20 July 2025
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Radio Svoboda
My friend N. moved to Crimea. I condemned him with all the severity of intransigent liberalism: you’re condoning the annexation, you’re violating the Ukrainian border, collaborator! N. dejectedly agreed with my accusations but made these arguments as justification. His wife’s old mother lives in Crimea. She’s all alone, she needs care, and she misses her daughter. She has lived nearly her entire life in her house in Crimea and categorically refuses to move to Moscow in her old age to live with her daughter.
In this situation, what should N. do? On the one hand, there is Ukraine’s sovereign right to Crimea; on the other, the human right to live with your family. N., a decent and far from cowardly man, made his choice in favor of family values.
When I talked about him to our common friend, he reproached me for my tolerance for collaborationism. And, of course, he is partly right. Can I condemn N. for preferring his individual rights to the state’s sovereign rights, though?
Can I condemn Ukrainian citizens—residents of Crimea—for continuing to live in their small homeland, despite the annexation and the malevolent Russian administration? Can I reproach the Crimean Tatars, who went to such lengths back under socialism to secure their return to Crimea, for remaining in Crimea under the Russian occupation? Yes, from the standpoint of Ukraine’s state interests, their behavior is not beyond reproach. Many Crimeans (nearly all, I think) have received Russian passports. Teachers continue to teach children in schools that are financed in part out of the Russian state budget. Doctors continue to treat patients in hospitals that are also maintained at Russian taxpayers’ expense. What else can they do? Abandon their pupils and patients and start raising vegetables or working in the commercial sector? Are they supposed to pay for the fact that in 2014 the Ukrainian army surrendered Crimea without a fight and the Ukrainian state was unable to defend them from Russian aggression?
The story with my friend N. is a specific instance, but it illustrates a more general problem. When the interests of the individual and the state collide, which choice is correct? There is no unambiguous and irreproachable answer here. As always, the devil is in the details. If a person builds a career and achieves prosperity by consciously and decidedly supporting an occupational power, in solidarity with its ideological rationales and political practice, then I think he merits moral and possibly even criminal condemnation. But if he is defending his basic human rights and stepping away from the interests of his state for the sake of his own or his family’s survival, I would not throw stones at him for that.
Ultimately, we have to remember that one of the main ideas of a liberal democracy consists in the fact that the state is created for man, and not man for the state. And if a state for any reason is incapable of defending its citizen’s rights and interests (for example, having lost control over a part of its terroritory), then it has no right to demand of those of its citizens who have remained there faultless observance of all the norms of ordinary state life.
After all, we remember how, during and after World War II, inhabitants of the German-occupied Soviet territories were considered second-class citizens in the Soviet Union. Their rights were restricted and sometimes the mere fact of being under occupation could be grounds for political repressions. That was the Communist regime, though, which looked on people as state property and live material for realizing their ambitious plans. Democracy neither can nor should act in that way.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
