Daisy Sindelar: Max, you're actually a very unusual guest so far for Weight of the World. And that's because you are from a country that is actively at war. You’re from Ukraine, which for the past three and half years has been under a full-scale invasion by Russian forces. And even beyond that, you’re from eastern Ukraine. You're from Zaporizhzhia, which is in the southeast. It's in a part of Ukraine that is largely occupied by Russian military forces. And so normally with this podcast, we begin by talking about people's origins and their childhood. But I think for you, the natural first question is how are you? How is your family? And what is their day-to-day life like at this moment? 

Maksym Eristavi: Well, I appreciate that. I think, sometimes when you travel and [you meet] people, everybody knows what Ukraine is and what is happening. But for some people far away, they ask these questions like, ‘Is the war still going on? I heard that it's fine-ish, or that people have normal lives, or the bombing is [only] occasional.’ So unfortunately people do not understand the extent of these daily mass-murder campaigns. And even if you live next to the front line or far away from the front line, they can hunt you down or try to kill you every day. It doesn't matter if it's in the west, in Lviv, in Kyiv, or in Zaporizhzhia, or Kharkiv [in the east]. That's part of everyday life for my people.

And despite that, you can normalize everything, and people should be trying to find normalcy in their life, but of course, nothing about it is normal. For example, just a couple of days ago, there was another massive bombing in Zaporizhzhia, but that was also a normal working day for people. So you have to show up for work, and you have to work. On the other hand, you also have to clean up your house and figure out how to replace your windows that were blown off. That’s definitely taxing, it's definitely part of Russia's campaign of terror. So you don't only kill people, you don’t only erase the place, but you also disrupt people's lives and ensure that they're as tired as possible, as exhausted as possible. So this is an everyday reality that unfortunately not so many people abroad know about or understand is happening.

So you and I today are speaking in Prague. You've been here for about 10 years. How do you consume news and stay abreast of what's happening in Ukraine without becoming paralyzed? 

Part of the playbook for these kinds of invasions, imperial invasions, is not only to invade the place, but also create this atmosphere of fear, fear that will paralyze you. With that in mind – knowing how Russian cognitive warfare works and what the aim of it is – I consume my news very responsibly. The stories that I see every day are stories of resilience: of people building things, of people creating things, of Ukrainians doing outstanding things despite everything that's happening, and against all odds. 

And I collect these stories for myself because they're inspiring. Because if people can not only survive, but do something despite this level of insane mobilization, the way the entire society has for three years – and we're seeing it on the battlefield as well, the way Ukraine still stands proudly as a country, as a nation, despite facing the second-largest nuclear empire, that has almost unlimited resources – it’s an inspiring story on its own. 

And that’s why I think part of the problem of foreign coverage, and the way our newsrooms in the free world generally function, it that there’s probably too much focus on negativity, versus too little focus on those stories that can also inspire people and show that resistance makes sense – that this is how it looks, and this is why people keep resisting. 

That's really interesting. I did want to go back a little bit to your origins. As we talked about, you grew up in eastern Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia, and you've made no secret of the fact that you grew up in a Russian-speaking world, you were strongly aligned with Russian culture. That wasn't a choice, a deliberate choice that you made, it was just a fact. And it was very common for that part of Ukraine. As a kid growing up in Zaporizhzhia, speaking Russian, how would you have identified yourself if someone said, ‘Max, who are you?’ What would you have said? 

In the part of Ukraine and the part of Eastern Europe where I come from, these policies of imperialism and colonialism were so brutal that the simple questions of who you are and where you come from are very hard for people to reply to. 

When I was growing up, my family was a Ukrainian-speaking family, but as you mention I was brought up as a Russian-speaking child. The only way for them to ensure that their kid had a chance in this world was for that kid to speak Russian and maybe pass, at some level, as Russian. It was impossible for you to get a higher education without speaking Russian. It was [prohibited] to defend your thesis, master's or PhD in anything but Russian. ‘You can use your silly local indigenous language up to [high] school.’ But then even within high school, for example, in my Russian-language school where all the curriculum was in Russian, our Ukrainian-language teacher was bullied if she dared to assign a low grade to a student in Ukrainian language or literature because other teachers would come and say, ‘this is not a real subject, this is not a real language, you shouldn't mess up the grades for the people who are studying that.’ 

Just on a very personal, basic level, it's such a messed-up situation when you cannot speak the same language with the people who are the closest to you – your parents or your grandparents. The most intimate connection between them and you is already robbed, because you have to speak a different language. So once again, I don't really think that lots of people understand the profound depth of what was happening in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion. The [campaign] to end Ukrainian identity didn’t start in 2022 – it’s a long-term job that they’ve been trying to do for centuries. And my family is just one of the manifestations of that violence, that colonial violence, that was done to Ukrainians. 

