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What did Ukraine's 2020 security strategy promise?
Summary
A look back at the national security strategy approved in mid-September 2020 and a documentary film festival held in Odesa region.
What did Ukraine's leadership want its security thinking to centre on in autumn 2020? On 18 September 2020, the answer was already a few days old: on 14 September, President Volodymyr Zelensky approved the National Security Strategy of Ukraine, titled "Human Security – Security of the Country".
The title itself signals the framing. It places the individual alongside the state, rather than treating national security as a matter for institutions alone. That is the reading the document's name supports, and it is the one that matters for analysis of the period.
A very different kind of event ran in parallel. From 12 to 19 September 2020, the village of Krynychne in Bolhrad district, Odesa region, hosted the OKO International Ethnographic Film Festival. It was the first festival of ethnographic and anthropological documentary film, and its competition programme was streamed online.
The two events belong to different spheres, and no link between them should be implied. Together, though, they mark a mid-September week in which Ukraine set out a security doctrine at the national level while a small southern village opened a new cultural platform for documentary film.
