrong side. I do not claim that he therefore does not want peace. There is no evidence for that, and what is known suggests the opposite: the obstacle to a ceasefire has so far been Moscow’s demands — all of the Donbas and no NATO — not Ukrainian intransigence. Naming an interest is not an accusation.

But the interest exists, everyone can see it, and pretending otherwise is not analysis. From it, incidentally, follows the opposite of the usual conclusion: that a country’s leader carries a personal cost of peace is an argument for holding elections, not against.

Part VIII. How this ends

Now to the future. The argument about it is usually conducted between two extremes: either Russia’s total defeat and disintegration, or a freeze followed by a new and worse war with deaths in the tens of millions. Both branches are possible. But both are edges, and the middle is likelier. Let us work through it with numbers.

The arithmetic of the front

Since February 2026 roughly 20% of Ukraine’s territory has been under Russian control. The country’s area is 603,500 sq km, so the occupied portion is on the order of 120,000 sq km.

In the first five months of 2026 Ukraine retook about 600 sq km — and that was its best stretch in a long time: for the first time it was regaining more than it lost.

Do the arithmetic. 600 sq km in five months is roughly 1,400 sq km a year. To recover 120,000 at that rate would take something like eighty years.

This arithmetic says nothing about who is right. It says one thing: at current rates, military liberation of the territory does not exist as an option. Any scenario beginning with the words “Ukraine will retake it” requires not continuation but a break — a fundamentally different army, different supplies, or the collapse of the opponent.

What each side rests on

Two of these numbers matter more than the rest.

Ukraine spends 34.5% of GDP on the war. No economy sustains that level for long. It is possible only because the civilian budget is covered from outside. Ukrainian resilience therefore rests not on the Ukrainian economy but on somebody else’s decision to keep paying.

Russian growth fell from 4.9% to 1.0% in a single year. Military Keynesianism has run out: the stimulus is spent and stagnation remains. But stagnation is not collapse. The Soviet Union stagnated for a decade and came apart not from that but from a decision at the top.

From which follows the main conclusion, and it too is visible only from altitude:

The outcome will be decided not at the front but by whose internal system fails first. Both sides are racing not each other but their own decay. Ukraine’s weak point is institutional and financial: a country at war without a defence minister, personnel policy conducted through the square, hundred-million-dollar schemes in wartime, and dependence on foreign money. Russia’s is economic and successional: stagnation, worn-out capacity and the question of what comes after.

Five scenarios

1. A freeze without a treaty — the most likely.
The line of contact hardens, the shooting subsides or becomes desultory, there is no peace treaty, nobody recognises the annexations, and both sides declare victory at home. The model is Korea: the armistice was signed in July 1953, there is still no peace treaty, seventy-three years on. This is not peace. It is a war on pause, with every cause of it preserved.

2. A settlement with real guarantees — less likely.
It requires Russia to accept Ukraine’s rearmament and Ukraine to accept the de facto loss of territory. Today both refuse precisely that. Possible if external pressure comes to outweigh both sides’ domestic reasons.

3. Ukraine breaking — low probability, but it must be named.
This scenario is discussed less than the others: it is inconvenient for everyone who wishes Ukraine victory. The mechanism: an interruption in external financing, plus exhaustion of manpower, plus a political crisis. Thirty-four and a half per cent of GDP on defence is not something held together by willpower.

4. Russia breaking — low probability.
It requires not stagnation but collapse: the economy, an elite split and the succession question all at once. States do not fall apart on schedule, and treating this as a plan is not analysis but hope.

5. Nuclear escalation — very low, but not zero.
This must be said plainly. A scenario in which deaths run into the tens of millions means, arithmetically, not a large conventional war but a nuclear one. Conventional war in Europe does not produce such numbers: the Second World War cost some 70–85 million over six years with whole continents mobilised. Tens of millions in a short span comes only from the use of nuclear weapons. Such a scenario requires a direct clash between Russia and NATO — that is, not a continuation of the present war but a qualitatively different event.

My own ranking of probabilities is subjective and I do not insist on it: a freeze without a treaty is likeliest; a settlement with guarantees markedly less so; a break on either side is improbable but real; nuclear escalation is the least likely and the most catastrophic.

What follows for Kazakhstan

And now the unpleasant part.

In four of the five scenarios Russia emerges from the war with a mobilised army, an economy rebuilt for war, and its claims unresolved.

A freeze settles none of the questions the war began over. It leaves a state that has spent three years learning to fight, keeps an army under arms, and sustains its industry on military orders. Such a mechanism cannot simply be switched off: it demands either demobilisation — politically costly — or use.

That is the real question for us in Kazakhstan. Not “who wins”, but what the neighbour does the day after the shooting stops.

And we will be answering that question holding the very paper in the safe that says “assurances”.

Part IX. What all of this amounts to

The temptation to draw two simple conclusions is strong, and both would be lies.

The first lie: “Ukraine is just as corrupt, so it is no better.” A hundred million dollars at Energoatom is theft, and the war does not excuse it.

The second lie: “Ukraine is fighting for freedom, so everything there is honest.” Not everything. The Mindich scheme operated during the war, under the sitting president, with his partner involved. And around the defence ministry, in the former minister’s own words, there were a lot of people swarming.

