A vision of a country. The Fifth-Project for Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 almost overnight turned Volodymyr Zelensky from an unpopular President to a national hero and an international celebrity. Zelensky’s display of personal courage and dignity and his refusal to accept American offers of evacuation from Kyiv when its fall seemed imminent were in startling contrast with what the world has expected of its leaders in this century. It was also in contrast with Zelensky’s image up to this point: the Jewish former comic actor hardly fitted into any traditional Ukrainian image of a hero.
In the critical early days of the invasion, when Zelensky himself thought death to be very close, weapons were distributed to members of the Presidential Office. Only one person knew how to handle them. That person was Oleksiy Arestovych, who held the post of advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine. Daily “national therapeutic sessions,” that is, YouTube streams, which Arestovych has performed since the war broke out, made him the incarnation of Ukraine’s resistance - that is rational, composed, and cold-blooded. During these many hours of recordings, Arestovych laid out a full picture of what Ukraine and Russia were, are, and can become. Let’s dive into Arestovych’s Fifth Project for Ukraine.
Arestovych is a former officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence, with combat experience in the war in the Donbas. He is a professional soldier, a graduate of the Odesa Military Academy, and, according to his own words, comes from a military background - his father was a Soviet military intelligence officer. He himself is fond of quoting from Victor Suvorov’s “Aquarium”. But Arestovych has also done many other things. He has been an actor (who acted in Russian films, including war films), a student and teacher of theology and philosophy, and a practicing psychologist. It is this mixture of military expertise with his skill as a psycho-analyst that has been the foundation of his remarkable success on social media and a very major contribution to Ukraine’s success in psychological warfare against Russia.
Of Arestovych’s numerous social media activities, the greatest impact have had his frequent appearances on YouTube, where he has more than 1.5 million subscribers on his own channel. Arestovych, who, like Zelensky, comes from a Russian-speaking background but is also fluent in Ukrainian, appears both on Ukrainian and Russian language channels. The largest impact by far, though, have had his almost daily live streams on YouTube with Russian opposition figure, lawyer, and former Duma member Mark Feygin. These sessions always begin with an analysis of the current military situation, about which Arestovych is always very well informed. Besides being an adviser to the Office of the President on “strategic communication,” he is a good friend of Ukraine’s commander in chief general Valeri Zaluzhnyi, whom he knows from the military school in Odesa. Arestovych often stresses that he has no access to military plans but still is careful not to reveal anything that is not public knowledge. “I can only comment on the commenters,” he repeats. Yet his very clear strategic and tactical analysis, delivered in a calm, assured manner, have almost invariably proved accurate. These streams, which have been described as “collective therapy sessions'', have served to calm down much of the Ukrainian population in the hardest moments of the war and in moments of doubt. Arestovych achieves this effect as much through his undoubted military competence, striking intelligence, care to avoid giving credence to any unverified information, yet always conveying an air of optimism, as much through his strategic analyses as through his calm tone and body language. These are the tools of a professional psycho-analyst, and Arestovych put them to excellent use. The result is that he has become one of the most popular figures in Ukraine - opinion polls put him just behind Zelensky in popularity. In a recent interview with Ukraine’s most popular journalist Gordon, Arestovych, in reply to a direct question, announced his readiness to run for Ukraine’s presidency if the current president Volodimir Zelensky (for whom Arestovych expressed strong support) does not.
While such an eventuality is still unlikely, it could produce one of the most interesting election campaigns and perhaps presidencies, in modern history. One reason is that Arestovych is not only an excellent communicator of ideas but a serious political philosopher of his own. His philosophical ideas, on which he bases his political ones, can be discerned from the classes he holds, together with the political philosopher Pavel Shchelin, in his online “Apeiron School of Thinking.” A detailed discussion of these philosophical views is beyond the scope of this video, but their practical implication leads to a rejection of all the dominant ideological trends of our age: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, libertarianism as well as authoritarian conservatism (Arestovych regards himself as a cultural conservative).
Although Arestovich believes that the whole world is living through a historic crisis, his principal concern is Ukraine. He argues that a war like the one that is going on now is not worth fighting for anything other than a vision of the future. He has such a vision or “project” for Ukraine and believes that it also could also become a model for much of the world. He calls his vision “the Fifth Project.” This project stands in opposition to four other projects for Ukraine, which according to Arestovych, are now battling for Ukraine’s future. These he calls the Euro-optimistic project, the nationalist project, the Soviet project, and the Russian project.
