Where We Speak From

Some of us remember the morning of 24 February as a sound that woke us before the alarm clock. Some remember an empty classroom where thirty classmates had sat only the day before, but only twelve remained. Some remember the queue at the border, where a mother held a younger brother by the hand and could not explain why their father was staying behind. We come from different places, and we are different, but we are united by our encounter with loss and by our faith in Ukraine.

We heard the phrase “the common good” at conferences and in documents. We decided to fill it with our own living meaning: it is not what benefits someone in particular, but what is worth staying together for even when it is difficult, and what does not exist by itself but is created every day, together with everyone who is prepared to do this work.

We Speak for Ourselves

For a long time, others described us in their own words. Sociologists measured our activity in percentages. Politicians called us “the future of the country,” meaning: wait, your time has not yet come. Even adults and relatives spoke about us in the third person, as though we were objects of care rather than subjects of our own lives.

We are now eighteen, twenty-two, or twenty-five years old. Some of us are at the front. Some are in the exhausted rear, holding their families together alongside their parents. Some have left the country and decide every day whether or not to return. Some were born under the sound of air-raid sirens. We are different, and that is precisely why we have the right to speak not on behalf of a single group, but on behalf of an entire generation that saw the familiar world collapse and decided to build it anew.

Why We Do Not Remain Silent About What Hurts

We see divisions within our own people and problems within the country, and we do not pretend they do not exist. In the past, people were divided along the line between west and east; now they are divided according to who fought and who did not, who volunteered and who avoided service, who stayed and who left. These dividing lines have been known since the times of the Cossacks and imperial rule. They divided us so that we could be governed more easily, and today the enemy strikes precisely at these fault lines, knowing that a divided people is easier to defeat. Meanwhile, the state is not doing enough to create rules within which there is a place for everyone. We refuse to play by these rules.

We know that the battle is taking place not only at the front, but also over influence on people’s minds. In the occupied territories, a generation loyal to the occupier is being deliberately raised through textbooks, prohibitions against doubt, and fear of one’s own thoughts. We must create different conditions in our country, so that every young Ukrainian, wherever they may now be, can feel that they are awaited here and that there is a place for them. At the same time, we understand that no one will create ideal conditions for us or offer ready-made solutions. We ourselves must make efforts for the good of the country and for our own development.

The dispossession of peasants, deportations, and occupations taught our grandparents and great-grandparents that everything they had acquired could disappear in a single day and that there was no point in thinking about tomorrow. We know where our habit of surviving alone rather than together comes from. But we must cultivate cohesion without losing our individuality. We are capable of overcoming the legacy that we have decided not to pass on.

We have seen good intentions shattered against a system designed to grind down integrity: the rule of “do not stand out,” clans within institutions, and salaries on which it is impossible to live. We have seen the media and civil society organizations compete with one another for the scarce resource of public attention instead of working toward a common goal. We say this out loud so that we no longer have to pretend it does not exist.

On the Disagreement We Do Not Conceal

We also do not pretend that complete agreement exists among young people. Some of us believe that the state must act more decisively and harshly for the sake of victory. Others insist on the right to seek other, no less meaningful ways of serving the country besides taking up arms. Some regard compromise with neighbouring peoples as a betrayal of memory, while others consider the same compromise the only path forward.

We know where this sharpness often comes from. We are taught to divide a complex world into ready-made pairs: friend or enemy, with us or against us, patriot or traitor. This habit seems convenient because it frees us from the need to think beyond our first impression, and it is precisely this habit that propaganda can exploit most easily. Propaganda does not need to convince us of anything new; it only needs to suggest into which of two ready-made boxes we should place the next person or event. We are presented with a choice between a free society and a protected state, but we choose both at the same time. There is no choice between justice and victory in which one must necessarily exclude the other.

These disputes will remain neither abstract now nor in the future. They are already taking place: over whom to include in a shared national pantheon, over how fairly mobilization is organized, and over society’s right to take to the streets when other ways of reaching agreement have failed. After victory, there will be more such disputes, not fewer. Reconstruction, the return of those who left, and the distribution of resources will affect every family personally. We do not demand that these disputes cease. We demand that they remain within the sphere of public debate, fair courts, and elections, and that they do not turn into hostility and physical confrontation.

We refuse to think only in binary oppositions or to choose between two ready-made solutions. We are prepared to hold two truths in our minds at once, to search for a third and not reject a fourth, and to listen to an opponent before making a decision. This requires greater courage, more complex thinking, and greater tolerance. Honestly acknowledging differences of opinion is more important than pretending to have a unity that does not exist. We expect the same from the state and society, and therefore we also demand it of ourselves.

