by Scott Douglas Jacobsen
How did Ernst Raxarov’s Sloviansk roots and Swiss advocacy shape his response to Russia’s war against Ukraine?
Ernst Raxarov, also known as Oleksandr “Sasha” Volkov, is a Ukrainian-Swiss advocate from Sloviansk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Trained in economics, computer science, and German, he moved to Switzerland through a scholarship and became active in the Ukrainian Society of Switzerland. Since Russia’s war began in 2014, he has organized Swiss rallies, lobbied politicians, challenged Kremlin propaganda, and privately delivered civilian vehicles to support Ukraine’s defence within Swiss law, while defending modern, law-based neutrality principles.
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Ernst Raxarov trace Raxarov’s roots in Sloviansk, studies in Kyiv, scholarship path to Switzerland, and transformation after Russia’s 2014 aggression and 2022 full-scale invasion. Raxarov describes family ruptures, propaganda collapse, support for Ukraine’s military, Ukrainian Society of Switzerland advocacy, vehicle deliveries, Russian economic limits, Putin’s war logic, espionage concerns, and why Ukraine’s defence feels existential for the diaspora in Switzerland and Ukraine’s struggle for survival under Russian aggression.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were born and raised in Sloviansk, and you studied here in Kyiv. What was your family background? Was your family also from Sloviansk?
Ernst Raxarov: Yes.
Jacobsen: For how many generations?
Raxarov: I can trace parts of my family back about five generations in that area. That is quite a long time for that part of Ukraine.
Jacobsen: Why did you choose to move to Kyiv for your studies?
Raxarov: For young people who thought of themselves as talented, the usual choice was to study either in Moscow or in Kyiv. My sister made the choice first. In the second half of the 1980s, she decided not to go to Moscow. She went to Kyiv because we had already begun to think of ourselves as Ukrainians.
Those were the natural choices: either Moscow or Kyiv. There was also the possibility of going to Kharkiv, which was closer to home, but my sister was already studying in Kyiv, so I joined her there.
Jacobsen: What did you study?
Raxarov: I studied economics and computer science.
Jacobsen: There are many lawyers and economists here.
Raxarov: Computer science was more practical. I also studied languages. At the university, I had a parallel course of study in a second faculty.
Jacobsen: Which language?
Raxarov: German.
Jacobsen: Have you used German a lot?
Raxarov: Yes. It later helped me win a competition to study in Switzerland for one year.
Jacobsen: What kind of competition?
Raxarov: It was for a scholarship, through a special programme. That is how I ended up in Switzerland. I did not know much about Switzerland. I had entered several competitions to study for a year or half a year in Germany. Then, by chance, there was one for Switzerland. I entered that competition and won.
Jacobsen: In 2014, the initial Russian attacks and annexation began. How did that affect you, your family, and your life?
Raxarov: Very profoundly. It affected my personal life even more profoundly than the full-scale invasion in 2022. I have relatives from Crimea. For me, the annexation of Crimea was already the start of World War III. I saw parallels with the German annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
Then, as events moved into Donbas, the actual war began in my hometown, Sloviansk. One of my cousins was involved. He was a deputy police chief in Sloviansk, and he was on duty on April 12, 2014, when Russian-led armed men entered the city and took the police building. It was my cousin who surrendered the building.
I had very unpleasant conversations with him and his brother that day. I will remember that day for the rest of my life.
Jacobsen: As things progressed from 2014 to 2022, how did you plan your life from there?
Raxarov: First, there was the terrible realization in 2014 that this was not simply an uprising or irregular unrest. The Russian army was behind these actions. For me, by June 2014, it was clear that regular Russian forces were fighting in Ukraine.
That felt like a catastrophe. First, I still had many relatives and family ties in Russia. Second, I understood that this was not going to end quickly. If the full weight of the Russian army was involved, then it was absolutely clear to me that we were heading toward a much larger war.
Jacobsen: After February 24, 2022, there was further international condemnation, and more countries began taking the issue seriously, though still not enough. Even Switzerland shifted. What conversations did you have with non-Ukrainian international colleagues and friends? How did their perspectives change?
