On Hope, Humanity and Meaning of Freedom

This speech was given by Maksym Butkevych at the Annual Frontier Institute Conference. As a prisoner of war, Maksym spent 2 years and 4 months in russian captivity. He was freed about a month ago and here is sharing his reflections on that experience, meaning of hope, freedom and responsibility. 

The original text and speech in Ukrainian was published on nv.ua, I made a translation in order to share it with you. 

We can go transcend ourselves, project ourselves into the future, and hope will help us preserve ourselves as humans. Without hope, there is no space for choice. Without the space for choice, there is no freedom.

Photo: Andrii Yushchak/ Frontier Institute

Until now, a month after my release, I am filled with - and will continue to be filled with - incredible gratitude to all the people who remembered me. Remembered us. After all, I am just one of hundreds and thousands of our boys and girls who ended up behind bars under the control of the Russian Federation. I am grateful to those who remembered, prayed, wrote, published, remembered, did what they could to bring my release closer. To bring our release closer.

First of all, I must say that I spent a significant part of those two years and four months in captivity with almost no contact with the outside world. Sometimes I could cross paths with new prisoners for 20 seconds at the infrequent washroom and, passing each other, say who was from where, and ask how things were with those who were captured later. But even then, I never doubted for a moment that I was remembered and there were people fighting for me. Only upon release from captivity I learned that this struggle was much larger in scale than I could have imagined. A huge number of people, many of whom I had never met in my life, were involved in this process in one way or another.

I will not have enough life to thank everyone. I don’t think that such things can be thanked properly. Perhaps the only thing I can do is to say again and again how important it is to me. Perhaps the only possible gratitude from my side is to contribute as much and as fully as possible to the release of those who still remain there.

It's wonderful to be free. It's simply incredible to be free. I'm still recovering a bit, getting used to the big city again, little by little, one by one, meeting people I haven't seen or heard from in so long. And everyone I meet fills my life with happiness.

These words probably sound a bit pretentious or loud. But this is a time, such conditions, when other appropriate words simply don't exist. All my close friends, relatives, acquaintances and those I don't know personally really make me happy. They make my feeling of freedom even clearer and stronger.

I was asked the other day how do I experience freedom, the fact that I'm free, or do I feel it at all. The question of personal freedom, human freedom is one of the key questions of philosophy, about which debates have been going on throughout the history of human thought: does it even exist, or is it an illusion? Well, it's a very practical thing, and I feel it. For me, this question does not stand in a philosophical or practical dimension, because it is one and the same dimension.

To feel what freedom is, you have to be in conditions where this freedom is almost nonexistent. 

Why almost? Because it is always like an inner dimension that needs to be protected, defended and sometimes hidden in order to save. I tried, I prayed to preserve it. Thanks to many people and glory to God, I think I succeeded.

The feeling of freedom that I have now is so practical that you can touch it. It is, in the simplest sense, freedom of choice: from choosing what you want to drink, what you want to eat, whether you want to go right or left, whether you want to speak or remain silent, what your plans are for the day, what your plans are for life, whether you want to answer a person this or that, or not want to answer anything at all. Each of these simple questions simply does not exist there, because you drink what they give you, if they give you. You eat what they give you, if they give you. You go where they tell you. They tell you to stand - you stand, to lie down - you lie down, to do push-ups - you do push-ups, to squat - you squat. To stretch - to stretch. Head down, hands up, a blow to the liver - you feel it all, you have no choice.

My previous ideas about violence were superficial. We all associate it primarily with destruction, with what can be destroyed, broken, annihilated, if we are talking about a living being, about a person. I suddenly felt that violence is not about that.

Physical harm is already a consequence of violence.

Violence is, first of all, the transformation of a person into an object. When the person does what you want them to do and does not do what you do not want them to do. This is when you turn a human being into a puppet: they will say what you tell them to say, behave as you tell them to behave. Otherwise, if they suddenly do not do this, as a result, you have the opportunity to break them, mentally or physically. This is very easy to do, a person is much more fragile than we can imagine. We know this, but it is one thing to know, and another to feel it in everyday life.

Photo: Andrii Yushchak/ Frontier Institute

This dehumanization, the transformation of a person into an object that can be rearranged, put down, broken if you get tired of them or they annoy you - this is the violence

that permeates the entire system in which our prisoners, prisoners of war, convicted and unconvicted, our civilian prisoners are held.

This system is permeated with violence, even if you are not beaten. I have not been beaten for over a year. It was a calm time, compared to the previous period, you could even say it was comfortable. I could read, and since the spring of this year I have even been able to receive and write letters. But the feeling that you live in a system built on violence was constant. You are constantly waiting for an order to which you must react correctly. You live in a regime and there is no choice. You understand that you are not a human, really.

That is, you are a human only to the extent that you preserve your inner world, inner space, because they cannot force you to think differently. 

They can force you to speak, they can force you to be silent, but they cannot force you not to think and not to feel. 

Including feeling gratitude, compassion, empathy, which you suppress in yourself, because it is dangerous there, but it is precisely this that makes you still human.

On the evening of February 24, 2022, I went to the military registration and enlistment office, having anti-militaristic beliefs and having never served in the army before. I felt that this was the right thing for me to do. On March 4, I was already an active officer, and a few days later, a platoon commander. And I had no internal contradiction regarding the fact that I am an anti-militarist and a human rights activist, and that I am at the same time an officer, a soldier, a warrior, that I am protecting life and for this I take in my hands a machine specially invented to take this life.