On War, Loss, and Honesty Among Us

We have lost classmates, friends, older brothers and sisters, and parents. Some of us have lost our health. We will not be the same as we were before the war, but we do not want to carry within ourselves a trauma that destroys us. Nor do we want these losses to become figures in an annual report, forgotten as soon as they have been spoken aloud.

We know that there is no single opinion among us regarding mobilization, and we speak honestly about this. Some of us volunteered and regard it as the most important choice of our lives. Some received a call-up notice and went because the state had decided so. Some are still looking for another way to serve the country without carrying a weapon and regard this right as equally legitimate. Some left the country and carry that decision as a burden they have not yet come to terms with. We do not judge one another for these different paths as quickly as the society around us often does.

But we demand one thing: anyone who demands sacrifice must bear the same risk themselves, without hidden exemptions for themselves or those close to them. Mobilization must be based on transparent rules that are the same for everyone, rather than on who has the right connections or money. Questions about the conditions of this duty must be permitted to be asked aloud without the risk of being called a traitor merely for asking.

We see how these issues already bring people into the streets when other ways of changing something fail. We do not regard this as the best path, but we understand where it comes from: where there is no permanent and honest channel for dissent, sooner or later dissent breaks out spontaneously. We want such a channel to appear before the next spontaneous eruption in the streets.

The Voice of Those Who Are Far Away

Some of us are writing these lines from outside Ukraine. From a foreign country, surrounded by a foreign language, with work or studies that we did not choose freely but accepted as the only available way forward. We do not want to be erased from this generation simply because we are not physically present in Ukraine at this moment. For us, Ukraine is wherever we are.

We carry this distance as a guilt that no one names aloud, but that we feel in every call home. We watch the news and do not know whether we have the right to miss home as deeply as those who stayed, or whether that feeling no longer belongs to us. We learn a new language during the day and dream in Ukrainian at night.

We dream of returning, and this dream is not abstract. Some are already counting the years until the end of their studies. Some are waiting for their work to become stable so that they can bring back what they have earned and achieved rather than starting from nothing for a second time. But we honestly admit that the longer the distance lasts, the harder it becomes to imagine returning not as a dream, but as a concrete plan with a date. We ask that we not be forgotten in plans for the future and that our return not be made dependent solely on our own desire, when it also depends on whether there will be somewhere and something to return to.

What and Whom We Rely On

We do not rely on empty promises, and we do not believe in an ideal government that does not need to be controlled. We rely on people whose honesty has been tested through actions in difficult times: on volunteers who went out without orders to rescue strangers during the first days of the full-scale war; on teachers and doctors who remained in place when leaving would have been safer; and on those few officials and judges who had the opportunity to take a bribe but did not use it. We know that there are more such people than the news suggests, and it is them, rather than positions and false authorities, whom we are prepared to follow as examples.

We rely on our own ability to organize from below, without orders from above, because we have already proved that we can do so: through forums, volunteer networks, and the daily work of communities that held together when the state could not provide help in time.

We are not asking to be heard in the future. We want to be involved in public life now. We sat at the same table with researchers and spoke about the common good in language we understood. We have already held our first forum, where we ourselves named the values and virtues we consider important and acknowledged the issues on which we disagree. We are writing this text rather than waiting for someone else to write it for us. This is our beginning, small but real, and that is why we have the right to speak as participants.

We rely on our own tools: networks that we know how to build faster than any institution can outpace us, and that have repeatedly proved their ability to organize aid, information, or protest more effectively than official channels.

We do not want to rely on fear, and we do not build the future solely on the memory of injustice. History is important, but it cannot be the only foundation upon which we build our lives.

On the Older Generation: Gratitude and Honesty

We are grateful to the older generation for enduring, preserving independence, and not surrendering the country. But gratitude does not mean blindness. We saw how the generations of our parents and grandparents remained silent where they should have spoken. We saw how they taught us through their example not to trust the state, instead of teaching us to change that state together. We remember how older people passed on to us the habit of surviving alone instead of the skill of acting together. We do not blame the older generation for this, but we refuse to repeat these mistakes merely because they seem familiar.

We do not want to displace the older generation; we want to work alongside it. We are ready to learn from those who lived through the 1990s, the Maidans, and the first years of the war in Donbas, because that experience has not become outdated and does not belong only to the past. But we expect the same in return: that we be respected, not kept in the role of executors of other people’s decisions, but included in the team as equals, with a place at the same table rather than merely a seat in the audience.

