Both speakers were born in the Soviet Union and experienced diverging national trajectories after its collapse. Russia returned to authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin after a brief period of fragile democracy. Ukraine maintained electoral competition and developed a robust civil society despite struggles. Oleksandra Matviichuk leads the Center for Civil Liberties, which earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and documents the occupation and abuses from Russia's war. Ukraine's military and, critically, its civic institutions together sustain resistance to aggression and underpin confidence that Russian attempts at domination will ultimately fail.
It's easy to take democracy and civil society for granted when it's all you have known. Americans are aware of the repression and brutality in faraway lands. But for most, autocracy is a word: not a threat, not a way of life. If you are born in an unfree state-like my guest, Oleksandra Matviichuk, and I were-it is a different story. We were both born in the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, known to you as the U.S.S.R., Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But our paths diverged when the Soviet Union collapsed and disintegrated. My nation became Russia again. And after less than a decade of fragile democracy, it was dragged back into authoritarian darkness by dictator Vladimir Putin. In contrast, my guest's newly independent homeland of Ukraine, despite predictable struggles, has had a long series of those most wonderful things: real and unpredictable elections.
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