Taking Ukraine Seriously:
On the Obstacles to Asking Why
Anna Ivanova
Justus Liebig University Giessen
Following much of the contemporary academic and political debate on Ukraine, one quickly discovers
that the only ideologically acceptable answer to the question “What has gone wrong in Ukraine?” is:
Russia. It is not only the war itself that is analyzed exclusively through the lens of Russian imperialism
– though this framing crowds out diverging accounts so insistently, that over four hundred prominent
scholars of East European Studies have called to “read less about Ukrainian domestic politics and
international relations" in order to “understand the sources of the Russo-Ukrainian War.”
1
Ukraine's
domestic problems and international relations, too, are often attributed to Russia across different regis-
ters: corruption at the highest levels of government is framed as a Soviet institutional legacy; criticism
of domestic policy is dismissed as Kremlin narrative; Russophone Ukrainian citizens are described as
victims of Russification; and even disputes with neighboring Poland over historical memory are not
rarely attributed to Moscow's manipulation rather than to the unresolved complexities of a shared past
and present of two neighboring states. The claim of Russia's responsibility over Ukrainian problems
extends far into history – the most expansive accounts locate the original breaking point in the times
of Kyivan Rus – and spreads across every domain of analysis, functioning as an ontological premise
underlying the dominant explanatory framework for what Ukraine as a state and society is.
Yet, this argument is much more theologically than scholarly grounded – not because it is always
false, but because questioning it is often treated less as an intellectual disagreement than as an act
of heresy. To put it another way, treating Russia as a totalizing explanatory category for the state of
Ukrainian affairs does not pass the falsifiability test. In Popperian terms,
2
what distinguishes scientific
knowledge from metaphysics, religion, or ideology is not the accumulation of confirming evidence,
but the methodological and empirical possibility of refutation. Doubt, thus, is not a failure of com-
mitment; it is the engine of inquiry. Accordingly, attributing whatever and whenever has happened in
Ukraine entirely to Russian influence is analytically weak and intellectually lazy, as it substitutes caus-
al investigation with an unfalsifiable explanatory principle. Doing so forecloses the very questions that
scholarship must ask. Therefore, in seeking an answer to the question “Has anything gone wrong in
Ukraine?” – and if so, what – I believe it is necessary to begin by explaining why it is legitimate to
pose such a question in the first place, especially within the context of academic debate.
The first explanation is scholarly. A basic premise of social research demands defining a research
object, placing it at the center of inquiry, and maintaining a critical stance toward it.
3
To study a state
and society seriously means to subject them to scrutiny: to question assumptions, test competing hy-
potheses, and remain open to conclusions that may prove uncomfortable or politically inconvenient.
Neglecting these principles means replacing research with either apologia or condemnation. Not only
as a scholar, but much more as a Kharkivite, I am well aware of Russia's crimes and of its role in the
destruction of life in Ukraine – I have witnessed them with my own eyes and lived through them.
These crimes and the broader dynamics of the Russian state, regime, army, and society must be studied
critically. Without such analysis, what is happening in Ukraine cannot be understood in full. At the
same time, the analysis of Russian factors must not crowd out the studies of what is happening within
1 "An Elon Musk-Supported Apology for Russia's War on Ukraine," Ukrains'ka Pravda, 28 April 2026, https://
www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2026/04/28/8032087/.
2 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2005).
3 Zygmunt Bauman and Tim May, Thinking Sociologically , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 165-80.
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Ukrainian society itself. To place Ukraine at the center of inquiry is, first of all, to take seriously the
interests of Ukrainians and the forces that run counter to them. Its study, while necessarily attentive to
the broader context – namely, to the role of Ukraine’s neighbors, partners, and other actors in bringing
the state toward catastrophe – must, nevertheless, treat Ukraine as a full-fledged research object. It
should be asking questions about its structures, dynamics, and historical trajectories in order to con-
tribute to debates about its future – especially if we want this future to meaningfully differ from the
present.
Inevitably, this research agenda carries a direct political implication: to regard Ukraine as a sover-
eign and independent state necessarily means recognizing its capacity for political agency, both do-
mestically and internationally. To explain all of Ukraine's difficulties exclusively through the actions
of the Kremlin is, implicitly, to deny that agency: to portray Ukraine as largely incapable of shaping
its own trajectory, as an object of geopolitical competition rather than a subject of its own history.