You’ve written that you actually felt more comfortable coming out as gay than you did coming out as Ukrainian – that was a process that came later and took longer. Why do you think that was? 

I think, from my experience of living abroad for so long, I would often feel more comfortable being queer or gay in Ukraine than in many places, even in Western Europe. Ukraine is still a more nurturing space for diversity. When I was growing up in the ‘90s, there were so many positive, liberating things that were happening specifically to the queer community in places like Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which were leading very often in these trailblazing queer-liberation movements. It was much easier to come to terms with your queerness and your sexuality than it was to come to terms with your indigenous identity, your national identity, because the conversation and realization about the trauma of colonization and the trauma of erasing your identity wasn’t happening back then. And that’s turned out to be much harder work for me personally. 

Once again, your sexual identity isn’t something that comes from the history of your family or passes on through generations. It’s something you come to terms with yourself. But with national identity, especially if it’s erased or targeted in such a violent way, you need serious investigative journalism skills to just uncover and untangle all of it. 

So can you tell us a little bit more about that process? How did you begin exploring your Ukrainian identity? 

I think it was around the language issue, trying to figure out why I speak this [other] language and not the language I was supposed to speak in my own country – the Ukrainian language and the language that my ancestors would speak. Asking myself those questions kind of led me to start connecting the dots and untangle things, and trying to figure out what my story should have sounded like if not for this erasure, if not for this violence that was done to generations of my ancestors. And ultimately, I think this process, which is called decolonization, is about regaining your own true, authentic story.

Can you tell us your authentic family story? What did you learn? 

I remember my father gave me a tape recorder. I think I was maybe 5 or 6. So he gave me this tape recorder and I started running around and trying to record everything – everyone, basically. I didn't know then that it was called an interview, or whatever. But I started approaching my grandparents and asking very simple questions the way a small kid would ask: ‘ Where were you born? Who were your parents? Where do we come from?’ They had very detailed memories of their weddings from 30, 40 years before, or maybe some birthdays or some [other] life events. But when you would ask, ‘By the way, what happened to our grandfather who's not with us?’ they would say, ‘Yeah, one day he just disappeared.’ Or I would ask who our great-grandparents were – you know, the parents of my grandfather and grandmother and so on. And nobody would be comfortable discussing any of it. 

So I had these huge gaps starting right there in my family tree. It seemed like their lives and the story of our family started only [when the history of] Russian occupation started. That's it. As if nothing else before that even existed. And I think that prompted me to actually start my career as a journalist. Using these skills from such an early age to try to at least fill the gaps created by this violence later became kind of a natural habit for me professionally as well. 

You’ve spent many years as a journalist with independent Ukrainian media outlets. You also have some exposure to the policymaking community in the United States because you've been a fellow with the Atlantic Council. You've worked with CEPA, the Center for European Policy Analysis. And so I wanted to ask you a bit about your time in the United States and how it may have contributed to your emerging worldview as a Ukrainian. 

I feel now, retrospectively, that when you grew up in the place where I grew up, you had only two choices. Either you use the Russian language and you get automatically attached to Russian culture, because the Russian language is an instrument and vessel of Russian imperial culture. And then you consume everything around the entire world through the Russian language, through Russian translations, Russian media, Russian news, everything. Or you choose English, and then your outlook on the world is completely different, because your source of information about the rest of the world outside your village or city or country comes through the English language. 

I don’t think I ever discussed it with my parents, but their kind of cheeky way to correct the fact that they were raising me as a Russian-language speaker was that they invested in me learning English at a very early age. And I really hated it at first. I was very terrible at it, but they insisted that I should definitely do it. And with time I started consuming everything in English, and this [Russian-English] divide was very obvious for me. Now my friends who come from the same city and I discuss how they’ve started doing this job of untangling themselves from Russian imperial culture. And I realize that their image of the world that was fed to them through Russian media and Russian culture is completely distorted in a way that it wouldn’t have been if they’d had access to the English language and had this experience. 

That’s not entirely an answer to your question about America. But maybe one of the most prominent things that stood out for me is the concept of American-ness. What it means to be American. And that you can come from different backgrounds, you can have a different skin color, ethnicity – you can have so many multiple identities within you and still subscribe to certain American values or a certain idea of what America stands for. And somehow for me it felt very similar to what it means to be Ukrainian. Because in Ukraine, we also have 120 ethnicities living in one country of 40 million. People come from different backgrounds and skin colors. Even within our family, we have Roma and Asian people and Ukrainians, and it all comes together naturally into all of them subscribing to the identity of being Ukrainian. 

