Ukrainian lawyer, public figure and serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Masi Nayem told journalist Anastasia Bagalika for online.ua about his vision of the future of Ukraine, the glorification of the military and why dignity alone is not enough for the success of the country.
Dignity is not enough for the success of the country.
I would like to start not with the present but a little with prehistory. Nine years have passed, and soon, it will be the anniversary of the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity. After its completion, many people said that very different people came to the Maidan with different visions of the future. And for these eight years, between 2014 and 2022, our visions of the future clashed; we were building something in common and, in some ways, something different. Despite all the sceptics, it turned out that these visions of the future had a common feature - this is dignity. First, do you think this is a good enough foundation to build the future on now? And secondly, what kind of Ukraine do we want to have after the war ends?
You know, I compare it to the task of getting from point A to point B. Because of previous stories with Yanukovych and Co., we have a crazy demand for valuable people.
But when we get on a minibus from point A to point B, the valuable driver is not the fact that he will deliver. He needs to learn to drive.
And, of course, a certain logical error occurs here when we want valuable people, but we don't always have competent ones.
Therefore, dignity is not enough to make a prosperous country. However, this can be a base from which we can start.
That is, a person must be dignified — he must be able to bear responsibility, have Ukrainian citizenship and fundamentally understand that there is an aggressor state and that Ukraine has some interests. And if it is already in the database, let's move on to the competencies.
For eight or nine years, we understood as a society that we influence the state, that we are the state.
Zelenskyy did not come from a family of politicians, he came from the street. And all of us, like my brother, for example, just came from the street to decide the fate of the country.
I think the future is now at an insane risk that we will make the mistake of calling into power people of value, that is, those who protect us, but they will not have their own agenda.
Therefore, we will have politicians who will not have a vision for the future. And if they don't know what to do here, the street will come to power again, and we will go to the bottom again to push away.
Read the first part of the interview with Masi Nayem: If judicial reform occurs, many people will return to Ukraine, — Masi Nayem.
Going to fight for your society is normal.
This is already a challenge for the period after the war's end. By the way, I also often think that we will again, as in 2014-15, first face the fact that we will think that all those who fought for the country are “infallible”; we will somehow write out the ideal ideas about those who were in the war. And then we may be disappointed in some things because we are all human, after all, and we all make one or another mistake.
It seems to me that the very first mistake that concerns the military now, and I have a right to speak about it, is that we consider it something abnormal that people go to war.
We cannot make heroes of people who, for example, do not beat a woman. They are not heroes for us. Why? Because it's normal.
Going to fight for the society in which you live is normal. You don't need to make a lot of heroism out of this.
They are, of course, heroes. Some heroes go to war, losing their health and lives. This is normal.
These people should not be made into gods or politicians, especially in the executive power. These are just ordinary people. They paid the tax. Thank you. Let's move on as equals.
You may also be interested in: An unscrupulous person turns people into wolves. It's a war of all against all - Masi Nayem.
In the future, Ukraine will no longer have a Russian agenda
How do you see Ukraine in five years, for example?
I'm thinking - should I talk about it from the point of view of optimism or realism? If from the point of view of realism, then I understand that we will have great challenges related to the consequences of the war.
And five years from now, I think we'll still be muddling through our internal wars, unfortunately. It is, in particular, because the theft of state funds or funds allocated by international institutions continues.
And we will receive the consequences of all this in five years. However, there is already confidence that we will at least not have a Russian subpoena.
I would like to think that those people who are currently lobbying Russian businesses and who are still in power will come to their senses. And to make them come to their senses is the task of society.
Society should have a request for integrity in power.
You mentioned that war often changes people, but not many. That is, the way we were until February 24 of this year, we may remain the same, changing only some things. The attitude towards the Russian Federation is the base, but what concerns our everyday life is that it is undergoing certain changes, but not in such a broad population category. What do you think we need to do as a society so that integrity in our everyday relationships, between a person and the state, in the relationship, for example, between two officials or between two citizens, becomes the basis?
It seems to me that this is great work with society. This is always the case in small companies; when you set a goal, and someone sabotages it, it is only because of a lack of understanding of how certain actions can affect achieving this result.
It seems to me that we will, first of all, want to live after the war. When we see what affects this life and look back, we will see that during eight years of war, the country did not form a strong army.
As a result, we have an insane number of people killed. Perhaps these retrospectives can help society realize why virtue is needed.
And the fact that I blew up in a car that was not a military vehicle, but an ordinary transporter, is also a consequence of the fact that someone stole money for armored vehicles from the Ministry of Defense.
I understand that it should be shown just like that. Because people like to declare that they love the military, are grateful to them, and like to say that they want another state. But how does it happen?
Many activists have been working with the state, criticizing it all these years. But how many percents is it, 1-2? Maybe 5%. Maybe even half a percent of the entire state.
So, now it is necessary to work with society so that it realizes that it is not some politicians who are doing evil. It is we who allow them to do this evil. It is our lack of demand for integrity that creates "Medvedchuks"[pro-Russian politicain and compadre to Russian dictator Putin - Ed.].
