The Speech I Never Gave: The Republic of Free Citizens and Ukraine’s Future
Around Ukraine’s Independence Day, Kyiv became the setting for several intense days of discussion about the country’s future.
The National Prayer Breakfast of Ukraine brought together Ukrainian and international leaders from public life, faith communities and civil society. The international forum “35 Years of Faith and Freedom” gathered representatives of conservative thought from Ukraine and abroad. Another forum, “Ukraine Tomorrow,” focused directly on the kind of state Ukraine should build in the years ahead. New policy institutions were also launched, including the Institute for the Reconstruction of Ukraine and the Faith and Freedom Center.
I was honored to be invited to these events, and I am sincerely grateful to their organizers — for the work they have undertaken, for creating spaces where difficult questions about Ukraine’s future can be discussed openly, and for their trust.
I had prepared remarks. I had thought carefully about every argument and every emphasis. But the schedules had other plans, and I never had the opportunity to deliver them from the stage.
Perhaps that was not such a bad thing.
What I had intended to say to several hundred people in a room, I can now share with a much wider audience — with those who read these pages and who, I hope, are willing not merely to agree or disagree, but to enter the discussion.
So here it is: the speech I never gave.
Born to Be Free
This speech is about what I call the Republic of Free Citizens: a model of Ukraine in which individual freedom is inseparable from personal responsibility, and the strength of the state is measured not by the breadth of its control but by the quality of its rules and institutions.
In early 1648, at Mykytynska Sich near the Dnipro rapids, a Cossack community gathered to make decisions about its future.
It did not possess the institutions of a modern state. It had no established national budget, no conventional standing army and no international financial architecture to sustain it. What it did have was a community of people prepared to make a collective choice, assume risk and act.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky soon emerged as their hetman, and the uprising that followed transformed the political map of the region.
The lesson I draw from this history is not that free people always win, or that courage can replace institutions. History is never that simple.
It is something more fundamental: people who understand themselves as participants rather than subjects behave differently.
A mercenary may fight for pay. A subject may act under compulsion. A free citizen acts because he or she believes there is something worth taking responsibility for.
Nor did this political instinct begin with the Cossack Sich.
Long before it, popular assemblies known as the viche formed part of the political life of a number of cities of Kyivan Rus, participating at different times in questions of princely authority and public affairs.
I explored the evolution of these political traditions with Serhii Udovik in our two-volume study Rus-Ukraine: The Formation of Statehood. The deeper I went into this history, the stronger one conclusion became:
Self-government is not only a Ukrainian aspiration for the future. It is also part of our historical experience.
We saw that capacity again in 2022.
Across the country, people volunteered for territorial defence, organized evacuation and humanitarian assistance, created supply networks, supported their communities and assumed responsibilities for which no ministry had issued an instruction.
This capacity for voluntary self-organization is sometimes described as Ukraine’s “genetic code.” I would put it differently. It is a deeply rooted civic habit — and one of Ukraine’s greatest political resources.
My Experience — and the Idea Behind the Republic
I spent four parliamentary convocations in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, working as a legislator and lawyer on questions ranging from justice and legal policy to international affairs, law enforcement and electoral legislation.
Those years taught me to look at the state not only from the podium, but from inside its machinery — at its incentives, its strengths, its temptations and its institutional weaknesses.
That experience led me to a conviction that has only grown stronger with time:
A country becomes resilient when the rules are stronger than the people who temporarily hold office.
Institutions should protect human freedom precisely because no minister, president, parliamentarian or official should be able to rewrite the fundamental rules for personal or political convenience.
My work with electoral institutions and international professional exchanges has also given me opportunities to study democratic systems beyond Ukraine.
Different countries organize democracy differently. Their laws, political cultures and constitutional traditions vary enormously. Yet one relationship appears again and again: citizens’ freedom, institutional trust and the rule of law reinforce one another.
It was from these experiences that, together with like-minded colleagues, I began developing the idea of a Republic of Free Citizens.
It is not intended as a collection of slogans.
It is a model of the country as an association of free people who are not clients of the state but co-owners of the republic: people who contribute their work, knowledge, enterprise and responsibility to the common good and expect in return not discretionary favors from government, but clearly defined public functions that individuals and communities cannot effectively secure on their own.
At the core of that model are security, public order and justice.
