Free Ukraine under fire and pressure: why the war is not only for land, but also for meaning

When Russification does not end with the empire

For several centuries, Russia has consistently imposed a foreign political, cultural, and linguistic framework on Ukrainians. This policy was not accidental. It was built as a long-term project of suppressing identity, in which the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian memory, and the very right of Ukrainians to be themselves were seen as a threat to the imperial order.

We must honestly admit: to a certain extent, this strategy worked.

Even today, in the fifth year of the full-scale genocidal war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, statements by Ukrainians still appear in the public space, repeating old Russian theses almost word for word. And this is one of the most severe consequences of Russification: it affects not only schools, books, and media but also the internal optics of people, through which they then view their own country.

This is especially noticeable in discussions about freedom, language, church, journalism, and political opposition. Where Ukraine defends itself from the influence of the aggressor state, there are always those who try to present self-defense as ‘repression.’ For the Israeli audience, such logic should be very understandable. When a country is fighting for survival, the issue is not about abstract tolerance but about security, sovereignty, and protecting society from enemy infrastructure.

Why the language dispute has long ceased to be only cultural

The Russian language in today’s Ukraine no longer appears to many as a neutral tool of communication. The language itself, of course, does not bear moral guilt. But in the conditions of war, it has become a channel through which narratives of the aggressor state have been promoted for decades and especially actively in recent years.

It is through the Russian information flow that ideas about the ‘brotherly people,’ the ‘civil conflict,’ the ‘neo-Nazis,’ the ‘external governance,’ and other constructs, which Moscow used to justify first intervention, then occupation, and then open war, entered the Ukrainian space. Therefore, the reaction of Ukrainian society to the Russian language today is determined not by theory but by the experience of blood, destruction, deportations, and daily attacks.

Yes, during a total war, there may be excesses on the ground. This is the reality of any country living under military pressure. But it is one thing to have individual emotional or conflict episodes, and quite another to claim that there is a state policy in Ukraine of persecuting people based on language or ethnicity. This is no longer analysis but a deliberate substitution of concepts.

Where freedom ends and working for the enemy begins

The myth of ‘persecuting everyone indiscriminately’

In public debates, one can often hear a set of accusations against Ukraine: allegedly, they persecute Russian speakers, black people, Roma, Asians, priests of the Moscow Patriarchate, opposition, and journalists. Such rhetoric is presented as sarcasm, as if the obviousness of the situation does not need proof.

But if you analyze such statements not emotionally but substantively, a simple question arises: where is the confirmation that all this is indeed the official policy of the Ukrainian state? Not private incidents, not everyday conflicts, not actions of individual radicals, but precisely the state system? If there is no such evidence, then this is not civic criticism but a repetition of clichés convenient for the Kremlin.

This is fundamentally important. In any country, including democratic ones, there are marginal groups, street radicals, and aggressive environments. Ukraine is no exception here. But to replace the existence of individual extremists with the thesis of alleged total state discrimination is to consciously distort reality in the interests of the side that is trying to destroy Ukrainian statehood.

What the Moscow Patriarchate means in wartime conditions

A separate topic is the structure of the Moscow Patriarchate. To present it in Ukraine as just a religious institution outside politics is either naivety or deliberate manipulation. In the current war conditions, the issue has long ceased to be about theology or freedom of ritual.

The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has long been considered in Ukraine as part of a broader ideological and political system of Russian influence. It is not just about priests in cassocks but about a channel of soft power through which meanings favorable to Moscow, justifications for aggression, and the representation of Ukraine as a territory that supposedly should remain in the orbit of the ‘Russian world’ could penetrate society.

For Israelis, there is nothing exotic here either. Any state at war closely monitors structures that may serve as a cover for ideological or organizational influence by the enemy. And when Ukraine limits such tools, it is not a fight against faith but a fight against agent presence under a religious umbrella.

Opposition and journalism during the war

Another favorite thesis of Russian propaganda is to say that Ukraine ‘persecutes the opposition’ and ‘pressures journalists.’ But here, too, the key question is not the loudness of words but the content.

What kind of opposition are we talking about? About political forces that, during the war, promote the interests of the Kremlin, dilute Ukrainian subjectivity, and work to defeat the country from within? Then the problem is not that they are restricted, but that someone is even trying to present such activities as a normal part of the democratic process at a time of national survival.

With journalists, the situation is no less clear. The status of a journalist itself does not automatically make a person a bearer of truth or inviolability. European history knows well that propagandists can also be called journalists, editors, publicists, and commentators. And if a media person systematically serves the narratives of the aggressor state during the war, the question arises not because they are a journalist, but because they become an instrument of hostile influence.

At the same time, Ukraine continues to prove that it remains a free country. It is enough to recall the mass protests of youth in Kyiv in 2025 against the resonant law signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky. People took to the streets, expressed disagreement, and the very possibility of such a protest showed that even in wartime, Ukrainian society retains a lively political reaction and does not turn into a controlled silent mass.

Ukraine as a free country in the war against global fascism

Why it is important to understand this right now

The main nerve of this topic is not in a domestic argument on social networks. It is elsewhere: some people still try to view the war against Ukraine through old peaceful categories, not noticing that what they face is not an ordinary political conflict but a state’s struggle for existence.

Today, Ukraine defends itself not only from missiles, drones, and occupation. It defends itself from a foreign worldview in which a Ukrainian must remain silent, agree, forget their own, endure an imposed language, a foreign church, a foreign history, and a foreign interpretation of freedom. Therefore, the dispute about Russification, language, church, and ‘persecutions’ is actually a dispute about whether Ukraine has the right to defend itself not only physically but also meaningfully.

Such topics are especially accurately read through НАновости — Новости Израиля | Nikk.Agency, because the Israeli audience knows too well the price of self-defense, the price of information warfare, and the price of illusions that the enemy can be defeated without calling them an enemy.

Ukraine remains a country of free people. Yes, tired. Yes, traumatized by war. Yes, sometimes harsh, nervous, and ruthless to those who repeat the rhetoric of the aggressor. But precisely free. And this is perhaps best seen in those very protests, in public debates, in lively criticism of the authorities, which has not disappeared even during the great war.

Therefore, the final conclusion here is straightforward. Glory to Ukraine, which is leading a difficult and heroic struggle against global fascism led by Putin’s Russian Federation. Glory to the Ukrainian defenders and all those true Ukrainians who did not bend, did not dissolve in years of Russification, and did not agree to live according to a foreign imperial scenario.