War was never our choice, but it became our reality. Speech by Ola Myrovych at the Opening Ceremony of the LMF 2025

When the founders of this forum were working on its idea, they envisioned LMF as a place where journalists, thinkers, and civic leaders from every continent would gather. They wanted Ukraine and the wider world to discover one another through dialogue — right here in Lviv, a city open to the world. Instead, for the past eleven years, the world has been discovering Ukraine through war.

War was never our choice, but it became our reality. Back in late winter 2014, the word “war” was scarcely uttered in morning newscasts in Kyiv, Brussels, or New York. It was absent from official statements and international reports, and families mostly avoided it at the dinner table. For eight years reality kept knocking — until the dawn of February 24, 2022, when the shock-wave of a Russian ballistic missile blew the doors in.

A few years ago, I watched Steven Spielberg’s The Last Days for the first time. It tells the story of five Jewish survivors — among nearly half a million Jews living in Hungary and Transcarpathia — who were caught in the machinery of the Holocaust in spring 1944, barely a year before the Second World War ended. One memory in the film has haunted me ever since:

“Refugees were coming into Hungary, fleeing from Poland… They would come and tell stories… We began to hear about the killing of Jewish infants… about mass shootings and mass graves… And I remember that very often we didn’t believe them… We had this naïve feeling that we Hungarians wouldn’t do such things… that Hitler was in Germany, so what happened there didn’t concern us."

The war we now live through has shattered our world — and with it, our boundaries. Suddenly, we realize that from Taiwan to France, from Georgia to South Africa, there are people who speak our language. Some are, even now, defending their right to build a space of freedom around themselves. Some are drawing lessons from past mistakes. Others, living under the shadow of existential threat, are learning from ours.

This conscious vulnerability has opened the way for global solidarity. It has also sharpened a truth that many democracies let fade during decades of fragile peace: Freedom rather is not an individual right. It is a shared project — and a personal responsibility.

So why, after all we have endured, do we still find ourselves not only defending democracy against assault but also pushing back against indifference, ignorance, and hostility to facts?

Today’s media — social feeds, broadcasts, headlines — overflow with familiar words, yet attempts to grasp their context often fall into a vacuum of meaning.

Right now, the world’s attention is focused on peace talks. Politicians speak of ending the Ukrainian war. But these efforts are doomed — just like any attempt to fight imaginary enemies.

You can only end what has a beginning.

The “Ukrainian war” doesn’t exist. Russia's invasion of Ukraine does.

Until that is named, real solutions will remain out of reach.

To speak the unspoken is a mission we share — journalists, civic leaders, cultural figures, public servants, politicians. How will we know we’re making progress?

When solidarity for democracy and human rights moves from closed rooms and social media into the streets and polling stations.

When peace plans rest on facts and deliver justice, rather than handing a bloody burden to the next generation. 

When identities cease to be targets of physical or political attack, and a person’s right to live no longer demands someone’s death.

We extend our gratitude to everyone — in trenches and in institutions — who is fighting to bring this moment closer. Because of you, we still have hope for justice. We also remember those who will never live to see it.

Allow me to close with a line from the New Testament. The Gospel of John begins: “In the beginning was the Word.”

It reminds us that language and being are inseparable — and that the words shape the world we inhabit and the future we choose. The future doesn’t need our belief.

It is born from what is possible — and from our decision either to remain witnesses or to become co-creators.