Around them are private initiative, voluntary solidarity, personal responsibility for one’s decisions and their consequences, and the Christian moral tradition that has shaped a significant part of our cultural inheritance.
Four Pillars of the Republic
Pillar One: Freedom and Responsibility
A Cossack went to the Sich in search of freedom. But once he stood beside others in battle, he also understood that another person’s life might depend on his conduct.
That relationship still matters.
Freedom is the starting point of a free society. Responsibility is what makes freedom sustainable.
A society cannot remain free if people insist on rights while systematically transferring the consequences of their own choices to everyone else.
The Republic of Free Citizens therefore begins with a simple premise:
Freedom and responsibility cannot be separated.
Pillar Two: Contract, Competition and Property
Ukraine’s political and legal history contains a long tradition of negotiated rules, local autonomy and self-organization.
The Cossack constitutional tradition reminds us that political authority can be defined through agreement rather than merely imposed from above. The experience of cities governed under Magdeburg law demonstrates the importance of urban self-government and autonomous institutions. The long Ukrainian relationship with land and private enterprise reminds us of another principle: property gives people a material sphere of independence from political power.
From this I derive several principles for the Republic.
Voluntary agreement should prevail wherever coercion is unnecessary.
Competition, governed by clear and equal rules, is one of the strongest protections against monopoly.
Human capital — knowledge, education, competence and reputation — is among a society’s greatest forms of wealth.
And private property must be protected because economic independence is one of the practical conditions of personal freedom.
Pillar Three: Government Under Law — and Government Only Where It Is Needed
In 1710, the Pacts and Constitutions of the Rights and Freedoms of the Zaporozhian Host, associated with Hetman Pylyp Orlyk, sought to define political obligations and place limits on the exercise of hetman authority.
In 1787, the framers of the United States Constitution confronted another version of the same enduring problem: how can political power be established without allowing it to become arbitrary?
These were different societies, different documents and different historical circumstances. They should not be treated as identical.
But both point toward a question that remains central to constitutional government:
How do we place power under rules rather than rules under power?
For me, limited government cannot remain an abstract slogan. It has to mean institutional choices.
In the model I propose for a Republic of Free Citizens, the state’s core sovereign responsibilities should be sharply defined: national security and defence, public order, and an independent system of justice.
I would go considerably further than today’s Ukrainian institutional model.
Education, healthcare, social provision, science and business, in my view, should cease to be domains of direct bureaucratic management. Professional communities — doctors, teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs and others — should exercise far greater self-government, operating within transparent, equal, contractual and competitive frameworks.
The official should not decide how medicine is practiced or knowledge is taught merely because the official occupies an office.
Professional competence, responsibility and reputation should carry far greater weight.
This is a proposal, not a description of Ukraine’s current constitutional order. Any transition toward such a model would require serious constitutional and legal debate, including about how fundamental rights and Ukraine’s international obligations are protected.
The same applies to taxation.
One model I believe deserves discussion would give each level of self-government its own transparent tax base: property taxation at the community level, consumption or sales taxation at the regional level, and income taxation at the national level.
I would also argue for a dramatically lower overall tax burden and for a system in which additional productive activity is not penalized by ever-higher marginal rates.
My preferred model would keep the combined burden low — potentially within a ten-percent framework — while shifting much more responsibility and resources back to citizens and communities.
That proposal would clearly require serious economic, fiscal and constitutional analysis before it could ever become public policy.
Social solidarity, meanwhile, should not be reduced to bureaucracy.
A free society needs mechanisms for supporting people who genuinely cannot protect themselves. But it should also cultivate voluntary solidarity, philanthropy, mutual aid, family responsibility and community institutions rather than assume that compassion can be outsourced entirely to administrative systems.
This is how I understand subsidiarity: responsibility should remain as close as possible to the individual, family, professional community or local community, and move upward only when the lower level cannot reasonably perform the task.
Pillar Four: A Home We Can Defend — and Develop
The first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion demonstrated something important about the architecture of Ukrainian society.
Central institutions were operating under extraordinary pressure and uncertainty. At the same time, local leaders, communities, volunteers, businesses and citizens repeatedly acted without waiting for detailed instructions from Kyiv.
That was not the failure of the state. It was evidence of the resilience created when initiative exists beyond the state.
Ukraine should build on that strength.