Raxarov: At the beginning, the full-scale invasion was, in a strange sense, a relief. Russia destroyed years of its own propaganda. It had constructed many myths, and then its own brutality destroyed those myths as Russian forces marched in. In that sense, it was a relief. I did not need to fight that Russian propaganda in the same way anymore, because Russia had destroyed it itself.
On the other hand, I clearly understood that my life had changed permanently. Since then, I have not had normal holidays. I have three children, but I spend my holidays mostly here in Ukraine, communicating with my children by WhatsApp, because I feel obliged to help as much as I can.
I support the Ukrainian military. That was also a clear realization in 2022. As someone who studied economics, one still looks for pragmatic ways to resolve problems peacefully. But after the full-scale invasion began, it became clear to me, and to many fellow economists in Ukraine, that the most efficient way to invest money in Ukraine was to support the military.
That is a brutal realization. It was also a break from my previous life. When I was young, I was a pacifist. I had to change that position. It was a pragmatic and painful realization: supporting the military was the most efficient way to spend money.
Jacobsen: There was a similar realization in Gandhi’s thinking too, where peace and pacifism extended only up to the point of self-defence, including armed self-defence. What are you doing now? What are you driving? What are you sending? What are you doing logistically?
Raxarov: I am a board member of the Ukrainian Society of Switzerland, the oldest Ukrainian society in Switzerland, established in 1945. As members of that society, we work a lot with Swiss politicians, trying to convince them to support Ukraine more strongly. We lobby for laws that would benefit Ukraine, and against those that would harm Ukraine.
We also speak frequently with Swiss media and organize rallies in support of Ukraine. There is now an annual rally in late February in Bern, in front of the Swiss Parliament. I am the main organizer of that rally.
In parallel, as a private individual, I collect donations, buy used cars, and drive them to Ukraine to support the Ukrainian military. I do this as a private person because I cannot do it as a member of the Ukrainian Society. Because of Swiss neutrality, registered associations in Switzerland cannot support foreign militaries in that way.
Since we cannot do that as an organization, I do it privately. Thankfully, this is not prohibited in Switzerland. A civilian car is not on any prohibition list. If I drive a normal civilian car to Ukraine and give it to the military, that is legal. I do what I can, within the law, to support the Ukrainian military.
Jacobsen: Economically, neither Russia nor Ukraine is a super-wealthy country in purchasing-power terms. At the same time, Russia is fighting this war with substantial support from the Russian public, and something like one-third to 40 percent of the Russian state budget has been devoted to the war.
Raxarov: Not GDP—the government budget.
Jacobsen: Right, the government budget. They are using more advanced weaponry, but they are still funding the war through economies whose purse strings are limited when compared with countries such as Luxembourg or Germany.
Jacobsen: I think the Russian Federation’s GDP is roughly comparable to Italy’s. So there is a strange condition here. Economically, if one says, “I am going to conduct this kind of war and maintain this kind of self-defence,” it can look almost irrational. But if the ideology and the personality behind it—speaking of Mr. Putin—are such that they will do it no matter what, especially with the foot-in-the-door phenomenon and the sunk-cost fallacy, then the logic changes.
Raxarov: Again, returning to Carl von Clausewitz, for Putin this war was from the very beginning an advancement of political goals by other means. For him, it was probably considered acceptable. He tried it in Georgia in 2008. Then he tried it in Crimea. After Crimea, his approval rating in Russia rose sharply, and he was even rewarded with the Nord Stream 2 project from Germany after the annexation.
Jacobsen: Do not tell that to the CEO of Rheinmetall.
Raxarov: For Putin, it is a completely different story. For him, war is an instrument to preserve power at home. Continuing this war is cheaper for him than stopping it.
For Ukraine, it is absolutely a war for survival. You also have to understand that in Switzerland, for example, we are an open country and a neutral country. Switzerland usually does not expel Russian spies, so there are many Russian spies in the country, as well as Russian interests. Unfortunately, this is still going on.
For us in the Ukrainian diaspora in Switzerland, it is absolutely clear that if Russia prevailed here, Russia would probably deal with us as well. We might end up on some elimination list too.
Especially with current technology and the spread of hybrid warfare into other countries, this war is deeply personal. For me, it is a war for survival. Full stop.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Ernst.