Horbulin: Territorial losses in 2024 are consequence of divided society

Ukrainians have equal responsibilities in the matter of protecting the state, but the actual situation is different, and Ukraine's territorial losses in 2024 are a consequence of a divided society.

Volodymyr Horbulin, First Vice-President of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Ukrainian Security Studies Institute, expressed the opinion in an interview with Ukrinform, naming three factors that prevent a positive view of Ukraine's future.

"The first is our objective dependence, about 90 percent, on external support. The second is the absence of harsh punishments for corruption, which in wartime should be equated with treason. The third is too slow progress towards social justice: in the matter of protecting the state, all representatives of society have equal responsibilities, but in fact, we see a somewhat divided society, and we need to work on this. The rear is not yet at war, and therefore our territorial losses in 2024 are precisely the consequences of a divided society, this is the most dangerous challenge," Horbulin said.

At the same time, if the Ukrainians overcome these negative things, they will be able "not only to defeat the nuclear enemy, but also to ensure the balance of military potential for decades, because our human phenomenon also manifests itself in the rapid development of technologies," he said.

According to Horbulin, the ability to self-organize sharply distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians, and even before the first Maidan protests, Western analysts noted that public institutions in Ukraine are more powerful than government institutions.

"And this is amid the degradation of the masses in Russia - under the increasing pressure of imperial manifestations in power and the improvement of propaganda and repressive structures. Therefore, the rapid and spontaneous formation of armed resistance in February-March 2022, to a certain extent, contrary to the underdeveloped structures of territorial defense, became the greatest peak of self-organization. Here, the authorities followed the self-organization of the people, and not the other way around, but managed to pick up initiatives from below and form a rather powerful system in the form of the Territorial Defense Forces as a separate branch of the Ukrainian Armed Forces," he said.

Later, in the course of the war, Ukrainian units demonstrated initiative, creativity and autonomy, in contrast to the rigidly vertically subordinate units of the enemy.

"It still makes it possible to maintain advantages on the battlefield in the skill of its management - we have hundreds of excellent illustrations of stopping and decisively defeating the enemy's forces, despite its traditional superiority in the number of people, weapons and ammunition," Horbulin said.

A survey conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation found that 62% of Ukrainians believe that security guarantees from other countries would help protect Ukraine from possible Russian aggression in the future.

In addition, at this stage of the war, most Ukrainians (64%) are convinced that Russian aggression was inevitable after Ukraine regained its independence, while 18% believe that this could not have happened. Similarly, the majority of respondents (59.5%) are of the opinion that regardless of the conditions for ending the current war with Russia, the Russian Federation will attack Ukraine again in the future. This position is shared by 68% of respondents in the west, 60% in the center, 55.5% in the east and 45% in the south.