Arestovych rejects all the “projects” for a number of reasons, but one of them is that they are all divisive and exclusive: supporters of each of them want to completely obliterate all the others. Arestovych calls them all “komsomoltsy” - that is members of the communist youth movement. The main problem with liberalism project in its current manifestation is its embrace of utopianism and “gnostic thinking.” The latter term derives from the writings of German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. This is a way of thinking akin to ancient religious gnosticism, which believes in transforming the world, usually into some Utopia, by an “enlightened elite”, which believes it possesses knowledge that is beyond criticism. Both Marxism and fascism are based on gnostic thinking. In Arestovych’s view, the principal manifestation of gnostic utopianism today is the “Green Utopia”, whose symbolic representative is Greta Thunberg. Arestovych views the movement she represents as a great danger to Ukraine, for not only does it want to normalize the deviant personality of Greta herself, but the entire movement is totally indifferent to Ukraine and its survival.
Arestovych’s view of Ukrainian nationalism is, if anything, even more negative. Even though he admits that many nationalists are admirable on a personal level, Arestovych views nationalism as the greatest danger to Ukraine of all, perhaps even greater than the Russian project. In Arestovych’s view, Ukraine is to its very core multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multilingual. It is a combination of five principal cultural influences: Polish, Crimean-Tatar, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish. Ukrainian identity cannot be based on mono-ethnicity or monoculturalism without Ukraine entirely and permanently losing southern, eastern, and a half of central Ukraine.
Arestovych denies the reality of the concept of “nation”, according to him, it is just the old archetype of “the king’s body politic ” (in Ernst Kantorowicz’s phrase). He sees nationalism as a “pro-entropic” project, treating the individuals who are supposed to make up the “nation” as an undifferentiated mass. Especially in multicultural, multilingual, and multi-ethnic Ukraine, such a project is a recipe for disaster.
The third and fourth projects are the Soviet and Russian projects. Unlike many Western analysts, Arestovych not only does not consider them at all to be identical. On the contrary, they are diametrically opposed - both as ideology and as political practice. The Soviet project was a classic gnostic utopia - an attempt to construct a “new Soviet man.” The “Russian project,” initiated by Putin after he began to turn away from “liberalism,” is essentially anti-utopian, based on the idea of “the Kathechon,” which can be described as a force of “restrining the coming of Antichrist”. Currently it plays an important role in Russian Orthodoxy.
Arestovych, while working for Ukraine’s military intelligence, was in Moscow in 2005, and met many leading figures (including the current Patriarch Kirill), and learned about their ideas about forming the new unified state, which was supposed to be based on the common history of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In particular, in the planned new unified state, the Patriarch was supposed to have two principal residences, in Moscow and in Kyiv, with the former being the political and the latter spiritual capital.
Arestovych believes that the idea of the Kathechon (even if not widely or well understood) is the principal reason for the attractiveness of Putinism to the Western right. Just as the Katechon in Orthodox Christianity restrains the coming of the Antichrist, so Putin's Russia restrains the advance of gender, green, etc. utopias that have taken over Western liberalism. This makes the idea attractive to the part of Western, Christian conservatives. It is only the incompetence of the Putin regime that makes this intellectual weapon has not been even more successful.
According to Arestovych, in Ukraine, the Russian and the Soviet projects, far from being the same or even allied, have been involved in a bloody struggle since the start of the war in the Donbas in 2015. The field commanders of the separatists who led the FSB-backed revolt against the Ukrainian state in 2014-15 were supporters of the Soviet project. Later most of them were killed in various ways. Arestovych believes that the Soviet project has no longer any chance in Ukraine because it remains only as nostalgia among the old, while its original utopian driving force is discredited. But there is just one aspect of the Soviet project that he admires and wants to restart. It is the Soviet space program.
So these are the four projects that are currently battling for Ukraine’s future. Arestovych believes that, without Putin’s idiotic invasion, the Russian project would have been almost irresistible because it is the only one that has a transcendental appeal rooted in historical archetypes of Russian and Ukrainian history. The only alternative currently seriously competing with it is the Euro-optimist project, in which Arestovych sees some good points but which he does not expect to be realized (“Old Europe does not want another Poland,” he says).