The truth is in between, and it is more interesting than either.

The machine is the same. Only what happens after exposure differs.

In Ukraine investigators arrived with a search warrant at the home of the president’s closest aide — he was gone the same day and charged six months later. The president signed a law against the anti-corruption bodies — and repealed it nine days later.

In Kazakhstan, over thirty-five years, not one development institution has ever had a conclusion drawn about it. Not once. Instead of conclusions: renaming, merger, liquidation. There turned out to be nobody to ask: the legal entity no longer exists, its successor changed its signboard, and the successor’s successor was wound up.

And what the world’s history of fighting corruption teaches is exactly this: nowhere did it begin with jailings. It began when the question “where did the money go” acquired an address.

The difference, then, is not in the cleanliness of the elites, nor in the quality of the state — no working state was built in Ukraine. The difference is in who turns out to be stronger in the end: the cabinet, or the people who came out into the street.

And that deserves a section of its own, because it holds both the answer and the price of it.

One paper between two of us

Back to where we started.

In the analysis of the Kurultai I wrote that Nazarbayev is not in prison not because he did not steal, but because he traded the presidency for guarantees of his own safety — guarantees issued by someone who can withdraw them at any moment.

In December 1994 Ukraine traded 1,900 nuclear warheads for security guarantees. More precisely, for assurances.

In both cases the meaning of the paper was later decided by whoever issued it.

Our copy lies where it always has, signed on the same day by the same hands. It differs from Ukraine’s in one respect: ours has not been tested yet.

Guarantees given by another are worth exactly what that other decides. The only guarantee that cannot be withdrawn from outside is the one built inside.

And that is what the last of this is about.

What they have and we do not

In thirty-four years Ukraine has built almost nothing of what a functioning state is usually measured by. Its economy is nearly five times poorer than Poland’s. Its courts did not become independent. Its army had to be rebuilt from scratch under fire. The stealing is such that a hundred-million-dollar scheme is uncovered at the height of a war, and the head of the presidential office is charged.

And yet Ukrainians have one thing, and no post-Soviet republic where power does not change hands has it. It is called neither democracy, nor prosperity, nor the rule of law.

Ukrainians refused to be driven.

Four times in a little over twenty years. In 2004, when their election was stolen. In 2013–14, when the country’s direction was decided for them. In July 2025, when the president signed a law against the anti-corruption bodies — they came out under missile fire. And in July 2026, over a minister they had decided was theirs.

None of these was wise in itself. The first ended with Yushchenko on five per cent. The second, with the loss of Crimea and a war. The fourth was played: the square was handed someone else’s head and took it. The street errs, and errs expensively.

But every time, the same thing was confirmed: here you cannot talk people into accepting that others know better for them.

Who Pushkin was writing about

Two hundred years ago Pushkin, in bitterness, wrote:

What use are freedom’s gifts to herds?
They must be sheared, or they must bleed.
Their heritage from age to age:
the yoke with bells on, and the whip.

He was writing about his own country, having concluded that the sower had scattered his seed for nothing. Goethe’s Mephistopheles puts it harder still: man calls the divine spark reason, “and with that spark he lives a beast among beasts.” I have examined both texts in the article on the Kurultai: the pyramid rests not on the villainy of rulers but on the consent of the ruled.

Well — as far as they themselves are concerned, Ukrainians have closed that question.

Someone will say: we came out too. True. Zhanaozen, Qantar — people came out and paid with their lives. The difference is not that nobody comes out here. The difference is that there, power gave way; here, it never has. No Kazakh protest has annulled an election result or removed the man it was directed against. There the street proved stronger than the cabinet; here the cabinet has always proved stronger than the street. That is what being a herd actually means: not silence, but having no way to be heard even when you shout.

The half Ukraine now stands on

But refusing to obey is only half of it, and Ukraine is standing exactly on that boundary.

A people that has stopped being a herd is not yet a people of citizens. A square can remove a man; it cannot bind the next one. It works like an emergency brake: it saves you in a crash, but you cannot drive on it. July 2026 showed that with unpleasant clarity.

The second half has a dull name: the rule of law.

Not “strong laws” — dictatorships have strong laws too. But the rule under which the law stands above everyone: above a popular minister, above a commander-in-chief, above a president.

In July 2025 Zelensky signed a law against the anti-corruption bodies and repealed it nine days later. That was a victory. But a state under law is not one where such a law is repealed in nine days. A state under law is one where it cannot be signed.

Between those two conditions lies the whole difference between a country held up by protest and a country that holds itself up.

And here is what happens when Ukraine crosses into the second half. There will be nothing left to take it by from the inside. From outside, territory can be seized — this war has shown that it can. But a country where law stands above power cannot be bought, cannot be broken through your own man at the top, and cannot be persuaded that someone else knows better for it. There is nothing left to break: where the law does not depend on who is in the chair today, changing the chair settles nothing.

Invincibility is not about the army. It is about there being no lever left inside to pull.

And us

We in Kazakhstan have not completed even the first half.

