“Letʼs finally adapt our imagination of the world order to the really word order point.” A conversation with Pavlo Kazarin about journalism, dying hole and social networks

I would like to start with a quote from our common acquaintance, a well-known journalist who went into politics. He once told me: “When youʼre a journalist, you have only black and white sides, and youʼre always on the white one. In politics, when you start doing something with your hands, you can no longer be on the white side. Because of this, my horizons have expanded significantly." I immediately thought that he was talking about the compromises he had to make. How did your horizons expand after two and a half years at war?

I joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine when I was 38. At that age, you already have a career and an understanding of who you are. And at that moment, you get into an environment where all your skills are not really needed, and you have to start from scratch. This is a kind of downshifting and a complete reboot, which made you look at yourself differently. Now I will try to explain. By nature of their profession, journalists have (or convince themselves that they have) kind of a helicopter view. Somewhere above, we look at what is below and say ʼoh, how can it be possible? Oh, this is not how it should be done!ʼ

And when you get into the war — not into any leadership positions — but into the war-war — the real one — then you start to look from the bottom up and realize that you donʼt have any helicopter view. You see everything like binoculars — very close, and you feel that you lack the competence to make any global conclusions.

For example?

For example, I remember when we were in Bakhmut, in February-March 2023. Colleagues call me and ask me to tune into the air for 15 minutes. I found Starlink, tuned in somehow, and they say: "Pavlo, whatʼs going on in the Donetsk direction?"

And you look to the right and to the left...

Yes, because I can tell about 150 meters to the left and 150 meters to the right. This is where my competence ends. If you need some global conclusions, call the people at headquarters. And this deformation inherent in our profession started to get very annoying: when it seems to us that we and our interlocutors have the general picture. People say out loud very large-scale things that are not related to reality.

Maybe because of this there was more intolerance around? Because someone elseʼs stupidity has become worth a lot? Sometimes you read a post on social networks and your hands go to your throat.

You know, this internal intolerance is often a sublimation of the impossibility of reaching the real enemy. That is, you do not have the opportunity to go and kill the occupier, the aggressor, but the internal tension is looking for a way out. And you begin to fight not with a real enemy that is far away, but with a conditionally internal enemy or with the one whom you have declared as an internal enemy. This is such a lightning rod. I am leading to the fact that during the war I understood very well how much knowledge I lack in order to have the right to an expert position in a huge number of issues.

Why did this happen in the war? I mean, it is partly understandable, but there is education, a lot of life experience, experience of relationships, but it is during the war that such global transformations take place.

Because war has no basis for comparison. It is difficult to find any analogies for our war in the last 70 years. And when you donʼt have a base for comparison, a problem arises. For example, there are many discussions in social networks about how our country passes the test for war, solidarity, self-sacrifice, and civil society. And on the one hand, they say that our army has grown from 250 000 to a million, so we pass this test. On the other hand, we have huge problems with mobilization, so we do not pass this test. And I have a question: who are we comparing ourselves to? With Britain or with the USA during the World War II? Stop! Cʼmon, itʼs not working. Britain in 1939-1940 is a completely different country, it is a huge empire with a lot of colonies. Itʼs not a small island — itʼs Australia, New Zealand, Canada, a bunch of other overseas territories that have been at war with a small island.

If a war of a similar scale, tension, dynamics and cruelty were to befall any European country, would they behave better or worse than us? We donʼt know, we donʼt have a "momʼs friendʼs son", but everyone on social media thinks we do. All the experts on world politics are there.

What new things did you learn about the same "simple Ukrainian people", with whom you previously crossed paths not so often and not so closely, but wrote a lot?

It seems to us that there are people on the white side and people on the black side. There are good activists who care about the public good and lead everyone else along. And there are people who are focused only on the values of everyday survival — they need to be directed in the right direction and so on. No way! No fucking way! The people you meet in war are most often tricksters who can behave differently in different situations. These are people with very ambiguous biographies. I remember the battalion commander who was one of the first to go to the borders of the Kharkiv region with Russia, so he had several criminal records. People with linear biographies, like from textbooks, are not always very successful soldiers and commanders.

There is such a popular thesis that Ukraine was saved from the dictatorship by 10% of society — people who made sacrifices were ready for active protest. Russia did not have these 10%, and here is the result. Now you want to say that this 10% is not the point?

