Thank you for your ask, Comrade! 🥰💜💛💚
For me personally, the canon framework simply leaves no possibility for the Valana ship. This is not to imply at all that Valana ship should not exist. All fictional ships are valid and welcome, and all expressions of creativity that do no harm inherently have value as far as I am concerned. These are just my own personal opinions. As always, I welcome debate!
In the story, Ulana is presented as a tough, driven, brilliant person, with a singular passion for truth and justice. At the same time, she is far from being cold or unfeeling, and she does care about people. She instructs Garanin’s secretary to “go East'' and supplies her with iodine pills. She is looking out for Lyudmilla. The stories of the first responders that she has gathered, clearly deeply move her.
But when it comes to Valery, Ulana just... doesn’t seem to have any compassion to spare for him. Perhaps she is too blinded by her idea that it is through Valery’s sacrifice that the change in the Soviet Union could finally be made possible. Ulana is very aware that with Valery’s clout and authority, he will be listened to, and that his sacrifice has potential to shake the system to the core. Ulana had solved the trolley dilemma for herself: sacrifice one person to save the potentially innumerable numbers of people. Except that it requires Valery to go to the sacrificial pyre - and she pushes him relentlessly toward it.
What is noticeably missing is Ulana expressing any warmth or concern towards Valery. To her, he is not so much a feeling, suffering person as more of a means to achieve justice. Ulana seems so focused on her mission that she starts to disregard Valery’s humanity. There is simply no space for love left in this layout.
It is notable that to convince Valery, Ulana brings a pile of notebooks with her from Minsk - one for each first responder - but here sits Valery with his skin looking aged and his hair starting to fall out - and where is his notebook? Doesn’t he get a notebook, too?
By the way, Ulana’s treatment of Boris’ illness is strikingly similar: as Boris hastily exists the courtroom, coughing, Valery looks like he is about to jump out of his skin with worry, looking at Boris, looking at the judge, looking at Boris again… but Ulana, on the other hand, doesn’t even turn her head in Boris’ direction. Thus, Boris doesn’t get a proverbial notebook from Ulana either.
There is a point where, for me personally, Ulana crosses the line. It is when she responds to Valery’s “I’ve already given my life - isn’t that enough?” with “No, I am sorry, it is not”. She is shockingly cruel to Valery in that moment. Even if she is morally right - and it is a big “if” - she had no right to say something like this.
The tragic seed of that moment will come to flourish a year later, when Valery would take his own life quite literally at the very spot where his conversation with Ulana took place:
And yet we never get to find out how Ulana feels about this all. Mazin’s script pretty much loses interest in Ulana in the end - once she had served her role in advancing the plot as an externalized version of Valery’s conscience. After the trial, we see her standing by Boris’ side, looking sad - but how does she really feel? (She may be looking sad, but Boris looks gutted).
How will she feel in the following months, knowing that Valery’s career, his legacy as a scientist are being destroyed? How will she feel when she finds out that Valery is gone? Did Ulana herself suffer any repercussions in her career and her life after the trial? Perhaps she didn’t. After all, her own testimony was surprisingly toothless, given her ardor. All she really had said was that Toptunov was young.
All these questions left unanswered make the character of Ulana, to me, a weaker element in an otherwise masterfully constructed script. Perhaps it is due to a common problem that male screenwriters seem to have with writing women convincingly.
Ulana’s cruel (yes, cruel) treatment of Valery is in such stark contrast with how Valery is with her. True to his wholesome nature, he is nothing but kind to Ulana. He takes a major risk getting her out of prison, he entrusts her with a supremely important assignment - researching the causes of the accident - in lieu of literally everyone else at his own institute. Not to mention that Valery likely saves Ulana’s life by giving her an assignment in Moscow, far from Chernobyl.
And yet, how different is Valery’s behavior with Ulana as compared to how he is with Boris! Even his body language tells us of this: how much more still he is in scenes with Ulana! Where is all that bouncing, pouting, hand-clutching? To me, it is very much the proximity to Boris that makes Valery behave in all sorts of discombobulated ways. As one tends to behave around one’s crush.
To summarize, the story leaves, in my view, no space for romantic feelings between Ulana and Valery. Ulana is so driven by her mission that she all but fails to acknowledge Valery’s humanity. And Valery… Valery acts, for the most part, as a calm, well-disposed senior colleague with Ulana. It is when Valery is with Boris his behavior becomes that peculiar and endearing mix of defiance and submissiveness. He is not making any sense. He is in love.