Sovereignty, however, implies not only power, influence, and the capacity to make decisions, but also
responsibility for the choices made and their consequences.
4
If Ukraine is to be taken seriously as a
political subject, its choices and their outcomes must be subject to the same analytical scrutiny applied
to any other sovereign state. It is from this position – taking Ukraine seriously as both an object of
inquiry and a subject of politics – that this essay proceeds. And it is from this position that it becomes
impossible to overlook the fact that something has gone profoundly wrong in Ukraine.
Re-Defining State and Nation
A closer look at Ukraine's internal development shows that the country today lags behind what it was
in the early years of independence in many respects. The origins of this decline predate the war of 2022
and lie in the way the state and the nation were rebuilt after the collapse of the USSR. Even before the
Russian invasion, Ukraine had become one of the poorest countries in Europe, with a GDP per capita
of 4775 USD in 2021, lagging behind most of the European and even other post-Soviet states.
5
It has
been increasingly integrated into the periphery of the capitalist world-system, characterized by eco-
nomic dependency, weak state institutions, political instability, and social polarization.
6
Yet, thirty-five
years ago, Ukraine entered the period of independence under relatively favorable conditions. The state
possessed a developed industrial sector, vast agricultural resources, and an infrastructural network that
sustained the social reproduction of a population of 52 million.
7
The society of independent Ukraine
emerged as a product of Soviet modernity – an urbanized and educated entity, shaped by industrial de-
velopment and substantial opportunities for social mobility, marked regional differentiation, and wide
ethnic diversity.
8
Unlike some other Soviet republics, Ukraine’s exit from the Soviet Union, from the
perspective of the 1990s and 2000s, appeared peaceful.
These favorable conditions, however, did not translate into the outcomes they seemed to prom-
ise. Independence has launched the process of reimagining the state and the nation simultaneously,
and redefining how and by whom the resources inherited from the Soviet state would be managed.
4 Alan James, "The Practice of Sovereign Statehood in Contemporary International Society," Political Studies 47,
no. 3 (1999): 457-73.
5 World Bank, "GDP per Capita (Current US$) – Ukraine," World Bank Open Data, NY.GDP.PCAP.CD, accessed
10 July 2026, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=UA.
6 Andrii Maliuk, "Trajectory of Socio-Economic Development of Ukraine in 1991-2021 from a World-System
Perspective," Interdisciplinary Political Studies 11, no. 1 (2025): 292.
7 Anders Åslund, How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute
for International Economics, 2009); Robert S. Kravchuk, Ukrainian Political Economy: The First Ten Years (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); A. I. Amosha, N. E. Briukhovetskaia, and I. P. Buleev, "O vosstanovlenii vedushchei roli
mashinostroeniia v postroenii novoi ekonomiki Ukrainy," Ekonomichnyi visnyk Donbasu ,64, no. 2 (2021): 94-107.
8 Georgiy Kasianov, Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s-2010s (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2022), 387-98.
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The processes which are often analyzed as state-building and nation-building
9
had not started from
scratch and were transforming a previously formed Soviet Ukrainian state and nation. The concept of
a nation-state centered on the titular nation replaced the universalist Soviet project, and a multiethnic
population had to be brought into alignment with a coherent national and cultural identity.
10
This ob-
jective was pursued so vigorously that national rebuilding often outpaced, and at times undermined,
the development of stable state institutions. As Åslund observed, in the first years of independence
“Ukraine focused on little but nation-building,” elevating it into an “all-dominant priority.”
11
Simultaneously, and under sustained pressure from international financial institutions, Ukraine
implemented a neoliberal economic program. Unlike most other Soviet republics, Ukraine had not
managed to restore the country’s economy to its 1990 level by 2021.
12
Additionally, the economy has
undergone a reorientation: entire high-tech subbranches, such as aircraft building, heavy and power
engineering, rocket and space technology, ceased to exist; the share of high-tech industries dimin-
ished.
13
Industry's share of gross value added fell from 54.6 percent in 1991 to 23.2 percent in 2021,
14

and what remained was an economy reoriented toward raw material exports, dependent on imported
components, and built on a low-wage labor regime as its primary competitive advantage
15
– a trajecto-
ry that Guzhva and Honcharenko describe as the "primitivization" of the Ukrainian economy.