No, why? In times of peace, it is these people who can be the watchdogs of democracy that protect social standards and ethics. But war is not the business of the ten percent. War is a matter of very different people and large numbers. What side of social morality people were on before the war does not affect their fighting qualities in the war. But it is still easier for us, because, unlike the Russians, we can always rely on a certain ethical standard that will support us. That is, when motivation disappears, you can always say that we are on the right side of the story. It wasnʼt us who attacked, we were attacked.

What do you not like in civil society or in social networks today (if they can be its mirror)? So much, that it could drive you crazy.

All kinds of military experts without military experience. It is infuriating when people ask for a ceasefire. And when they write that look how bad things are at the front, why donʼt we sit down at the negotiating table, we need to keep a chance for the future, we need time to rest. And you understand that this is such a distortion: when you cannot get to the root cause of your bad condition, you begin to project your fatigue onto those around you. That is, you cannot shout at Russians who support Putin, and start shouting at Ukrainians who resist.

Donʼt you get annoyed by such a conditional social networksʼ “Komsomol” — people who havenʼt caught it, but copy its essence, consider themselves standards of morality, and organize friendly courts? This is such a global revision that affects many. You were born in the Soviet Union, and why didnʼt you go to rallies? Stus was killed, and why did you...

I maintain that Facebook is in no way a sign of any social mood.

Twitter?

I donʼt have an account there, fortunately. If Facebook were a reflection of the country, the sixth president of the country would have the same name as the fifth. So when I see idiots in the comments on Facebook, I just shrug my shoulders, and try not to take it to heart.

Donʼt you think that all this revision and blacklash is our future?

We pay attention to it because we have a certain idea of the norm, and we compare what is happening with this idea, see the discrepancy and say:

"Look, there is a certain curve here."

The Armed Forces and my experience in them taught me that social norms are very flexible.

I remember how one of my brothers came up to me and said:

"And you sometimes write there, I read you, you write everything correctly. In general, I believe that there are two normal journalists in our country — [Dmytro] Gordon and [Vitaliy] Portnikov."

And you look at him like this and think “well...”

What do you read me?

Firstly, I mean that the army and the experience of communicating with people who ended up there teach us that either the norm does not exist, or it is much more volatile than we are used to thinking about it.

Secondly, I always remember that in social networks we hear not those who are more, but those who are louder. It is just like when the military looks at the rear and hears only the voices of principled evaders, and there are a large number of people who will go to the front if they receive a summons. If they donʼt get it, they wonʼt leave. I call them fatalists. And they do not articulate their position out loud.

Do people at the front feel that societyʼs standards and requirements for the military are increasing over time?

An ideal soldier should fight silently and ideally die for his country, then we will honour him.

... and speak Ukrainian.

To speak Ukrainian, of course, and to remember "Kobzar", to have towels on the wall, etc. But we have to decide who exactly is making such demands, how many of them there are across the country. Very often it is better to look at sociology than social networks. Sociology can stop us a little in our attempts to invent a society for ourselves and judge peopleʼs motivations based on social networks.

Facebook or the same Twitter is a story where people come to shout. Something hurts them, and they come for emotions. This is not a space for discussion, it is a space for fights without rules. Thatʼs why you look and there is a person screaming. It means that something hurts her. That maybe a person feels fear, shame, insecurity, maybe someone close to this person died or was injured, or maybe just this person is a jackass. Well, okay, this person screams. Why take it to heart?

Letʼs talk about censorship. A topic with which the journalists had everything clear before the full scale. We fought against censorship, we are fighting and we will fight until the end. A full scale began, and one day we all somehow understood that censorship exists and sometimes it is necessary.

Self-censorship.

Yes, of course, I am talking about self-censorship. Journalists themselves began to define some frameworks, fences in their heads, beyond which it is impossible to go. Letʼs not talk abstractly, letʼs talk about Serhiy Hnezdilov — a military serviceman, an activist who publicly went AWOL and demands the establishment of terms of service. Some of the military supported him, and some condemned him. We interviewed him. I was struck by the fact that some journalists were categorically against an interview with Serhiy. They literally said that if Babel will take such interviews, we will write our texts from exile. That is, in my head this interview was already behind the fence of my self-censorship, and it was still taboo for them. As a soldier and journalist, what do you think about self-censorship?

I certainly have it. One of the signs of the end of the war will be that I will no longer follow the rules of self-censorship. As for Hnezdilov, I remember that they called me several times for a comment and asked me to express my opinion about Serhiy. I asked everyone to call me back in February 2027. Then it will be exactly five years that I have been in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine — as long as he has. And only then will I have the moral right to condemn him. Now I have been in the army for two and a half years, I have no such moral right. It is not for me to be an inquisitor for Serhiy Hnezdilov.

