Interview to Anatolii Mazaraki, Rector of the State University of Trade and Economics, Kyiv.
We have sadly reached the third anniversary from the outbreak of the conflict against your country. What is the current situation in Ukraine and what are the main challenges?
The current situation is quite evident. We are a country amidst the war, unfortunately you have witnessed it every night. That is why our top priority now is to remain strong, resilient and to protect our country.
Our nation, our heroic armed forces, our students and academic staff are all working together toward the victory and help each other. But meanwhile, we are not stopping our development. We clearly understand that we have a European integration perspective, and we work relentlessly toward this direction. This is a very important component of our educational and scientific activity. What is interesting is that being under the martial law has not stopped but accelerated these processes.
Talking about the university, we updated our educational programs, we started employing European approaches even quicker than before, we developed also our hardware and material-technical base. There is also the emergency staff launching generators to maintain the possibility to work in a stable way.
We are also contributing to the European Green Deal goals, as we have energy savings, and we are building a large SunPower station to maintain our energy needs. If not a war maybe we would have postponed it, but we engaged in it.
A further example of what we are doing is related to the creation of our center for mental health. Many people do need psychological health during the war, and the quantity of those people would only grow. We created a center that will have a lot of laboratories, psychological consultation and research including polygraphs and other means. Today as well we have the methodological council, and we will put forward the necessity of accelerating the process of our students learning English. I could go on and on with the list of projects we have, but it would be very long. But the main thing I want to emphasize is that we do not wait but fight for victory, and we understand that we will never be the same after the war.
How has the war impacted universities and students’ lives? What are the main difficulties that you, as Rector, had to face from the beginning of the war in the continuation of your ordinary activities at office? What about the education sector in times of war?
We may divide this into several stages. From the beginning of the full-scale invasion to the beginning of the academic year, the main purpose was to find out all the students, to make sure that they were alive and good. Then, we organized education in distant mode, since it would not have been possible otherwise. The second stage, after the beginning of the academic year in September 2022, we started to use the offline education method as well. It is quite evident while walking through the corridors that the number of students increased. But we cannot forget that we have students and academic staff that left the country and are now abroad. It is vital that they remain connected to their motherland and their university, so as to be able to continue to follow lectures in the distant mode. I will not delve precisely into the topic, but we needed also to create shelters. There was a time in the first months of the full-scale invasion that markets stopped working and we had here almost 1,000 students, we were self-feeding and self-organizing the supply.
In any case, the main difficulty we are facing is that much of the academic staff migrated abroad and for us it is like a brain drain. We experienced a lack of staff. The situation we are facing does not only stem from the brain drain itself, but with the war the number of students in our university increased – for example 2022 compared to 2021 is 1%, 2023 compared to 2022 is 3% and 2024 compared to 2023 is 4% of students, while a part of academic staff is mobilized, at the frontline. The situation when the number of students increases and the staff decreases is hard to face.
Worth mentioning is also the issue of our international partners, who granted us not only moral and intangible support, but also material backing, entering into cooperation with our students and staff, exchanging experiences, and our internalization expanded. For instance, we have a double-degree diploma with Italian universities, which are actively cooperating in that regard.
The University is and has always been a key place where students gather to learn and to become active citizens in their countries. Do you believe that Universities and especially your University could become the starting point of initiatives aimed at fostering dialogue with other research centers and universities abroad to contribute to reach peace with your neighbor?
I do believe in that. Our cooperation has never seen such levels and never stopped. Not only we have double degree programs with Italy, but also with other universities. Our scholars’ joint publications with international colleagues increased, and our academic staff has been more often invited as visiting professors. We had many incoming professors in the past, but now it has become evident that our professors are becoming increasingly demanded. The last close ties were arranged with Finland. We developed a strong cooperation with them.
The university in Ukraine is not only a study institution, but it is the core of the international society. It is like a hub for intellectuals of the country. I give you an example of this week: we welcomed here the head of the National Treasure Chamber, which constitutes a network with also other national Treasure Chambers and issues standards that need to be substantiated scientifically. We are closely cooperating with them, in order to provide them the scientific support. I am the Counsellor of the scientific support to that Chamber.
A further example is the fact that on the occasion of the celebrations for the consumers’ day, we will welcome here representatives from different part of the industry, other specialists, State representatives, many NGOs which represent consumers, and the university is the pillar who attracted these realities and provided a space for negotiations. We have these kind of events almost every day, which proves that the university is the milestone that influences the society.
Against this background, what role do you believe the civil society and universities can have in fostering peace and more in general in the post-conflict recovery of Ukraine? What are the main priorities you are trying to pursue to contribute to the enjoyment of the right to education to the students that are navigating through these difficult times?
From my point of view, the renovation-reconstruction of Ukraine after the war means to recover the damage not only mechanically, but especially in the sense of renovation, modernization and updates. We should also be aware that we have witnessed many negative effects that will be visible only several years after the end of the war. The country, for example, suffered an immense number of losses; we see many students that have lost their parents because of the war; there are people that return from the frontline, and they especially need help to be reintegrated into society.
The country should put much more efforts in building defense capacities and in the military sector. What happened in Ukraine is not a local conflict. What happened in Ukraine is first of all the clash of Russia and the West. Thinking that the enemy will become something else in very short time is a bit unconscious. Ukraine now is defending the whole Europe in the sense that it is defending the principles of civilized nations. The only justified conclusion is that we should become stronger: we have learned how to be resilient and we have friends.
You know, the world is very complicated. The point is the reason why it happened: after WWII and the USSR collapse, in some way the US and the EU relaxed and decided that there would not have been confrontation again. They considered that this second pole disseminated with the collapse of the USSR. This may be true for the first ten years, but then the change of power in Russia and the ruling of Putin began to follow a political line aimed at renewing power and to make the world obey their rules, their worldview. The Russian Federation is on the European continent only for a small part, but actually it is Asian and mentally they differ very much for their considerations, that could even lead them to self-destruction. Of course, there are many points of view for what happened, but the fact is that it happened and now we have to deal with it. Maybe Putin thought that Ukraine would surrender in just 2-3 days, but actually it did not happen. It is now that we witnessed that the amount of weapons increased and became more modern, but also Ukraine has raised its own production of arms and artillery. Without the help of the EU, the West and other countries of course it would have been very difficult for us to stay resilient. But for the time being we are quite optimistic.
Last but not the least: if you analyze the history of Russia for the last 150 years, you will be sure that it has lost all the wars: the Crimean war: the Russian-Japanese war; in the first world war they negotiated an agreement with Germany; the second world war was a different parenthesis, but again if it was not for the help of the USA, the Soviet Union was not succeeding in the victory. And the list can continue: Afghanistan, Syria.
They are good at starting wars, but not as finishing them. It is the law of history, that is why we need to stay positive. But it will not happen quickly: only Trump promised a 24-hours solution of the conflict, which for now has still not happened. He had an approach to this conflict as a businessman, but politics is something that will be understandable only in the future, when time passes. Now we do not have many answers.
Photo: Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics