I can choose cheeses for myself, and this is how i see it, well, this is how it was perceived in soviet society freedom, there were not several varieties of cheese, and those who have access to products were considered free, obviously, and now western societies, who have absolutely no idea what its like not to have a choice of cheese, see freedom, thats how it is as a demand for the state to secure their comfort zone, and thats why its so difficult now explanation, this is me again linking to ours. The situation that if ukraine does not stop russia, then russia will go further and they will be forced out of their comfort zone, and all this help that we receive, and for which we are certainly grateful, because nothing is guaranteed, in the world no one is obliged to provide this help, but it is not just help, it is an investment in their own security, well, here it is also important for us to understand how to prevent the degradation. This understanding of freedom in society, because you know, i remember very well i see the Russian Society of the 90s there, and by and large, at least in the big cities that were the centers of the country there, such as moscow or st. Petersburg, the level of this freedom and responsibility for many people was much higher than in Ukrainian Society , then we saw it by the hundreds of thousands rallies there in defense of a free lithuania there, or people even demonstrated against the war in chechnya, and. There was a huge number of people who voted for liberal political forces, it wasnt a majority, maybe, but it was millions of people all over the country , and now these people are simply gone, we even now see from sociological polls there that the majority of russians would generally like the country to be communist, their number grows every year, sympathy for stalin grows every year, that is, from that society which i observed how a society that seemed to gravitate towards freedom was abandoned. These are only memories, you can write memoirs, but also the poor rights defenders, by the way, now remember, who in fact put their whole lives into making this society the way they dreamed of it, making compromises with the authorities, remember , like lyudmila aleksieva, nothing came of it, just nothing at all, this is a very important point for me, how can we prevent such opportunities in our country . I dont have a simple answer, but ill try to tell from. My vision, really society can become rigid very quickly, because what i see and observe in Russian Society is a rapid barbarization, then this entire thin layer of culture in the form of dostoevskys ballet and so on, it, it simply overlaps with these patterns of behavior that we see in ukrainian the territory that was forcibly brought here by the russian military, if for someone russian culture is a conditional tchaikovsky , perhaps from ukrainian. Its roots, then for me its bucha, this is russian culture, this is what we saw there, these dead bodies of people who lay in the streets, and with their hands often tied behind their backs, until the moment of their release, this is russian culture for me, german culture during the Second World War was auschwitz and babeniar, absolutely, and here there is a difference between german and russian culture, but your question was not about that, so i will answer it first responsibility. On people who understand the threat, on ukrainian intelligentsia, on ukrainian civil society, because the minority determines the vector in which the country will move and develop, and therefore it is important that this minority is organized, that it articulates its messages and that it speaks in different languages about the same thing, that even in a genocidal war of extermination, we must remember that we are fighting to leave. A free society, and this is a twofold challenge, and that this war did not start in february 22, as the world thinks, in february 14, when we first got a chance to build such a. Society, well, right here it is very important there is also the attitude of the state and society towards this particular thing person, you understand, what we have not seen by and large very often even since 200 there in 2014, when it came to forced migrants, even not only from the side of the state, but also from the side of society, do you remember those suspicious views on people who were forced to leave crimea and donbass because they did not want to live under the yoke. Well, we as a society need to grow up rapidly, and for me one of the signs of growing up is selfreflection, its when you dont just feel your emotions and think that you have the right to do whatever you want, because youre in hurt, angry, or something, and when you try to rationalize it like an adult, and yes, you have a right to all emotions, but even with all these emotions that we all feel during war, you have to take it seriously. Decisions that have a positive effect not only in the short term, but in the long term. I never mention it in the international arena, but i always remind it at meetings with the ukrainian audience. The war in syria started a long time ago, and the ukrainians, they were not like that either that they fell asleep thinking about the poor syrians and woke up thinking about the poor syrians, this. Before we talk about the indifference of the world, we must remember ourselves, and i also remember, since i have been engaged in human rights since 2007, about the huge scandal, when the question of building a shelter for syrian adults was simply discussed in ukraine, and ukrainians, well, people in this area said no, no, no, we dont want anyone, and i would not be surprised that some of these people may also have become refugees and received a warm shelter in other countries. Which we used to be denied to the same people who fled from the war, so selfreflection is a very important ability of adult society, well , you understand, to be honest, not every person is capable of selfreflection, here a lot depends on state policy, to be honest, again, on the media , because asking every person to engage in selfreflection or in a period of, you know, survival when you need a million problems . To decide immediately when money is running out, and children need to be fed to school, to drive a husband who is in the army to collect help for himself for a man to fight or work, its also hard to feed a family in a changing economic environment, its about survival again, yes, so we cant tell everyone, you have to, you know, reflect and understand the situation, it depends on how much states and society are able to respond to the proclamation, you know, i. I just dont demand, i remind, and i always speak and act and act based on the fact that i do not transfer my responsibility to the state, i am not a public servant, i not a politician, and i have Great Respect for the work of journalists, understand the role of the media in a free society, but i also know that people have a lot of power, and i am reaching out to people with a reminder that it must be done, and who can do it . Even in the conditions of those that have developed, when, when the truth is that society is sick, when society is tired, when we go to bed and do not know what awaits us in the morning, and the first thing we do is check, and what happened last night , because even if your city in kyiv was not shelled, yes, this does not mean that other cities were not affected that night, even in such conditions, i remind you that we have before ourselves. Not before someone, but before ourselves, this is the moral, i would say, obligation to reflect on this situation as much as it seems possible to us, well, people always perceive more and the protection of human rights and responsibility for crimes against humanity, as some kind of effective tool, do you remember what was in ukraine, you could say, even joy, when an order was issued for the arrest of vladimir putin, well, this is important, i can. To clarify, it is important not only from the point of view of law, in the long term, if if putin lives, yes, then he will be in trouble, in the sense that authoritarian regimes fall, and their leaders, who considered themselves untouchable, end up in court, we dont have all of them, all of them, but we have examples, we have examples of milosevic , which serbia did not want to hand over to the hague, but serbia was forced to, that is, we do not know what the future will be, but with this. We are trying to construct the version of the future that we need, but even in the short term it is super important, and here not even the consequences, but the other consequences are important, i have a lot of her now. In Different Countries of the world, i meet with president s, with members of the government, with parliamentarians, journalists, there with different audiences, and i know and everyone in ukraine knows that there are politicians, even in the western world and not only orban, who would like to return to the socalled business as usual with russia, and here is this legal decision, this arrest warrant, it puts a barrier for them, because maybe orban can shake putins hand in beijing . But already a person who declares his devotion to democracy and whose voters follow this, well, he already understands that if he will shake hands with the worlds biggest kidnapper of children, well, he will get rid of his career in this society, that is, there are still such shortterm consequences that are super important for us. And tell me, hatred for putin is absolutely understandable, but in principle, society somehow lives in this category of hatred during war, it cannot be otherwise, you yourself mentioned about buja, what emotions it arouses in people, it arouses hatred for those who did it, for the country, for the citizens of this country who are able to ignore it, and how to get out of this hatred is also an important thing, do you remember how during the Second World War there was a famous article by ilya orenburg kill a german, ugh, and at the end of the war even the soviet leadership will force. It was from this article to try to leave and then it was never republished, i read this article in the orenburg collection published in 1942, after 1945 it was impossible to see it anywhere. It seems to me that when you are on the battlefield, this thinking is twophase, that is, which is very much only has. Colors black and white, it necessary, because you are trying to survive, because in a battle, if you dont quickly figure out where your enemy is, well, you will just be killed, so when you see that a russian soldier is coming at you, you dont have the luxury to think, but maybe he is fooled by russian propaganda, or maybe he has three children, or maybe he is a good person and an outstanding musician, well, if you think like that, he will kill you, because this is a battlefield, and this is the logic, it is justified there , and much that is. Justified on the battlefield, it cannot be automatically transferred to the rear, because hatred is a very complex feeling, like an emotion that needs an outlet, you ask me what to do with it, well, i, i am not a psychologist, it is difficult for me to answer this professionally, i know only two things, first, that the same commanderinchief of the upa, roman shukhevich, said that we fight not because we hate those who are in front of us, but because we love those who are behind us, and secondly, that i already see how this hatred in the rear, like people who cannot reach the russians, they are not on the battlefield, they begin to pour out to those whom they can reach out to, that is, to themselves, and i already see how this hatred, which is being cultivated, is fragmenting Ukrainian Society, and it seems to me that we in the rear, if we are not already in the trenches, need to be somehow gentle. Treat each other, because everyone is sick, everyone is tired, you dont see how the war was fought with a person and how your word can hit this person, instead we watch on social networks, well, not just a parade of these aggressive comments, but very dangerous ones trends that can disrupt social organism, and this is when you sometimes watch how the last case is attacked. This is a paramedic, kateryna na pseudobird, who survived in azovstal, went through captivity, and then they started scolding her there that she does not look like what people would like her to look like, she wrote a post that she was scolded for her weight, and you you just think, my god, we dont need putin, what are you doing, get off her, right now its very. Its important to understand how basically this is social, i would say, disappointment, just disappointment in a long war, people just dont did not expect that it would be so long, they are somehow disappointed that they are forced to live through a long war, even if they understand the inevitability of this, how it will be reflected in the postwar part, you said at the beginning of the war that for you victory is not simply the restoration of territorial. Integrity, but also the completion of the democratic transformation of the state, but now there is such an uncomfortable question will it be possible to do all this, to complete the democratic transformation, to create a real society. Solidarity people in the conditions, if not to us it will be possible to restore this territorial integrity for a long time, so we will be forced to do it in the conditions that exist, because we cannot predict the future, but the future is also not written in advance by anyone, this means that our generation must do everything dependent and to carry out these democratic transformations so that the next generations, if we fail to restore the territorial integrity of the 1991 borders, would find it easier to do so. We have to look and play long, build long strategies, and what war does is it narrows that horizon, so that we cant plan the next months, we cant plan a week, we cant plan for our day, we dont understand what and when will happen, and this ambition for a long strategy is also a resistance, because we say that was not, we know that someday we will restore it, someday we will return to these borders, and now we are taking certain intermediate steps. I will give an example, so that it does not sound abstract i am a pupil of ukrainian dissidents, Yevhen Sverstyuk played a lot of my personal role in fate, he is a philosopher, writer, prisoner of soviet political camps. I read a lot of memoirs of ukrainian and russian dissidents, and i thought about this issue, because from the point of view of the shortterm perspective, well, they looked like those who lost, because. That the movement was crushed, some people were killed, some people ended up in the soviet gulags, there was no mass support, there was no mass support, destinies were destroyed, families were divided, that is, from a shortterm perspective, they lost, but now we, in 2024, we know that we restored our independence in the 90s only because in the 60s this group of people fought, thats why this is. Laying a long strategy and sowing seeds that will germinate, well , this is super important, but what should come first, an effective state or an Effective Society in such a situation, or should it not be distinguished . I think that an Effective Society is interested in an effective state, well, we cant pay three times, but we cant, but now a lot of things in the army are covered by volunteer things, we have grown powerful volunteer funds, they are already buying. Such weapons, well, they started with mattresses in the 14th year, yes, from some socks there, and now they are already buying some unreal, heavy, difficult mechanics, although in reality it should be done by an efficient state for our taxes, obviously, then what am i leading to, paying three times its not unreasonable, we re doing it temporarily now, an Efficient Society is very interested in the state becoming. Efficient, so that we start paying once, but already, you know, to be exactly on target. Thank you, mrs. Oleksandra, our interlocutor was human rights activist oleksandra matviychuk, thank you to everyone who was with us on this broadcast, which Vitaly Portnikov conducted for you, i wish you all the best, friends, victory and peace. Greetings to the viewers of the tv channel, my name is kateryna galko and this is our exclusive conversation with the exPrime Minister of the republic of moldova. Lets start. Mrs. Natalya, you held the post of Prime Minister at the exact time when a fullscale invasion began in ukraine. So, how do you remember the mood of moldova at that time, and did you see a threat then . And for moldova. Of course, from the very beginning , we believed that this was a russian invasion of ukraine was a flagrant violation of international law. We supported ukraine from day one. We knew about the intelligence, we knew the information that the war might break out, so we prepared in case of unforeseen circumstances. But at the same time, until the last minute, we did not think that such a large fullscale war, the largest in europe after the Second World War, could happen very close to ukraine. Therefore, of course, we mobilized the entire society in support of ukraine. First of all, they helped the influx of refugees, but then, of course, because of. Of course, we had to focus on minimizing the impact of war on our citizens, although we are not in a war with combat, we are engaged in a hybrid war. We observed rather tragic economic consequences, therefore , at the same time as helping the ukrainian people, we also focused on helping the moldovan people. How the attitude and scale of assistance changed. First of all, let me mention peopletopeople contacts, because i think thats the most important thing. I think that there were many ukrainians who discovered moldovans for themselves, and many moldovans who discovered ukrainians, and i know very beautiful stories about how people get closer, about how people start cooperation, be it mayors or local authorities or businessmen. I know that the ukrainians started that. Business, started a new life, and i think we saw a high appreciation of how the Moldovan Society responded to the refugee crisis, you know, before the war in the unhcr, the high commissioner for refugees, you know, i thought we could host a maximum of 25,000 people, but as the whole society mobilized and we saw people accepting people into their homes, we saw a lot. Thanks to this, we were able to take in 125,000 refugees at the height of the crisis, which is five times more than our total estimated capacity. And you know, weve seen a lot of these human stories. Of course, this affects society as a whole. You know, i think a lot of people are starting to wonder about our real risks. In addition, our security strategy, for example, was updated for the first time. The threat from russia was mentioned in an o