We need transparency and genuine digital sovereignty: technologies that make the misuse of public resources radically harder to conceal, enable real-time accountability and give citizens far greater control over their interaction with public institutions.
A republic must also be capable of defending itself.
Ukraine’s own historical tradition of civic defence raises a legitimate question about the role of trained citizens in national resilience. I see a comparison — though not an equivalence — with the logic behind the Second Amendment in the United States.
Any Ukrainian legal framework governing civilian weapons and self-defence would, of course, require a separate constitutional, security and human-rights debate. But the broader principle remains important: a free society should not treat citizens merely as passive recipients of protection.
Finally, the Republic must look forward.
Drones, artificial intelligence, digital public services and new forms of defence and civic technology are not peripheral issues. They increasingly shape the relationship between citizens, institutions and sovereignty itself.
Ukraine should aspire not merely to import the institutional models of yesterday, but to help design the democratic institutions of tomorrow.
The Infrastructure of Freedom
None of these principles will implement itself.
Ukraine still carries a powerful legacy of centralized administration, paternalism and political decision-making based on discretion rather than durable institutions.
That legacy cannot be overcome by replacing one group of officials with another.
What we need is an infrastructure of freedom: independent research institutions, civic organizations, professional associations, local-government networks, religious and family organizations, universities, policy communities and other institutions capable of developing ideas beyond the electoral cycle.
I therefore welcome the emergence of new analytical institutions such as the Institute for the Reconstruction of Ukraine and the Faith and Freedom Center, alongside the many civic and volunteer organizations that have already demonstrated their importance to Ukraine.
By a republican movement, I do not mean an electoral campaign or a party project.
I mean a long-term civic and intellectual effort to answer a question that precedes any election:
What kind of state do Ukrainians actually want to build?
And when democratic electoral processes can fully resume under the constitutional and security conditions required by law, what mandate for further state-building will citizens give those whom they elect?
That conversation should begin before political programs are written.
The Founders of a Renewed Ukraine
Anyone who has read this far is already part of that conversation.
Ukraine’s next institutional chapter will not be written by one president, one parliament, one political party or one generation of public officials.
It will be written by citizens, communities, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, scholars, soldiers, public servants and civic leaders who are willing to think beyond the institutions they inherited.
For more than twenty years, I have worked in and around Ukraine’s state institutions.
I have seen their mechanisms from within — what works, what fails, what creates incentives for responsibility and what creates incentives for dependency or abuse.
That experience has persuaded me that much of the institutional architecture inherited from the post-Soviet era remains excessively bureaucratic, vulnerable to corruption and shaped by paternalistic assumptions about the relationship between citizen and state.
It can and should be changed.
Not through institutional destruction, but through institutional evolution: better rules, clearer limits on power, stronger constitutional safeguards and a persistent commitment by citizens who refuse to accept dysfunction as inevitable.
We need legal concepts, policy models and teams of lawyers, economists, public-administration experts and researchers capable of answering not only what should change, but how it can be changed within a constitutional democratic order.
The task is to transform bureaucratic institutions, wherever possible, into transparent public services — and to ensure that the state does well those limited functions that only the state can perform.
This is why the work ahead requires partnership, intellectual seriousness and conviction.
The work of founding institutions cannot be outsourced to bureaucracy.
Nor can it be completed by political slogans.
It begins with a serious discussion about freedom, responsibility, law and the proper limits of public power.
I invite you to join that discussion — here, in the comments, in professional communities, in universities, in local government, in civil society and wherever Ukraine’s future is being considered seriously.
My hope is that together we can build a prosperous, technologically advanced Republic of free and responsible citizens — a Ukraine in which the citizen does not belong to the state, but the state exists to protect the freedom, dignity and lawful rights of the citizen.
We praise God.
We build Ukraine.
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P.S.
I would also like to thank the American friends whom I had the opportunity to meet in Kyiv during these days for their faith in Ukraine and in the freedom-loving character of its people.
We deeply value your support.
In 1776, the American founding generation articulated a political idea that would resonate far beyond the thirteen colonies: legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and human beings possess rights that political power does not simply grant and therefore should not arbitrarily take away.
Ukraine’s history is its own. Our constitutional traditions are different, and our future will not be a copy of anyone else’s.
But across those differences, the belief that human beings are meant to live in freedom gives our societies a language in which we can understand one another.
Thank you for standing with Ukraine.