Speech by Olga Aivazovska, Chair of the Board of Civil Network OPORA, at the 25th Foreign Policy Conference “Reclaiming Peace? Freedom and Security in a Fragmented World” on September 29, 2025, in Berlin. 

On September 23–24, the European Parliament is hosting the conference “FURIC 2025. Technologies for Trust: Innovating for Election Integrity in a Changing Global Order”, where civil society leaders, international organizations, and policymakers discussed how to safeguard election integrity and public trust in times of digital threats and authoritarian influence. The event is organized by the European Platform for Democratic Elections. Olga Aivazovska, Chair of the Board of the Civil Network OPORA, delivered a speech on the first day of the conference. Below, we share the full text of her address.

Today, Europe has changed because we didn’t manage to stop Russia. This is not a pessimistic view, but a straightforward fact. Sometimes, even our international friends say (or think) that Ukrainians are overly emotional and traumatized. But the truth is that we have accepted a terrifying reality and are trying to resist it — rather than believing in wishful thinking, which belongs to the world of fantasy. There is no more security in Europe and all hybrid threats will become real for countries under the NATO umbrella if Ukraine loses to the aggressor.

On June 4-5 in Brussels, MEPs and election experts discussed ways to counteract politically biased (fake) election observation and related disinformation campaigns. The Civil Network OPORA, as a leading Ukrainian organization of independent civic election observation, was represented at the conference by its Chair of the Board, Olga Aivazovska.

"Peace agreed upon," declared The Washington Times on September 28, 1938. By now, we should have learned: deals with predator states bent on conquest – whether Nazi Germany then or Russia today – don't buy peace; they invite war. In the last century, Europe didn't avert disaster; it sleepwalked straight into the deadliest conflict in humanity's history. 

Russia is interfering with elections in democracies all over the world, resorting to any means, from cyberattacks to direct voter bribery, from sharing disinformation and disrupting society to discrediting candidates who are “unacceptable” for the Russian government. Contrariwise, they support politicians or parties ready to cooperate with the Putin's regime.

We embraced a huge number of challenges that have become the norm, and we have been living in this threatening environment for a long time. Nevertheless, our attitude towards the State is evolving, and so does the State’s attitude towards the society, the people, and an individual.

Olga Aivazovska, Chair of the Board of Civil Network OPORA, took part in the closed expert discussion "Democratic Challenges and Opportunities for Ukraine" held in June in Kyiv. Experts discussed the following topics: parliamentary reform and the code of ethics; challenges and risks of parliamentary and presidential elections in the current conditions; the balance between decentralization and centralization of power in wartime; the importance of media pluralism (countering disinformation; strategic communication of authorities as a prerequisite for fair elections); social cohesion and involvement of vulnerable groups in reconstruction and decision-making processes; protection of human rights in times of war: countering pressure and attacks on activists and journalists; gender-based violence.

Why did official Tbilisi resort to adopting the scandalous foreign agents law before the parliamentary elections, and will the civil society representatives obey it? How does society react to steps that actually destroy Georgia's European perspective? And is the current government of Georgia afraid of sanctions from Western countries? Watch more in this issue of “Power of Choice”

In October 2022, the Kremlin launched what was then the most comprehensive bombing campaign of the war. For the next five months, waves of Russian missiles and drones struck Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure on an almost daily basis. The attacks aimed to break Ukraine’s resistance by making life as unbearable as possible for tens of millions of Ukrainian civilians.

The collapse of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure last year due to Russia’s war brought the entire country to its knees. And while Ukraine was, for the most part, spared from widespread blackouts this winter, Russian forces are once again targeting critical infrastructure.

"The myth of peaceful coexistence is an entirely colonial perspective, and access to archives is crucial in dismantling it," explains Andriy Kohut, Director of the Sectoral Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). According to Kohut, Western academia has been influenced by the long-standing perception that in this part of the world, there was only Russia and its periphery, a view that has been constructed over centuries. "This is starting to change. But we need to institutionalize these ongoing discussions about decolonization and ensure that Ukraine's voice is represented at every level in any conversations about Ukraine," Kohut states. The discussion took place in an interview with Olha Aivazovska as part of the Civil Network OPORA's project, "The Power of Choice."