Dissatisfied with these choices, Arestovych offers his own “Fifth Project”. It requires nothing short of creating a new civilization. According to him, a war like the one Ukraine is fighting is only worth fighting to realize a vision of the future, one that has a transcendental core (not just a higher standard of living, etc). That is a new civilization.
The first ingredient of this new civilization is unrestricted spiritual and intellectual freedom of the individual, which used to be the promise of Anglo-American liberalism, but which has largely been abandoned. In order to avoid the same fate, Arestovych wants to go deeper, before Hobbes. He wants to completely abandon the idea of a “disciplinary” state, in which people’s evil instincts are kept in check by fear. He argues that, contrary to Hobbes, man is more good than bad and that he is capable of courage and sacrifice - but for this, he needs transcendental motivation.
Arestovych’s thinking is clearly influenced by his experience as a military leader and especially by the question of what men are willing to give their lives for as much as his study of pre-modern theology and ancient Greek thought. It clearly has to be something that transcends human life itself, but as he rejects utopias, it has to be something else. Arestovych speaks of “freedom moderated by a vision of eternity” as the founding idea of the new Ukraine of his Fifth Project.
This resembles the ideas of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who believed that the country they founded should be based on the idea of freedom moderated by Christianity (which was then the religion of the overwhelming majority of the population). In fact, Arestovych uses the Ukrainian word “volya”, which means both freedom and will, and which, unlike in Russian (but like in Polish) has a positive connotation.
Another similarity with early America is that Arestovych wants to open this new Ukraine to everyone who has something to offer. He believes that the idea of freedom in an increasingly unfree world will be so attractive that Ukraine will be able to gain a huge amount of human capital from all over the world by allowing effectively free immigration. This is hugely important in view of Ukraine’s demographic problems, which predate the war but have been greatly increased by it.
But at the same time, Arestovych, is a cultural conservative and a Jungian psychologist, for whom history is very important, through so-called cultural archetypes. These archetypes, formed by history, reside in the collective subconscious of a people. Sometimes they reside their so-called “shadows”, a kind of emotional blindspots, often objects of seemingly irrational obsession. For Russia, in Arestovych’s view, the West has been such a “shadow”. Positive archetypes are important in forming a new social structure, even a new civilization.
For Arestovych, Ukraine has two such sources of archetypes - early Kievan Rus and the Zaporozhe Sich. The inheritance of the former is the main object of the ongoing ideological struggle with Russia, but the latter is uniquely Ukrainian. There are obvious parallels between Zaporozhian Sich, and the kind of Ukraine Arestovych wants to create.
Sich means an armed camp, and Zaporozhia was a region in South-East Ukraine also known as “Wild Fields.” At the end of the 15-th century, it nominally belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (first Lithuania, then the Crown i.e., Poland), but in reality, the area was under nobody’s control. It was through there that Crimean Tatars would come on raids against Ukraine, looking for loot and slaves to be ransomed or sold in Middle Eastern slave markets. It was there that free-booters of various ethnicities formed the first armed camp - the Sich. Sich was to defend Ukraine from the raiders and, later, to conduct raids into Crimea and even the Ottoman Empire themselves. These so-called Cossacks, who ranged socially from adventurous noblemen, and even princes to serfs who had escaped their masters, created a remarkably democratic military community. The organization was largely modeled on that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth but for its time, was remarkably democratic. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was itself a “noble democracy”, with elected kings and Parliament, but all political rights were limited only to the nobility. Among the Cossacks, however, they were, at least in principle, possessed by all male members of the Cossack community. The Cossacks also elected all of their leaders, although the Commonwealth attempted to impose its own appointees to command the registered Cossacks (officially recognized and employed by the Commonwealth), they never enjoyed the authority that came with the election.
