Solidarity Conference | Panel 1 Summary: Global Solidarity with Ukraine
The opening panel of the 2026 TCUP Conference examined the shifting dynamics of global solidarity with Ukraine nearly four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion. Moderated by Rory Finnin (University of Cambridge), the panel brought together Nataliya Gumenyuk (Public Interest Journalism Lab), Yevhen Hlibovytsky (Frontier Institute), Sergio Jaramillo (Acordemos), and Roman Waschuk (former Ambassador of Canada to Ukraine).
Defining Solidarity: Knowing, Speaking, Acting
Finnin began by clarifying what he meant by solidarity. It is not automatic, he argued, but “an active convergence of interests and fellow feeling that bridges distance.”
He identified three interlocking forms of solidarity:
Knowing — studying Ukraine more deeply, recognizing that the current war is not an isolated rupture but part of a longer pattern of unfinished justice. Knowing is the foundation upon which meaningful solidarity rests.
Speaking — engaging political representatives, challenging misinformation, and ensuring Ukraine remains present in public discourse.
Acting — translating solidarity into tangible commitments: military support, humanitarian assistance, welcoming displaced Ukrainians, and institutional backing.
What shocked the world in 2022, Finnin warned, risks becoming normalized by 2026. The challenge is transforming short-lived moral attention into durable commitment.
Storytelling, Civic Responsibility, and the Fight Against Nihilism
Nataliya Gumenyuk approached solidarity through the lens of media and civic responsibility. In a moment when global attention is fragmented and fatigue is widespread, she warned of a growing danger: nihilism — the belief that everything is deteriorating everywhere, and that individual action makes no difference.
Against this, she argued, solidarity must be sustained intentionally.
Solidarity is not a gesture. It is labor.
For Gumenyuk, that labor includes the continuous work of telling stories — not only about suffering, but also about agency and action. In wartime, civic engagement is not limited to formal political participation; it also involves shaping public narratives that resist indifference.
She emphasized the power of individual stories to create unexpected connections. At a screening of a Ukrainian documentary on war crimes in Nigeria, she encountered a woman who ran a café at the venue — someone who had never met a Ukrainian before. The story of a Ukrainian child abducted by Russia resonated deeply with her because of Nigeria’s own “Bring Back Our Girls” movement against child kidnappings. For Gumenyuk, such encounters demonstrate that solidarity grows not from abstract geopolitical alignment, but from recognition of shared human experiences.
Physical presence, she suggested, still matters. Journalists, intellectuals, and policymakers who travel to Ukraine often leave with a transformed understanding — no longer seeing the war as a proxy conflict, but as a lived civic struggle. Equally important, she added, is the effort by Ukrainians to travel abroad and tell their own stories firsthand.
At the same time, she acknowledged that solidarity is politically complicated. Ukraine’s own debates over Gaza and the broader Middle East expose tensions in how Ukrainians interpret global injustice. If Ukraine asks others for principled support, it must also be willing to confront difficult questions about consistency.
Lessons from Latin America: Solidarity as Shared Interest
Drawing on Colombia’s history of armed conflict, Sergio Jaramillo argued that solidarity must be grounded not only in empathy, but also in shared interest.
Latin America, he noted, has a deeply ingrained commitment to sovereignty and territorial integrity — principles embedded in its diplomatic tradition. Many countries in the region understand displacement, democratic fragility, and human rights abuses firsthand.
This is not just about solidarity with Ukraine, but about all of our interests.
If a permanent member of the UN Security Council can invade its neighbor with impunity, he argued, the international system itself is undermined.
Yet Jaramillo also identified a major obstacle: perceived double standards. Western silence over civilian deaths in Gaza complicates efforts to mobilize support for Ukraine in parts of the “Global South”. Without consistency, credibility erodes.
His conclusion was clear: communication must be strategic and sustained. Solidarity must be networked — among writers, journalists, civil society leaders, and former diplomats — and built horizontally, not assumed vertically.
Intersections between Civil Society and the State
Roman Waschuk examined how official state solidarity intersects with civil society engagement.
The boundaries between formal diplomacy and informal advocacy, he observed, have blurred. The G7 Ambassadors’ Group in Kyiv became a unique mechanism for coordinated reform engagement. Ambassadors themselves increasingly function as public communicators and even quasi–civil society actors.
Yet rhetoric without action risks cynicism.
'Stand with Ukraine’, ‘deep concern’, ‘as long as it takes’ — such phrases breed cynicism when not combined with action.
At the same time, Waschuk cautioned against overreliance on donor-funded civil society — a phenomenon he described as “astroturfing,” where excessive external funding can undermine local credibility.
Encouragingly, he noted that the full-scale invasion has revitalized domestic ownership. Ukrainians themselves now fund significant portions of military and civil society initiatives. Ukrainian businesses are also expanding abroad, developing global agency rather than being passive recipients of aid.
Agency and Recognition: Ukraine as Political Subject
Yevhen Hlibovytsky argued that genuine solidarity depends on recognizing Ukraine as a political agent — not merely a victim of aggression or an object of geopolitical maneuvering, but a subject capable of shaping its own destiny.
For decades, he suggested, Ukrainians assumed that independence in 1991 meant automatic recognition and equal standing in the international community. Yet sovereignty proved conditional. Security “assurances” replaced guarantees; integration came with fine print. In retrospect, Hlibovytsky argued, mass political agency in Ukraine did not fully emerge in 1991 but in 2014 — when society mobilized to defend its own future. The current war, in this sense, is Ukraine’s true independence war.
Externally, solidarity falters when Ukraine is misunderstood. Hlibovytsky described Ukraine as “lost in translation” — both in the West and in the so-called Global South. Without deeper knowledge of Ukraine’s political culture, history, and lived experience, solidarity risks remaining superficial.
You can’t be in solidarity with a people you can’t understand.
Understanding Ukraine, he argued, requires grappling with experiences that differ from much of Western Europe’s postwar trajectory. Unlike societies whose encounters with totalitarianism were brief, Ukraine’s identity was shaped by prolonged totalitarian trauma — from Stalinism to late Soviet paternalism. Overcoming that trauma has produced a civic culture rooted not in abstract ideology but in shared vulnerability: the recognition that “the person next to you also hurts.”
Internally, he argued, this has generated a form of solidarity that transcends linguistic, regional, and religious divides. Externally, it challenges the international community to move beyond paternalism toward partnership. In his view, Ukraine is not simply seeking protection; it is fighting for a world in which small and middle powers retain meaningful agency in shaping their own futures.
What Undermines Solidarity?
Across the panel, speakers identified several destabilizing forces, including geopolitical polarization, perceived double standards, moral fatigue and the normalization of violence, performative rhetoric, and framings that induce paralysis rather than agency.
Some warned that invoking the risk of world war can freeze audiences rather than mobilize them. Others suggested reframing the moment as a rupture requiring renewed middle-power cooperation.
The panel converged on one key insight: solidarity cannot be assumed. It must be cultivated — patiently, strategically, and with intellectual humility.
Ukraine’s struggle, they suggested, is not only a national fight but a litmus test for whether smaller and middle powers retain meaningful agency in a shifting world order.