I don’t want to put the United States at the center of the Ukrainian narrative over the past couple of years, but it is undeniable that in the American media space, Ukraine comes up repeatedly as a very strong focal point of U.S. foreign policy. Donald Trump in his second term has not been particularly consistent when it comes to policy in Ukraine in terms of how much support he’s willing to provide or how strongly he’s willing to stand up to Russia and Vladimir Putin. What has it been like as a Ukrainian watching this latest chapter of U.S. policy on Ukraine? 

I am somehow lucky because I’ve been able to build a very enthusiastic and supporting, nurturing community online of people coming from all over the world who are following my work and support it. And a lot of them are Americans, maybe because I do it in English. And that for me is often the way to actually tap into the sentiments of how Americans feel about Ukraine, and whether there is more support or less. And actually in three years I haven’t felt a large change in those sentiments among the average regular American people I interact with. Nor have I felt less support when it comes to donations, when it comes to their enthusiasm about not only sharing information about Ukraine, but volunteering and being active. 

So why I’m mentioning this is because oftentimes when I read foreign media, there is always a self-serving narrative – a self-[fulfilling] prophecy, almost – that there is waning interest or less support or more support, that Americans are not that interested anymore. And at some point, this narrative is also of course fueled by Russian disinformation and cognitive attacks that try to portray the rest of the world as losing interest in Ukraine. But just as I was walking here for this interview, I saw this polling that actually kind of validated my feelings about Americans, that showed that over 70% of Americans still think that support for Ukraine is important, and moreover that the government has to increase sanctions against Russia because Russia doesn’t want to end this war, it doesn’t want peace. So it feels for me that, despite what is happening in this discourse that we have in the news about politics or political parties or personal stances of leaders on this or that issue, Americans still see it as a very important issue. Everybody’s hyper-aware, and despite the fact that this country is far away and it’s not a given that Americans need to pay attention to it, people still pay attention. Three out of four people pay attention a lot. My guess, and it’s just speculation, is that lots of people understand that Ukraine is not about Ukraine per se. That what is happening in Ukraine, and the ongoing genocide and the war, that this is where the fate of democracy and the free world is being decided now. And that’s why people are still so strongly attached to this issue. 

There's so much conversation about the war in Ukraine and what it will take for not just Russian leadership, but Russian citizens to understand what is being done in their name – both currently, militarily, in Ukraine, but also what has been done in their name in the past, historically. And you’re a person who knows this kind of information inside and out. I'm curious whether or not you use it to create conversations with Russians. 

We're not talking about a country that is, you know, having a very bad decade with one authoritarian regime. We're talking about an at least 500-year-old empire that has been doing the same stuff over and over again, using the same playbook over and over again. And you cannot deal with it if you cannot call it by its own name, if we do not call out imperialism and colonialism, and if we're shying away from actually labeling what is happening with their proper names. We talked so much about erasure. Russia spent centuries erasing those stories for a reason. Because those stories are not only about pain and destruction and murder, but also about resistance, and about successful resistance to Russian imperial invasions.

And I want the world to listen to them and learn from them because today, as Russian drones here in Europe are already swarming our airspace, we do need those stories to learn from them and try to figure out how to push back against Russia. 

Saying that, it is simply not my job or my place to have any dialogue with Russians themselves. I do believe that they have such a huge task at the moment for themselves, to figure out what it means to be Russian as an identity. That's also a huge misconception abroad, that being Russian is about ethnicity or nationality. Russian is an imperial identity. It's integrally connected to Russian imperialism. Russian language and Russian culture are all vessels of this Russian imperialism, historically speaking. So for them to figure out what it means to be a Russian – ‘if we don't have an empire, if all of those so-called great things produced by our country were produced in the name of violence and imperialism and subjugation’ – all of those conversations are not for me to have. Those are not conversations I need to help them with. And unfortunately, I don't see that job being done on a mass scale by Russians themselves. I feel like the only way for them to be faced with this conversation or forced into this conversation is for Ukraine to win. So that's where all my work goes – into ensuring Ukraine wins and justice is served. And the rest is already not going to be my job and not my space to be. 

Until now, you’ve been a journalist, a researcher, and a communicator. Now you're looking at moving into the defense field and specifically as it relates to Ukrainian defense. I'd like to hear a little bit about what led you to that decision. 

Honestly, for me, it's a very natural thing to do, considering that almost all my friends – the entire generation of Ukrainians my age, it doesn't matter if you live abroad or inside Ukraine – they all are actively doing something for defending Ukraine. So whether they're serving on the front line or whether their entire work is devoted to it – they work in non-government, government, startup areas. Because obviously for all of us, it's not really a choice. 

I feel when you realize that we're already at war – and in Europe we're already also at war, despite the fact that it's uncomfortable for many people to admit – the only response that will help us to withstand is this total mobilization of every aspect of our lives towards the goal of protecting ourselves, protecting our homes, protecting our democracies. Our democracies are really being hacked. Our elections are being attacked actively. You know, they almost stole elections in Moldova and Romania.