One aspect of the Sich that Arestovych frequently refers to, calling it “the Sich principle,” was that anyone of any ethnicity or social status could be admitted to the Sich. This principle Arestovych now wants to apply to Ukraine. He calls himself a conservative and, on the level of philosophy, he is in some sense, more conservative than many of those to whom this term is applied. Like the great 19th century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, who strongly influenced him, he is a supporter of Aristotelian philosophical realism and a critic of Western positivism. Like Solovyov, and his ancestor, the great Ukrainian philosopher Skovoroda, whom Arestovych often mentions, he puts individual freedom and self-discovery at the center of his philosophy. He supports a Western style open society, like the one that existed in Europe before WWI. But, while he wants a free economy and wants Ukraine to become the easiest place in the world to start a business, he is no libertarian. He wants a strong state, one that combines some elements of the Scandinavian system (particularly helping newcomers to develop their talents) with a strong defense and security. “Every Ukrainian should feel completely safe and trust another Ukrainian. Any Ukrainian who tries to harm another Ukrainian should be harshly cracked down on”.
Arestovych not only defends the right of all minorities to use their own language (his own first language is Russian) but is even opposed to having Ukrainian as the official language. He points out the fact that the United States has no official language. At the same time, he does not underestimate the importance of the native language as a means of dissemination of common culture and believes that the Ukrainian language and culture should enjoy special state support, but without in any way interfering with the (constitutional guaranteed) rights of minorities.
Thus Arestovych’s Rus-Ukraine is modeled partly on the United States and partly on the Cossack Sich, whose purely military function is to be replaced by a technological-military one.
Looking at this from a somewhat different perspective (or different “archetype”), what he seems to have in mind is basically regionalism and, perhaps a little more like Switzerland than the USA. His Rus-Ukraine consists of a number of largely autonomous regions, which sound like crosses between the Silicon Valley and the original Sich, under one central authority responsible only for defense, security, and support for national culture. (In fact, even defense and security will be partly the responsibility of the local Siches, through local Territorial Armies, rather like the US National Guard).
The most distinctive and contrary to much of the prevailing discourse in Ukraine are Arestovych’s views on Russia & Russians. As was already mentioned, Arestovych maintains warm relations with well-known intellectuals in the Russian opposition. Unlike many, perhaps even most Ukrainians, he is always careful to distinguish the Russian people from Putin’s regime. He insists that no matter how many barbarisms Russian troops commit, the Ukrainians must never descend to their level and always conduct themselves chivalrously and according to the laws of war.
This attitude of Arestovych is partly a reflection of his sense of honor and chivalry and partly a matter of strategy. Recently, writing on Facebook, he sharply criticized those Ukrainians who refuse to distinguish between those Russians who oppose Putin and his war on Ukraine (referred to, often ironically, as “good Russians”) from the regime’s supporters and those who passive toleration sustains it. He wrote, “A wise man looks for allies. A fool rejects friends”.
Besides being a general, universally applicable principle, this is also an important component of Arestovych’s complex and nuanced view of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It is this aspect of his outlook that is the most controversial and the most misunderstood. It is this that is the cause of most of the harsh attacks on him, which often come from Ukrainian nationalists.
Arestovych rejects as simplistic propaganda the often-heard view that Ukraine was a victim of “Russian imperialism”. This is not only because of his deep dislike of the “culture of victimhood” but also because this approach dismisses most of the great achievements of Ukraine’s history and contradicts the foundations of the Fifth Project - which means to include all Ukrainians, past and present. Arestovych views Ukraine not as a victim of the Russian and Soviet Empires but as a co-founder of and a driving force in both. Of course, this view puts on Ukraine a part of the responsibility for Tsarism, Leninism, and Stalinism, including the Holodomor, as well as the crimes of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, which Arestovych admits and which he wants Ukraine to judge and condemn. But then Ukraine can also take credit for the not-inconsiderable achievements of this project. Even more important to Arestovych is the other (along with Zaporozhe Sich) historical archetype of Ukrainian statehood: Kievan Rus. In fact, he sees the entire struggle with Russia as one for the inheritance of the state that was destroyed by the 13-th century Mongol invasion. In Arestovych’s view, it is Ukraine that is the true inheritor of the early Rus state, while today’s Russia is the political successor of the Golden Horde. For Arestovych the distinction between Rus (or Rus’ or Ruthenia) and Russia is very important. He believes that the way Russian concepts dominate the semantics of the discourse in Ukraine one of the strengths of the “Russia project”. Among the changes he proposes to make in a new constitution is replacing the name Ukraine by Rus-Ukraine.
In this struggle, which is an existential struggle between order based on freedom and order based on fear, all Russians can choose the side they want to be on. Arestovych wants as many of them, and particularly the most talented ones, with the most to contribute, to choose the side of Rus-Ukraine.
