On Liberation: Ukrainian and Western Perspectives on the Absence of Leverage

Liberation is often described in political or military terms: the overthrow of foreign domination, the casting off of chains, or the emancipation of a people from tyranny. But liberation is also an interior concept. It is not merely the absence of physical constraint but the removal of leverage—when no other person or institution can unduly shape one’s decisions, coerce one’s conduct, or colonise one’s imagination. To be liberated is to be able to live with dignity, according to one’s conscience and values, free from the manipulation of dependency or fear.

For Ukraine, the concept of liberty has long been intertwined with resistance—resistance to empires, ideologies, hierarchies and imposed identities. In the Ukrainian intellectual tradition, liberty is not simply freedom from interference but the affirmation of agency: the capacity to live as a moral and cultural subject in one’s own right, beholden to no alien power. This idea of liberation as the absence of leverage resonates not only with Ukrainian philosophical thought but also with key currents in the Western liberal tradition.

Here we explore liberation as personal and collective autonomy, examines Ukrainian contributions to the discourse on freedom, and situates these alongside the reflections of Western philosophers, from ancient times to the present. It seeks to show how liberation—conceived as the dismantling of leverage—is the foundation of both human dignity and national sovereignty.

Liberation and Leverage: A Definition

To understand liberation as the absence of leverage is to focus on a condition where one’s choices are not distorted by coercion, fear, dependence, or the subtle manipulation of survival. Leverage is not always violent; it may take the form of debt, blackmail, inequality of information, or the invisible constraints of custom and ideology. A person is unfree not merely when shackled, but when he or she must act for fear of reprisal, or when his or her possibilities are foreclosed by structural disadvantage. A nation is unfree not only when invaded, but when she must temper her policies to please a foreign patron, or surrender her culture to the influence of an alien power.

True liberation, then, is not chaos or licence. It is the conscious and uncoerced exercise of will, individually and collectively. It is the freedom to choose, to dissent, and to shape one’s destiny without being hostage to another’s priorities.

Ukrainian Thought on Liberty and Dignity

In the Ukrainian tradition, the idea of liberty has often been tied to the defence of cultural identity and the rejection of domination. Ukraine’s intellectual history does not follow a linear arc but arises from a chorus of voices, many of them suppressed or marginalised by empires that sought to erase them. Yet within this diversity runs a persistent concern with dignity, self-rule, and the moral necessity of liberation.

The 19th-century poet and national thinker Taras Shevchenko stands at the heart of this tradition. His work articulated a deep moral outrage at serfdom, colonialism and Russification, not only as political evils but as assaults on the soul of a people. For Shevchenko, true freedom was not the gift of emperors but a birthright: an awakening of self-respect in defiance of humiliation. He did not plead for tolerance; he demanded the restoration of agency. His liberation was inseparable from cultural revival, memory, and the reclamation of language and land.

In the 20th century, thinkers like Viacheslav Chornovil and Ivan Dziuba carried this tradition forward, often from prison or exile. They saw the Soviet system not merely as authoritarian but as corrosive of the moral autonomy of the individual. Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? expressed the idea that national culture was not a barrier to humanism but a precondition of it. A person stripped of his or her native language, symbols, or historical memory is not liberated, but alienated.

Even today, Ukrainian thinkers in civil society, such as Myroslav Marynovych and Volodymyr Yermolenko, have continued to explore liberation in spiritual and existential terms. For Marynovych, a former prisoner of conscience, freedom requires inner transformation—a refusal to surrender to hatred even under repression. For Yermolenko, liberation involves the rebirth of political agency through cultural renewal, memory work, and democratic practice.

Western Echoes: From Antiquity to the Present

Western political philosophy, from ancient Greece to contemporary liberalism, has also wrestled with the question of what it means to be free. In many respects, the Ukrainian conception of liberation resonates with the deep veins of Western thought.

Aristotle, for example, defined a free person as one who is “not under the power of another” and whose reason governs his or her life. For him, freedom was not the absence of rules but participation in self-rule, both privately and within the polis. It is not difficult to see in this an early formulation of the absence of leverage: the truly free citizen is one who is not dominated by another’s will.

In the modern era, John Stuart Mill distinguished between liberty as non-interference and liberty as self-realisation. His concern was not just to shield the individual from state coercion, but to preserve the possibility of personal development unimpeded by conformity or social pressure. This echoes the Ukrainian concern with cultural suppression: what use is formal freedom if one cannot speak his or her language, express his or her beliefs, or maintain his or her traditions without fear?

More radically, Philip Pettit’s theory of “freedom as non-domination” defines liberty as the absence of arbitrary power—even if that power is benevolent or unexercised. According to this view, it is not enough that no one currently interferes with me; I must also be protected from the potential to interfere. This anticipates Ukraine’s insistence on real, structural independence: not simply the withdrawal of occupying troops, but the removal of any latent influence over her economic, political or informational sovereignty.

Meanwhile contemporary critics such as Byung-Chul Han warn of subtler forms of leverage in modern societies: the tyranny of performance, data collection and internalised expectations. Liberation, in this light, requires resistance not only to external constraints but to the internalisation of oppressive norms. This, too, finds resonance in Ukraine, where decades of Soviet propaganda and self-censorship continue to cast long psychological shadows.

The Political and the Personal

The war in Ukraine has underscored the inextricable link between national sovereignty and personal autonomy. A country cannot be free if her citizens are afraid to speak their minds; a person cannot be free if her nation is hostage to foreign leverage.

Liberation must therefore be built on multiple fronts:

• Politically, through democratic accountability, institutional independence, and the refusal of neocolonial arrangements that render the country dependent on others for security or survival.

• Economically, through energy independence, fair trade, and the breaking of monopolies that allow external actors to extract concessions.

• Culturally, through the revival of Ukrainian language, memory, and artistic expression—not as folklore, but as living instruments of self-definition.

• Personally, through the education of free citizens, capable of critical thought, moral choice, and the courage to dissent.

A Culture of Liberation

To build a culture of liberation is not simply to repel an enemy or ratify a constitution. It is to cultivate conditions in which no one—whether foreign occupier, oligarch, algorithm, or ideology—has leverage over the choices that shape one’s life. It is to ensure that every citizen, and every nation, has the means to act from conviction rather than coercion.

Ukraine, in her long and painful struggle, has come to embody this deeper understanding of freedom. Her thinkers have shown that liberty is not a privilege, nor a technical arrangement, but a moral necessity. And as she fights today not only for her borders but for the soul of her society, she reminds us that liberation, in its fullest sense, is not given. It is claimed, preserved, and lived—one uncoerced decision at a time.