But what am I fighting for, what are we fighting for? State sovereignty, independence, Ukraine - all are important and key concepts for us, but they are based on something that distinguishes us from them. While in that system, communicating with the guards and other prisoners (in the colony we were a mix: convicted prisoners of war, those who were serving non-criminal sentences, the so-called “political”, and those who were serving sentences for criminal crimes, locals), I tried to understand how they perceived what was happening, and the difference was very tangible. I felt the atmosphere of the system of violence not only as one on which captivity or prison is built, but as one on which the world that the occupier is trying to bring with them is built. And the entire worldview of those I observed is built on the fact that “we can’t do anything, they will decide everything for us, there’s no need to say anything extra, we have to behave as they say.” Not in prison, but in life, in the state. Then they will feed us, take care of us, maybe they won’t let us do something bad. But we still have to be afraid.

Their world is built on conformity, on fear, and, to use a specialized language, on the complete loss of subjectivity. 

The rejection of agency, of one's own initiative, of the possibility of choice, of one's own freedom — this is what the "Russian world" is built on. 

And this is what they bring with weapons in their hands to us, to our community, to our lands. Of course, there is a certain reward for this rejection, in addition to the feeling that you will be taken care of if you behave correctly: you will belong to a huge power that everyone fears. "They fear us, and therefore respect us," believe those I spoke with. For some, it was a surprise that respect and fear are very different, and sometimes opposite, things. In addition, they are unable to understand why people like us defend their own freedom. After all, with freedom comes another unpleasant thing for some of my interlocutors there — responsibility. For many, it is more convenient and pleasant to live in the system represented by the “Russian world”, when the national leader takes responsibility, and the average citizen is not responsible for the war, for the mountains of bodies and rivers of blood, for the destroyed cities, for aggression, for hatred, for mutilations, for grief and for tears. The question of everyone’s personal responsibility was either meaningless for them, or so uncomfortable that they tried to avoid it.

Responsibility and freedom are one and the same. These are two sides of the same coin. They are Siamese twins.

You can throw in other metaphors, but I think it is clear what we are talking about. And this is responsibility not only for ourselves and our choices, for the world that we create, but for the fact that we do not turn those around us into objects, that we respect another person precisely as a person, including in things that are not comfortable for us. We respect her right to say what we don't agree with, to make choices that we wouldn't make.

Sometimes it's very tempting, especially in a war situation, to narrow the space of freedom because we really want to win, but if we do that, we've lost. That's when we lose, because then it's not clear what we're defending.

From a certain point on, I came across books there. I will not remember the first book, because it was propaganda junk, very poorly written. The second book was the New Testament. Later there was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Of course, I reread "The Little Prince" and saw him with completely different eyes. But there was also a work that I read as a teenager and did not understand at the time - "Letter to a Hostage". This is a short essay that Exupéry wrote to his friend, who at that time lived in the territory controlled by Nazi Germany. The writer tried to show what, in his opinion, separates those who fight against Nazism from the Nazis. He wrote that this is respect for Human, and “human” was with a capital letter. This is the cornerstone of our politics. 

Without respect for human, we are simply no different from them, and if it is there (and we have it), it makes us and them inhabitants of different worlds. 

We defend our world, where human means everything, and in that, other world, human is just another object that must and can be used to achieve some goals. It seems to me that this is a very important phrase and a very important work, so as not to forget what is fundamental for us.

I am not a typical humanist who believes that man is an ideal creature. Man, as you know, is intermediate between an angel and a demon, between everything and nothing, which has been written about since the time of the Apostle Paul. In some situations, we need to feel our own limits and understand whether we can cross them, become higher, whether we can rise above ourselves, because it is our choice. In some situations, we need to try anyway, even if it seems impossible.

We are probably the only living beings who can do it - to transcend ourselves. The ability to resolve contradictions that cannot be resolved, the ability not only to coexist, but to sympathize and mutually enrich ourselves with people with whom you disagree, on the basis of mutual respect - this is what sometimes seems impossible. But we must try to transcend ourselves. And this is where hope lies for me.

I have reread the New Testament fifteen times. It is one of those books that you read regardless of your attitude to religion and each time you discover something new. So, the Apostle Paul wrote, not literally of course, that we hope for what we do not see, for what we do not have, because when you see it, it already exists. We can make the invisible a reality. We can go beyond ourselves, project ourselves into the future, and this hope will help us preserve ourselves as people. Without hope, there is no room for choice. Without the room for choice, there is no freedom. Without freedom, we can neither sympathize with each other, nor love each other, nor create. We cannot be human.

We have freedom, we have empathy, compassion, we have love, although sometimes this love manifests itself in the fact that we take up automatic weapons. We preserve ourselves as people, we preserve everything that is threatened: what is left of international humanitarian law, which has been consistently destroyed by the Russian Federation; respect for the rights and freedoms of others; what is left of the international security system; everything that preserves what is human in people. And when we are tempted to push aside some of these things in order to technically win on the battlefield, we must be very aware of this.

We need to protect this world. This means protecting and respecting each other despite the fatigue, despite the exhaustion and exhaustion that can be felt very well. The worst thing is that someone starts to lose hope. It cannot disappear. Hope is what we hold on to, because it is inextricably intertwined with everything else important that makes us human.

I really hope that we will be able to overcome temptations, we will be able to overcome the enemy, not only external, and remain who we are - free and supportive, compassionate people in a free country, having become even freer because of this terrible tragedy, having transcended ourselves. I really want to demand from myself to do everything to make this a reality.