As for the future of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Arestovych seems to foresee at least two likely scenarios. One is a very long, almost unresolvable struggle, resembling the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this scenario, the period of high-intensity warfare will end but will be replaced by a long period of “war by other means”. To survive in this scenario, Ukraine needs to become like Israel: both in terms of economy, the military, the ability to utilize to the maximum its human resources, and, especially, the ability to exist under a state of emergency while retaining the maximum possible degree of freedom. Arestovych admires Israel probably more than any other existing state and knows it well personally: he says he did his fieldwork there during the first Gaza conflict.
Arestovych is also aware that even with the best will, a Russian liberal, having become the leader of Russia in its current state, would find it extremely hard to overcome the many points of conflict that exist between Russia and Ukraine. The only way for Russia to end this conflict would be to completely give up not only the idea of empire but of being a great power, he says. Arestovych often quotes Bismarck to this effect. He likes to point out that Russia has never won a major military conflict without Ukrainians. The most successful military commander of the Russian empire was Ivan Paskevich, a landowner from Poltava of Zaporozhe Cossack descent. The man who laid the ideological foundation for Peter the Great’s newly proclaimed Russian Empire was a Ukrainian, Theophan Prokopovich. It is the un-making of what Prokopovich did that Arestovych sees as the main task of his 5th Project. It was a Ukrainian, Alexander Bezborodko, who was the chief architect of Catherine the Great’s foreign policy - he contributed more than any other man to the erasion of Poland as a state through the third partition. These are just a few names in a very long list that make the part of Ukraine’s history many Ukrainians want to forget about.
On other occasions, however, Arestovych expressed his belief in the inevitability of the break-up of the Russian state. If this happens, Arestovych wants his Rus-Ukraine to be ready to replace it. For Arestovych, that would represent a resurrection of ancient Rus and a repairing of historical injustice, comparable to the re-emergence of the state of Israel.
This new Rus would be an empire - but one like the United States, based on free consent, perhaps a federation of some kind. Arestovych is not hostile to empires per se - he defines an empire as any state that contains several relatively autonomous cultures. Arestovych believes that mankind needs a non-Utopian project that can attract and utilize human creativity and energy, playing the role that “frontier” played for American pioneers and Zaporozhe Cossacks. He supports and admires Elon Musk, whom he sees as the successor of the Soviet space pioneers (as he often points out, at least 70% of whom were Ukrainian).
Some of Arestovych’s ideas are easy to criticize. His knowledge of Ukraine’s history is very impressive, but his image of the Zaporozhe Sich and Kievan Rus is idealized. Especially the latter, he sees through images of heroic princes and their often Western wives as the time when Rus has not yet been infected with the hatred of the West. But there is another image, that of an essentially viking state, living off trade but also of ruthless pillage and having slave trade as its main source of income. Take Grand Duke Svatoslav I, whom Arestovych particularly admires. His overthrow of the Khazar Empire was described by the great Russian historian Kluchevsky as a catastrophe since it removed the barrier that protected Rus from a much fiercer and more destructive enemy - nomadic Cumans. Svatoslav is also famous for wanting to abandon Kyiv and move his capital to newly conquered Bulgaria, which he saw as a much better location for his “commercial enterprise”. This is often mentioned as an illustration of how little the early Varangian rulers of Rus were attached to the state they ruled over.
Of course, for Arestovych, such historical quibbles are not very important because, in his thinking, history affects the present through the archetypes it creates - which implies that it is not so much what actually happened but what people believe happened that is really important. In this sense, myth is often more important than historical evidence.
More serious are the rather obvious difficulties with realizing the project. First of all, of course, the war needs to be won, and victory depends on Western help. And, as Arestovych is well aware, the current elites in the West are not keen on supporting his kind of ideas, which, if realized, would present a threat to them. And even after the war is won, an attempt to bring about such a radical transformation will create strong opposition, not just from supporters of the other projects but from interests vested in the preservation of the status quo (even if everyone admits the status quo is unbearable and unsustainable). To overcome such resistance while sticking to the principle of complete individual freedom, seems to be the most ambitious task since the one attempted by the American Founding Fathers, who were acting under less difficult circumstances. Yet that is the vision of Ukraine by Oleksiy Arestovych.