On Memory and Whom We Regard as Our Own

We know that the dispute over whom to regard as a shared hero is a dispute over what our future should be. It concerns figures whose legacy is ambiguous, events that some call victories and others tragedies, and lands remembered differently by different generations within the same family. We are prepared to acknowledge the complex and sometimes uncomfortable truth about our people’s past. We see the mistakes of our ancestors, and therefore we do not want a single simplified list of authorities made obligatory for everyone. We want the right to remember honestly and responsibly, including what hurts, rather than only what is convenient to tell. And we acknowledge that some questions about the past were passed down to us unresolved by our grandparents and great-grandparents, while others arose during our own lifetime and now await our answer, although they do not yet have ready-made solutions.

An Education That Does Not Prepare Us

We were taught more often to memorize dates than to ask uncomfortable questions. We were taught to write essays according to a template rather than to defend our own opinion before those who disagree with it. In most of our schools, the ability to work in a team still remains an exception rather than an everyday skill, although in Europe it is practised in almost every lesson from the first grade onward. We were hardly taught to recognize manipulation or develop critical thinking, even though our generation lives at a time when information warfare is as real as the war at the front.

We are convinced that the education system must change. We want an education that cultivates the ability to think independently rather than merely reproduce what has been heard. We seek a modern and open education that combines high-level theory with practical skills: how to start a business, how to read the budget of one’s community, and how to distinguish truth from fabricated news. We are interested in an education in which history is studied through the comparison and debate of sources rather than through a single textbook. We are prepared to teach one another where schools have not yet caught up, and we are already doing so.

What We Want the Media to Be

For us, the media and bloggers are not an external mirror that simply reflects what is happening. They are independent and influential actors that decide every day which disagreement to present as a drama and which not to show at all. An algorithm that promotes anger faster than careful thought, and a headline written to provoke rather than explain, shape how we think about one another no less than schools or families do.

We see new authorities emerge: bloggers and influencers listened to by millions, often more than experts or even family members. Some of them genuinely help us understand complex matters, but we ask ourselves an honest question: do most of them really teach us to understand one another and live together, or do they merely teach us to speak confidently about our desires and provide engaging content? A fashionable tone, a ready-made answer to everything, and contempt for those who think differently are what most often generate social media views, not what brings people closer together.

We want responsible journalism that explains rather than merely excites, that honestly separates fact from personal opinion, and that acknowledges its mistakes as loudly as it previously proclaimed itself right. We want bloggers who feel responsible for what they amplify with their voices and who understand that an audience of hundreds of thousands is not only influence, but also obligation. We want an environment in which disagreement remains disagreement rather than turning into harassment merely because harassment generates more views.

We ourselves bear responsibility for whom we listen to and trust. We do not want to be a passive audience that swallows ready-made conclusions. We are prepared to verify sources before sharing information and not to support those who profit from our divisions, however fashionable or confident their voice may appear.

What We Want the State to Be

We want the state to stop existing only on paper in the form of well-written laws and to become the sum of honest, predictable actions and legal institutions. We want officials to be accountable not to their superiors, but to the people they serve.

We want an officeholder who has made a mistake to come forward and explain it directly, rather than hiding behind a press secretary and remaining silent until the next scandal. We want anyone who demands sacrifice from others to bear the same risk themselves, without hidden exceptions for themselves or their families. We want reconstruction funds to reach those who truly need them rather than disappearing along the way.

We want a state that does not try to resolve everything centrally, but trusts communities where communities know better. A state that protects our right to speak uncomfortable truths aloud as persistently as it protects the border and the law.

We do not want a state that demands sacrifice from us without offering us a voice in return. We see our participation not as a formal consultation, but as real influence over decisions that determine our lives and the life of the country. This is not a gift that may or may not be given to us; it is something we demand as a condition of our trust. And we are prepared to participate in building the state.

What We Want Society to Be

We want a society that has learned how to argue without descending into hatred. A society that acknowledges that the experiences of the front, occupation, departure, and survival in the rear are different, and that none of them has the right to displace or devalue the others.

We want the cohesion that saved us during the first months of the full-scale war not to turn into suspicion of those considered “insufficiently patriotic.” We see this risk and name it: a force that unites can all too easily become a force that excludes.

We do not divide ourselves into those who are in Ukraine and those who are outside it. Millions of our peers and relatives are now abroad, and every one of them remains part of this generation and society, even if they do not yet know when they will be able to return or whether they will return at all. Belonging to Ukraine is not a matter of passport control. It is a matter of whether a person still considers this country their own.