16

These economic transformations produced a radical restructuring of the social landscape. Through
the redistribution of state property along nomenklatura-criminal networks, a small oligarchic class
emerged that concentrated productive assets in its hands while the broader population absorbed the
costs.
17
In mid-1995, the World Bank found 29.5 percent of Ukrainian households below the poverty
line.
18
The commodity boom of the 2000s produced a sharp decline in absolute poverty – from 32
percent in 2001 to under 8 percent in 2005 by the World Bank's own basic-needs line.
19
The following
decade largely undid the gains, while the war in Donbas and the 2014-2015 economic crisis pushed
the share of the population below the subsistence minimum from 17 to 52 percent in a single year.
20

Three decades later, after a partial recovery and then the Russian invasion, the World Bank estimates
that 41.6 percent of the population lived below the national subsistence line in 2025, roughly double
the rate of 2021.
21
Moreover, throughout the years, the welfare state has been progressively dismantled
through reforms of education (2017, 2026), healthcare (2017, 2020), and pensions (2011, 2017).
9 Mikhail Minakov, "Istoriia i svoboda na vostoke Evropy: K osmysleniiu postsovetskogo perioda," Palladium,
no. 6 (2023), https://freeuniversity.pubpub.org/pub/p6-01/release/1.
10 Rogers Brubaker, "Nationalizing States Revisited: Projects and Processes of Nationalization in Post-Soviet
States," Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 11 (2011): 1785-1814.
11 Åslund, How Ukraine Became a Market Economy, xii.
12 World Bank, "GDP (Constant 2015 US$) – Ukraine," World Bank Open Data, indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.KD,
accessed 10 July 2026, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=UA.
13 Maliuk, "Trajectory of Socio-Economic Development," 299-300.
14 Maliuk, "Trajectory of Socio-Economic Development," 300.
15 Maliuk, "Trajectory of Socio-Economic Development," 293.
16 Ihor Guzhva and Kyrylo Honcharenko, "Industry of Ukraine: Current Trends and Factors of Development,"
Market Relations Development in Ukraine, no. 1 (224) (2020): 18-24 [in Ukrainian].
17 Oleksandr Baranovs’kyi and Volodymyr Sidenko, "Problemy vlasnosti ta lehalizatsii kapitaliv i dokhodiv v
Ukraini," Natsional’na bezpeka i oborona, no. 2 (50) (2004): 2-13.
18 World Bank, Poverty in Ukraine , Report no. 15602-UA (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1996), https://
documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/413691468779375547/pdf/multi-page.pdf
19 World Bank, Ukraine Poverty Update , Report no. 39887-UA (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007), 6-7, https://
openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b933fd79-81a6-5bc0-afe4-5b7024917c39/content.
20 World Bank, Ukraine Poverty and Shared Prosperity Update, 2016-2019 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021),
2-6, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099430006232220098/pdf/P17204608594930609d8f08307fb5dd1ed.
pdf.
21 World Bank, Monitoring Living Conditions in Ukraine: Spring 2026 Update, Listening to Ukraine (Washington,
DC: World Bank, 2026), 3, https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/3df3ca7530237868137cf8a73f9b36b2-0080062026/
original/Listening-to-Ukraine-Update-Spring-2026.pdf.
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The rebuilding of the state and the nation produced a specific “division of labor.”
22
The former Sovi-
et nomenklatura engaged far more closely with the rebuilding of the state and the division of its assets
than with questions of national identity, leaving the symbolic sphere largely to cultural elites, former
dissidents and nationalist activists. Nevertheless, rebuilding of the Ukrainian nation proceeded rapidly
and took a prominent place in public debate. So, what kind of nation was being built? The model on
which this project drew from the onset was, in important respects, a nineteenth-century one applied
to a society on the brink of the twenty-first century. It was based on a narrative of an agrarian nation
marked by low social mobility, limited literacy, and thin channels of social communication. Aligned
with nineteenth-century ethnocultural nationalism, this narrative identified the nation with the ethnos
– an ethnocultural, linguistic, and religious community.
23
The history of the Ukrainian nation relied on
the imaginary preserved in the diasporic communities
24
that framed it as “a never-ending chain of suf-
fering, hardship, struggle for survival, and an eternal yearning for national self-determination.”