They try to influence all our elections all the time. They already fly drones over our heads and are doing lots of sabotage as well. 

So it’s just natural that you're trying to find your way and ask yourself, ‘Okay, here's my skill set. How can I specifically help to ensure that we're protected and we're ready when the next attack comes?’ Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared, and I didn't treat it as seriously as I should have [during the start of the Russian invasion] in 2014. So I just don't want that to happen now and that's why I'll try to figure out how it all fits into the field of just contributing to our defense.

Max, you've talked about friends and acquaintances in Ukraine who are living under incredibly difficult circumstances and have been for years, and yet are using that adversity to really work and double down on improving the future for their country. Is there something special about people living in Ukraine that makes them particularly resilient? Or is this something that people elsewhere can also learn – to adapt despite overwhelming circumstances? 

Yes and no. We cannot ignore centuries of the Ukrainians fight for freedom and independence that has been going on for many generations. Our entire culture and our entire set of values is really soaked in all of it. On the other hand, I don't necessarily think that when the invasion came in 2014 and the full-scale genocide started in 2022, my generation was really versed or knew what to do. And this mindset that formed that allowed for Ukraine to be so creative and mount this resistance with so much ingenuity and creativity, it came from a specific mindset. And that mindset, I really believe, is transplantable anywhere. 

That mindset is, of course, based on survival – because they are literally attempting every day to kill you or your friends and loved ones. But it’s also because people understand what's at stake very clearly. One of the things that I cherish, and that I developed in the past three years, is this clarity of what's at stake. What matters and what does not matter. What is primary, what is secondary. And once you have this clarity – specifically, that we're defending democracy, we're defending freedom, we're defending space where there is dignity, where it’s allowed for any human being to be treated with dignity. I think once you understand that, the priorities become much clearer. And once your priorities are clear, it's easier for you to calibrate your moral compass. It's easier to calibrate your priorities. That's why over this decade, I brought so many foreigners to Ukraine. I haven't seen a single foreigner who hasn't been profoundly changed once they got to Ukraine in the last decade, and especially so in the last three years. 

You said earlier in this conversation, and I think you're not alone in saying this, that Ukraine is where the future of the democratic world is being decided. And that's happening right now. Also right now, many Americans are watching their version of democracy slip away virtually overnight. How do you view events in the United States, if indeed you are paying attention to them at all? 

I think everybody pays attention, in Ukraine as well – not for a good reason, but because the United States actually plays a huge role in our defenses in Europe. We've been basically outsourcing the entire defense to Americans for a long time. People do care about what's happening in America, but up to the point that we need to also figure out how we ensure that we're not that dependent on America.

I'm pretty sure Americans are more than capable of figuring out what to do with their own democracy, with which kind of direction they want to go in. Once again, looking at the polls, I understand that for Americans who are paying so much attention to Ukraine, the story matters not so much out of empathy or just as a humanitarian cause, but because they see what is happening in Ukraine on the battlefield, and the way the imperial technology has developed, and the way war has completely changed. I mean, we're going through an absolutely unimaginable revolution in the field of warfare that we haven't seen since World War II. And a lot of people, even in expert circles in America, realize that America is not ready. Like, if that war comes tomorrow to America – the American military, America, is not ready to fight, is not ready to defend democracy. 

We always end this podcast by asking our guests the same question. Many Americans are watching an outright attack on their democratic laws and institutions. They're also watching people in Ukraine and elsewhere pay an extremely high price to defend their right to exist as free and democratic countries. Max, what advice would you give Americans today? 

I would probably extrapolate something from my personal life. And I remember when we actually going through the Maidan Revolution in 2014 – which was the first massive pro-democratic revolution in Ukraine, when we had to defend our democracy, our rights, our constitution, our commitment to Europe and European integration, which also led to Russia invading Ukraine back then – I remember that my biggest marvel all the time on the Maidan Square during the revolution was how many different people were there. They were coming from all walks of life – socially, economically. They spoke different languages, [they were] different ethnicities. But most importantly, everybody had very different politics. Somebody was far right, somebody was far left. There were feminists, there were Antifa. Everybody. Literally everybody. And you would see that they would disagree on almost everything in terms of their political outlook. But every day they would come together and work for one specific goal, which was defending democracy and defending our free way of life. 

And I think when you’re faced with this existential test, this is what you need to remember all the time. You shouldn’t lose sight of what is really important, which is to protect the space where we have this opportunity to be different, to disagree, to debate. That we shouldn’t shy away from expressing our different views. That’s a feature, not a bug, of a democracy. But also remember that there is an ongoing campaign to take all of it away from us. What Russia and China and Iran and all those tyrannies are trying to do is to end democracy, period. 

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You can listen to this conversation by following Weight of the World on Spotify and Apple. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.