We want a society that builds trust every day through small, almost invisible actions rather than through one-off declarations of unity. Trust between neighbours is no less important than trust in the state. The habit of acting together is no less important than the habit of making demands of the state.

What We Want Religious Communities to Be

We want religious communities to speak in a language understandable to every one of us, regardless of whether we believe, do not believe, or belong to a particular tradition. The first priority should be the language of a Church that speaks about dignity and mercy, responsibility and freedom, and only then about doctrine or denomination.

We want spiritual leaders to have the courage to speak truth to power and to defend the poor and disadvantaged as readily as they defend the strong and wealthy. It is important to us that the authority of the Church not become an instrument for legitimizing any political force. The Church must stand apart from ideology, the state, and politics. It exists to save souls and bring peace to society, not to construct national or political doctrines. It should therefore become an active civic actor, mediator, and moral arbiter in public debates.

We want denominational boundaries that have divided society for years not to be transferred automatically onto us. First of all, we are human beings, then citizens, then Ukrainians and members of particular denominations. We are prepared to respect another person’s tradition without demanding that it become our own, and we expect the same respect in return.

Conflict among denominations and jurisdictions is unacceptable to us. Each of them, provided that it observes the law and fosters social peace, has the right to exist. We condemn instances of interdenominational warfare and violence.

How We Want to Live

We do not want only to serve and make sacrifices. We also want to live and develop, to build, and to change ourselves and the country. We see Ukraine as part of Europe.

We want to build businesses here rather than merely dream about doing so somewhere abroad. We want to start families without postponing this until an indefinite “after the war.” We want to learn, create, fall in love, make mistakes, and begin again without feeling guilty that alongside our obligations we also have personal lives.

Financial independence is not a luxury for us. It is a condition that allows a person to hold a civic position without fearing for tomorrow. We build this independence consciously, not as an escape from responsibility, but as its foundation.

Entrepreneurship, creativity, and the ordinary desire to fulfil oneself in work one loves are just as much forms of love for one’s country as standing in a trench or volunteering. We refuse to choose between being good citizens and being living human beings with dreams of our own.

For us, change does not begin with great decrees. It begins in a particular courtyard that one of us improved without an order, in a local participatory budget to which one of us submitted an idea for the first time, or in the youth council of a small town that achieved real influence over decisions. We see that it is precisely at this level, where we live every day, that it is easier to prove one’s position through action than to persuade through words. This is where we want the state and community to give us not mere permission, but genuine instruments.

We are responsible for the land we will inherit. We must rebuild destroyed cities and plant new parks. Reconstruction that restores buildings while forgetting forests, rivers, and soil is only half a reconstruction. We do not want to inherit a country saved from the enemy but exhausted by our own negligence.

What We Believe In

We believe in dignity that does not depend on status or origin.

We believe in freedom that becomes real only when the citizens around us are also free.

We believe in justice measured not by slogans, but by whether the same rules apply equally to everyone.

We believe in responsibility that begins with ourselves rather than with the expectation that someone else will take the first step.

We believe in trust, which cannot be established by decree, but can only be cultivated over years through honesty.

We believe that diversity does not threaten unity, but is a condition for the country’s development.

And we believe that the common good is not a gift that someone will hand to us. It is work that we are prepared to do every day, together with everyone who is ready to do it alongside us.

Our Vision of the Common Good and a New Social Contract

For us, the common good is neither a shared opinion nor a shared history. It is what makes it worth staying together even when we think differently, and what no one receives ready-made, but what each person creates every day through their share of the work.

The new social contract, as we understand it, is simple in essence. The state serves honestly and reports on its actions instead of ruling and remaining silent. Society trusts one another and knows how to argue without descending into hatred. Business builds here rather than taking what it earns elsewhere. The Church speaks the truth both to those in power and to us, rather than only saying what is convenient to hear. And each of us, in return, accepts a share of the responsibility that we previously tended to place on someone else.

Our place in this society is not a seat in the audience or the role of an executor of decisions made by others. We want to be co-authors: to sit at the same table with those who make decisions rather than in a separate room reserved for young people. Our participation should be measured not by how many times we were consulted, but by how many of our ideas genuinely changed something.

We are not waiting for ideal conditions, which may never come. We begin where we stand: with our own courtyard, our own community, and our own daily choice to remain honest even when it is disadvantageous. The common good we propose is not an outcome that can be achieved once and then taken for granted. It is a practice that must be repeated every day, generation after generation, and we are prepared to be the first to begin.

We do not claim to possess final answers. We claim the right to search for them openly, together with the country rather than instead of it.

We do not want merely to inherit Ukraine. We have already begun creating it, here and now.