25
The
attainment of independence was viewed as a triumph of historical justice, achieved through a return
to the traditions of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Russian empire and the USSR
were viewed as external forces that had forcibly drawn Ukraine into their orbit, while the participation
of Ukrainians in the creation, maintenance, and development of both states was “at best, resolved by
contrasting the ‘merits and feats of individual people’ with the ‘evil of the Soviet empire’”
26
or not
discussed at all. The existence of the Ukrainian nation was traced back to Kyivan Rus as an early form
of statehood and further back to the early tribal forms of social organization, which made it possible
to speak of a thousand-year-old Ukrainian nation.
In the early years, the realization of this project on a political level unfolded in the form of civic
nationalism – a model promoted throughout the 1990s as the normative destination of post-communist
transition
27
– which conceives of the nation as a community united by loyalty to the nation-state and
formally encompassing all ethnic groups. As a result, the primordialist conception of the nation that
underpinned state memory politics was able to coexist with the forms of memory shared by represent-
atives of different ethnic groups, regions, and social classes, without guiding political decisions. More-
over, state control over memory was rather limited and inconsistent, and issues regarding symbols and
rituals were resolved at the level of regional authorities.
28
This early flexibility was also enabled by a
deeper continuity: independent Ukraine remained, in many respects, continuous with the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic.
29
The symbolic change – flags, anthems, currency, street names – took place
while the property, territories, and statuses, like UN membership, of the Ukrainian SSR remained un-
changed. Most Soviet laws remained in force, most Soviet functionaries retained their positions, even
many rituals were still in place, and the whole civil, critical, and industrial infrastructure remained in
the country. Nationalism at this stage was instrumental: it helped former Soviet elites legitimize their
rule, maintain their careers, and benefit from the ongoing redistribution of capital, while simultaneous-
22 Georgiy Kasianov, "Ukraine as a 'Nationalizing State': A Review of Practices and Outcomes," Sociology of
Power 33, no. 2 (2021): 121 [in Russian].
23 Kasianov, Memory Crash, 213-47.
24 Per A. Rudling, "Repatriating an Edifying Past: The Diaspora Ukrainian Authoritarian Right and Power over
Memory, 1991-2021," Nationalities Papers 52, no. 6 (2024): 1308-31.
25 Kasianov, Memory Crash, 213.
26 Andrii Portnov, "Uprazhneniia s istoriei po-ukrainski (Zametki ob obshchestvennykh izmereniiakh
funktsionirovaniia istorii v postsovetskoi Ukraine)," Ab Imperio 2007, no. 3: 93-102.
27 Matthew Blackburn, "The Persistence of the Civic-Ethnic Binary: Competing Visions of the Nation and
Civilization in Western, Central and Eastern Europe," National Identities 24, no. 5 (2022): 468, https://doi.org/10.1080/146
08944.2021.2006169.
28 Portnov, "Uprazhneniia s istoriei po-ukrainski," 94.
29 Artem Lytovchenko and Olena Muradyan, "Preconditions for Regional Divisions in Ukraine and the Global
Implications of the Ukrainian Crisis," in Uluslararası Politikada Ukrayna Krizi, ed. Hasret Çomak, Caner Sancaktar, and
Zafer Yıldırım (Istanbul: Beta, 2014), 37-38.
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ly serving as a lever of foreign policy, deployed strategically when needed.
30

Over time, this pragmatic construction was filled with increasingly ethnonational content, as the
former Soviet nomenklatura was trying to preserve operational control over state assets, and nation-
alist activists and dissidents were focused on managing the symbolic sphere. The primary criterion
of inclusion became adherence to a particular and narrow conception of Ukrainian culture, language,
identity, and vision of the past.  Over time, memory legislation became the central mechanism through
which this narrowing was institutionalized. At first, memory laws identified the historical moments
the state deemed worthy of commemoration – for example, World War II
31
and the Holodomor;
32
then
they prescribed how and whom to remember – for example, through the heroization of Stepan Bandera
and Roman Shukhevych,
33
or by adopting the law on the fighters for Ukraine’s independence,
34
and, in
their most extreme form, began to prescribe criminal penalties for violations.
35
Ethnic nationalism did
not replace the civic variant but came to coexist with it and reinforce it, extending the requirements
of national conformity beyond language and culture and increasingly ideologizing the category of the
nation itself. Thus, the space for imagining and discussing what the Ukrainian nation might look like
was constantly narrowing, while the image of the nation was increasingly regulated from above.
