Ukraine, which now has to fight for survival against genocidal aggression of Russian dictatorship and its allies, has the only way forward — building the new state from the scratch.

And it has to do this not "after" the war, but now, as it rages.

That was one of the main takes of Yevhen Hlibovitsky, prominent Ukrainian intellectual, journalist, civil rights figure, expert of strategic consultancy in conversation with "Arch Frontline".

Head of the Frontier Institute was named one of the 30 most influential public voices of the country by major Ukrainian media outlet "Ukrainska Pravda".

Mr. Hlibovitsky talks about the state of trust between Ukrainian society and the institutions, main challenges and frontlines, which lie not only ahead of Ukraine, but all Western world.

Existing on the frontier has several distinct features. First, it is a line of collision, or of encounter. That means what defines it isn't just the state of society, or just its capacity to exist under certain conditions, but the very dynamic of confrontation and the cross-cutting pressures that arise from it.

What's distinctive about the Ukrainian situation is that this isn't existence on a single frontier: it isn't only the Ukrainian-Russian frontier, it's a multi-frontier. The collision runs not only along the fault line between the values of the open, free world and the post-totalitarian, autocratic, Russian world. It's also a collision along the line of understanding subjecthood and freedom, where Ukrainian experience stands in opposition to any post-imperial experience, including the Hungarian and even the Polish experience (for example, the experience of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). It's also cultural lines that divide the world shaped by Christianity from the world shaped by other religious premises, and that has produced both cultural and institutional change.

It is also the experience of an internal frontier, between the experience of impaired subjecthood, which was a condition for Soviet-era survival, and the experience of full subjecthood, which is needed now. And full subjecthood requires not only the capacity to make decisions, but also the quality of the decisions made. It isn't enough for that subjecthood to simply exist: it has to be deep, responsible, analytical, complex.

Young Ukrainian society is dissonant with the deep roots of our culture. It doesn't have the practical, deep experience of governance or administration it could rely on to build a set of sophisticated institutions.

That lack of experience makes Ukrainian governance a genuine challenge. We're effectively in a situation where a weak post-Soviet legacy is up against a still-weaker Ukrainian experience. On top of that comes the challenge of war, and as a result we have a society that feels its frontier condition in its skin, that carries an enormous number of points of pain and injury.

This isn't only a problem for state leadership, or only a problem for particular affected groups of society; this pain is now spread across the whole of society: among those directly engaged in combat, among their families, among people who constantly have to revise their understanding of circumstances, among people responsible for more complex systems (businesses, civil-society networks) that have to not just survive but to continuously defend in a dynamic situation where threats keep growing more complicated (occupation, then drones, infrastructure damage), and partly because of the weaknesses of the internal, post-Soviet governance experience, which periodically produce protests even during wartime.

There has to be a continuous process of improving governance, of strengthening the capacity to defend. But the particularity of this war is that its endpoint, the point of demobilization, is unclear.

That means it's impossible to put life on pause, and impossible to concentrate all resources solely on the war while setting every other question aside. Because then we'd end up facing a demographic, economic, or political threat of such scale that it's not the military front that gets destroyed, but the neglected civilian one.

So the only way out is qualitative change running in parallel with defense. That means that out of a situation that falls outside the norm, we have to form and internalize a new norm, and live with it. That new norm becomes the ability to exist with uncertainty, the ability to exist with constantly shifting threats, the ability to exist under conditions where you have to plan around very seriously limited resources, and around the fact that exhaustion itself is a factor that changes the nature of interaction within society.

If, through all of this, we fail to find a new quality, the war can lose its meaning. Ukraine must not simply win the war: it must make the next war impossible. It must push potential threats as far away from itself as possible.

And it must find an order that secures internal cohesion and shared understanding, one that enables the most normal possible social development, rather than, say, total militarization and existence under a regime of total wartime mobilization. In effect, this is simultaneously a question of economic development, of demographics, of sustaining democratic process internally, and of developing a culture of competitiveness, education, and so on.

In effect, these are circumstances under which one has to normalize war, the way some nations normalize destructive weather, or the constant threat of earthquakes: phenomena that can kill you, but that you have to learn to coexist with.

Conflict theory says the cost of future aggression has to be unbearable for the aggressor. But that's not only a question of attack; it's also a question of, for instance, bad alliances. Ukraine never received critical support from the West on issues that were existential for it.

The Budapest Memorandum showed how deeply the great powers failed to grasp Ukraine's subjecthood. The story of the Nord Stream pipelines and the corruption of German elites shows how unaware a Western democracy can be of its own vulnerability. There are plenty of examples like this.

There's a deep dissonance in how strategic challenges are understood between today's Ukraine and today's Poland. There's the question of how Ukraine's deeply values-rooted core of politics coexists with a far more transactionally-oriented Turkey. In other words, Ukraine will have to exist alongside a huge number of actors who used to see it rather as an object, and who will now have to start seeing Ukraine as a subject. That's a very difficult, painful process, not only for Ukraine but for its neighbors as well, who will have to come to terms with it, to understand that in some respects they're no longer the ones who get to make every decision unilaterally. That's hard. It will produce a whole new set of challenges that will take time to adapt to. And this doesn't even touch on things like EU integration, the formation of a totalitarian bloc between China and Russia, or a new security paradigm emerging in the Middle East; those processes will have their own effects at a different strategic level.

I think it's less about improving or restoring trust than about the need for a fundamentally new relationship between society and the state. Institutionally, the state will simply have to be "re-founded." In the French logic, that means a next republic: the current French republic is the Fifth. If we accept that metaphor, Ukraine also needs a next republic.

And a next republic means a new set of norms, a different culture of political interaction, different relationships within society, a different way of making decisions. If you like, a new ethic: an ethic of interaction, an ethic of relationships, an ethic of coexistence and empathy. Without that, Ukrainian society will keep using, I'd even say keep finishing off the leftovers of, late-Soviet approaches, which is probably the least productive scenario possible.

War, to some degree, produces a particular state, a state of shock, a state of extremely high concentration, which numbs and shifts the usual pain thresholds. That opens up room for reforms that, under other circumstances, would have been painful, but under these circumstances become desirable: society becomes willing to accept them, even things it previously considered impossible.

From a reform standpoint, I think that chance was missed. We didn't transform the relationship between the state and the citizen, didn't rethink the role of force within that relationship. Citizens feel the pressure of coercive relations not only from the external threat, the enemy, but also from the internal lack of accountability of their own administration.

You can see that in how society simultaneously supports the war and defense while resisting mobilization methods. You can see it in the fact that coercive pressure on business hasn't eased. You can see it in the continued arbitrariness within the courts and law enforcement, in how the foundations of parliamentarism are eroding and how the quality of political debate is changing.

If we're talking about accountability of state institutions, about exactly which transformations need to happen for society to see them in a better light, there needs to be a synchronization of values. Society doesn't feel that its administration shares its understanding of priorities and challenges, or that it's using its professional talent to respond to changes in the environment in a timely way.

In many cases, society has become more mature and far-sighted than its administration, and as a result there's no basis for forming respect for its decisions. That erodes the foundation on which the administration's authority can legitimately rest.

Next in this series: Part II: Europe as a geopolitical union, the Baltic voice and the demographic abyss