In thirty-five years there has not been a single instance of power giving way other than by its own decision. Not one conclusion drawn about any development institution. And not one case in which a decision that cost people their lives or their money was answered for by the person who took it, rather than the person who carried it out.

Each time we are told that they know better up there: they know better when we will be ready for elections, they know better which figures to show us, they know better what we ought not to ask about. And for as long as we accept that they know better, no paper in any safe will protect us. It was signed by someone who will decide for himself what it means — and inside there is nothing that would compel anyone to reckon with us.

Having finished his “Sower”, Pushkin gave up on peoples. About Ukrainians he was wrong: it took them two hundred years, but he got his answer — four times, in the square.

About us the question is still open. And there is nobody but us to answer it.

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Sources

1. The December 1, 1991 Referendum / Presidential Election in Ukraine — CSCE Commission report, US Congress — 90.32% for independence, Crimea 54.19%, Sevastopol 57.07%
2. Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 — survey of research and estimates — 1.3–2.3 million dead, 38–42% of the Kazakh people, Kazakh share down from 60% to 38%
3. The Kazakh Famine of 1930–33 and the Politics of History in the Post-Soviet Space — Wilson Center — scholarly debate on estimates and classification
4. The Kazakh Famine: The Beginnings of Sedentarization — Sciences Po — the mechanism: forced settlement of nomads
5. Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances — Arms Control Association — arsenals, terms, the course of disarmament
6. The Budapest Memorandum After 30 Years — National Security Archive, GWU — declassified negotiation documents
7. Budapest Memorandum at 25 — Belfer Center, Harvard — assessment of the consequences
8. Assurances Are Not Guarantees — Yale Journal of International Affairs — the legal difference between assurances and guarantees
9. The Trilateral Process: The United States, Ukraine, Russia and Nuclear Weapons — Brookings — how the deal was prepared
10. Ukraine indicators — World Bank — GDP, GDP per capita, population, growth rates
11. Kazakhstan indicators — World Bank — comparable series
12. Military expenditure, % of GDP — World Bank / SIPRI — Russia 7.1% and Ukraine 34.5% in 2024
13. Zelensky signs law destroying independence of Ukraine’s key anti-corruption bodies — Kyiv Independent — the law of 22 July 2025
14. ‘Veto the law!’ — Protests sweep Ukraine — Kyiv Independent — the largest wartime protests
15. Following street protests, Zelensky signs law restoring independence of anti-graft bodies — Kyiv Independent — the repeal, 31 July 2025
16. Ukraine parliament restores anti-corruption agency independence — JURIST — legal analysis
17. Zelenskyy’s Anti-Corruption Climbdown: What It Means For Ukraine — RFE/RL — analysis of the retreat
18. Zelensky’s chief of staff Yermak resigns amid Ukraine’s biggest corruption scandal — Kyiv Independent — Operation Midas and Yermak’s resignation
19. Hell has frozen over: Head of the Office of the President resigns — OSW, Warsaw — analysis by the Polish Centre for Eastern Studies
20. Ukraine After Yermak: The End of the Power Vertical? — ICDS, Tallinn — what the resignation meant for the system of power
21. Ukraine: corruption scandal involving senior government officials continues — OSW — the charge against Yermak, May 2026
22. President until the end of the war: Zelensky’s term of office is extended — OSW — constitutional analysis of the expired term
23. Is Zelensky’s Legitimacy Really At Risk? — Carnegie Endowment — Articles 103 and 108, the competing positions
24. Constitutional court may be asked to rule on timing of future elections — ConstitutionNet — the legal debate inside Ukraine
25. Zelensky vs Fedorov: Ukraine’s Defence Minister dismissed — OSW — analysis of the dismissal, 16 July 2026
26. Inside the Zelensky–Fedorov stalemate: Neither side is ready to yield — Kyiv Independent — substance of the conflict, protest chronology, the Skelia regiment
27. Zelensky dismisses Defense Minister Fedorov — Kyiv Independent — the dismissal of 15 July 2026
28. ‘What A Nightmare’: Zelenskyy’s Dismissal Of Defense Minister Sparks Fury In Ukraine — RFE/RL — the public reaction
29. How Zelensky made a rival out of Fedorov — Kyiv Independent — ratings before and after, the autumn 2026 election plan, the Zaluzhnyi parallel
30. Fedorov’s trust rating soars by 30% amid protests, surpasses Zelensky’s — Kyiv Independent — trust from 35% to 65%, 72% against the dismissal
31. Protests against the dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov — compiled chronology and polling — summary chronology of the July 2026 protests
32. Zelenskyy’s New Defense Chief Has Combat Kudos, But Faces Tough Political Challenge — RFE/RL — Yevhen Khmara, acting minister from 20 July 2026
33. Zelensky rejected push to fire Syrskyi as commander-in-chief, Fedorov reveals — Kyiv Independent — Fedorov admits he first tried to replace Syrskyi
34. Mapping Russian attacks and territorial gains across Ukraine — Al Jazeera — share of territory occupied, February 2026
35. Ukraine reclaims territory as it doubles attacks on Russian logistics — Al Jazeera — 600 sq km over five months of 2026

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