What angers you now about the work of fellow journalists?

Clickbait is very annoying, especially on YouTube. Everyone is fighting for the cliques, not the Russian. And you are not the meaning of this war, but simply a side factor. They are not fighting for the strengthening of the country, not for the space of common sense, but for emotions. Itʼs infuriating when, based on our inertia, any state decision is evaluated from the point of view of corruption capacity. If there are any decisions that you donʼt like, they are probably trying to steal something and so on.

Itʼs maddening when people come with civilian experience to the military and blindly transfer the template. For example, when it comes to the purchase of weapons. There is no "Novus" with weapons in the world. When you come and say: "Yes, I have a certain amount of money, the General Staff asked me to buy 10 Javelins, 25 Stingers, 2 Abrams, 1 Bradley, etc. And thatʼs it, Iʼm going to the register". No, it doesnʼt work like that. The sphere of weapons and battle scale of ammunition in the whole world is primarily politics. And all countries in the world are divided into three types. Those who want to sell us weapons and place our military orders in their factories. Those who fundamentally do not sell and do not host, such as Austria, Hungary, Serbia and so on. And those countries that, for example, are ready to sell, but through intermediaries, because they do not want to show it directly. When we were in Zaporizhzhia in the spring of 2023, we had "Grad" systems from a very interesting country. I would have never thought that we buy from there. But we had them. And people who come and say:

"Oh, they overpaid twice for the purchase of weapons there."

Wait, where do you get these indicative numbers from?

You are now talking about the investigation by "Ukrainska Pravda" about the purchase of weapons by GUR.

Not only. I did not watch this [Mykhailo] Tkach material, I read his description. I just remember this in 2022, and in 2023, and in 2024, when people who are engaged in anti-corruption begin to use in the areas of military procurement those standards that are inherent in peacetime procurement. There is no “Prozorro” in war, it is always only and exclusively politics, it is always exclusively and only some system of complex agreements, etc. Letʼs finally adapt our idea of how the world is to how it really is.

You are a person connected with Russia in the past: you lived and worked there for a while. What do you think about Russians and "good" Russians? How should we build relations with them and is it necessary?

You know, in this sense I like the functional approach offered by Roma Shrike — one of the best bloggers. He says that there are no good or bad Russians — there are useful and harmful ones. Any person whose actions lead to the strengthening of our position is useful for us. And when we remove this ethical component in the evaluation of "good — bad" and replace it with "useful — not useful", it becomes much easier to live and evaluate.

Now I will say sedition: when Alexei Navalny died, I didnʼt want to comment on it ironically, as many people from my environment did, because it seemed to me that he and us — very rudely — on the one hand. We want to overthrow Putinʼs regime. But the problem with the useful Russians is that today you have a common goal and they are useful, and tomorrow, like Yulia Navalnaya, they say that it may or may not be necessary to give weapons to Ukraine.

Those people who declare themselves as the Russian opposition are not the Russian opposition because of one simple fact — the opposition is always fighting for power, and these people are not. The only thing they have a chance to fight for is the right to adhere to certain ethical standards. That is, they are not the opposition, they are dissidents. To draw attention to them as opposition is to give them a weight they do not deserve.

So it makes no sense for Ukrainian journalists to talk to Ilya Yashyn now?

Only in terms of some entertainment, maybe. In general, if we perceive the opposition as something that fights for power or is capable of overthrowing the power, then the only opposition for the Russian president is Ukraine.

The last question I wanted to ask you for a long time. You are a person who has a good idea of the state of affairs at the front and critical thinking, a realist. How do you manage not to fall into dying hole and see prospects?

When I want to scream, I scream in the woods, not on Facebook. I entered the army on February 25, 2022. At that time, my planning horizon was "letʼs spend all the money today, because tomorrow we can be killed". That changed in the second half of 2022, when the planning horizon suddenly changed to "letʼs not spend all the money today because we might not be killed tomorrow". I expected it to be over by the summer of 2022 and not necessarily in our favour. That maybe we will lose. And since then, for me, every day that we lived is like a new day for a cancer patient who was pumped from the fourth stage — a small miracle. I think those people who are shouting that everything is bad, we are going to lose, had a little high expectations. That is, if they really believed that in 2023 we will march on Red Square, our horizons must have been different. Our main task is the preservation of statehood and sovereignty. And if we achieve this goal, then we are already very well done.

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