Yet whether the criterion of belonging was cultural and linguistic or political and value-based, both
variants drew the same kind of boundary,
36
and both operated as a "form of knowledge,"
37
perceiving
the social world exclusively through national categories and rendering other cleavages, such as class,
regional belonging, language, and generation, secondary or invisible. Exactly in this fashion, Ukrain-
ian nationalism, whatever its civic or ethnic inflection, was structurally ill-equipped to represent the
society it claimed to speak for. Surveys conducted throughout the years of independence showed with
remarkable regularity that questions of language, culture, and the past occupied the bottom of these
rankings. For instance, in 2001, 76 percent of Ukrainians prioritised the population's standard of living
as a matter of concern, while only around 5 percent pointed to the status of the Russian and Ukrainian
languages and 8 percent to the revival of the Ukrainian nation.
38
Such distributions are unremarkable
in themselves: material concerns outrank symbolic ones in survey data across most countries, includ-
ing those under no economic strain at all. What distinguishes the Ukrainian case is not the ranking,
but what it corresponded to. Elsewhere, the priority attached to living standards registers a stable
30 Mikhail A. Molchanov, "Post-Communist Nationalism as a Power Resource: A Russia-Ukraine Comparison,"
Nationalities Papers 28, no. 2 (2000): 276-279.
31 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro uvichnennia Peremohy u Velykii Vitchyznianii viini 1941-1945 rokiv," no. 1684-III, 20
April 2000, Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy, 2000, no. 30, art. 239; repealed 21 May 2015 by law no. 315-VIII, https://
zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/1684-14. Zakon Ukrainy "Pro uvichnennia peremohy nad natsyzmom u Druhii svitovii viini
1939-1945 rokiv," no. 315-VIII, 9 April 2015, Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy , 2015, no. 25, art. 191.
32 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini," no. 376-V, 28 November 2006, Vidomosti
Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy, 2006, no. 50, art. 504.
33 Ukaz Prezydenta Ukrainy "Pro prysvoiennia R. Shukhevychu zvannia Heroi Ukrainy," no. 965/2007, 12 October
2007, https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/9652007-6491; annulled by a court ruling on the grounds that the title may
be conferred only on citizens of Ukraine. Ukaz Prezydenta Ukrainy "Pro prysvoiennia S. Banderi zvannia Heroi Ukrainy,"
no. 46/2010, 20 January 2010, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/46/2010; annulled by a court ruling in 2011 on the
grounds that the title may be conferred only on citizens of Ukraine.
34 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro pravovyi status ta vshanuvannia pam”iati bortsiv za nezalezhnist’ Ukrainy u XX stolitti,"
no. 314-VIII, 9 April 2015, Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy , 2015, no. 25, art. 190, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/
show/314-19/ed20150409.
35 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro zasudzhennia komunistychnoho ta natsional-sotsialistychnoho (natsysts’koho) totalitarnykh
rezhymiv v Ukraini ta zaboronu propahandy ikh’noi symvoliky," no. 317-VIII, 9 April 2015, Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady
Ukrainy, 2015, no. 26, art. 219, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/317-19/ed20150409.
36 Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, "Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism: Euromaidan Eventful
Nationalism in Ukraine," Post-Soviet Affairs 36, no. 3 (2020): 226-45.
37 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 18.
38 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, "Dumky ta pohliady naselennia Ukrainy, sichen’
2001 roku," 17 January 2001, section "Sotsial’no-politychni oriientatsii," https://www.kiis.com.
ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=252&y=2001&m=1&page=1.
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background preference; here it tracked a documented economic collapse and impoverishment on a
mass scale over the same period. The symbolic agenda dominated regardless of popular demand and
economic data. Thus, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national imaginary appeared incommensu-
rable with the material and social aspirations of the society it governed – a modern society that had
sought independence not as an end in itself, but as a condition for improving its living standards and
expanding its life chances.
39
From Exclusion to Erasure: Defining the Limits of National Belonging
If the early period of independence established nation-building as the dominant public agenda, the
post-Euromaidan period accelerated investment in the symbolic sphere, through which Ukrainian na-
tion-building shifted from the attempt to rebuild a Ukrainian nation to the attempt to define norma-
tively who belongs to it. Anti-communism and the progressive restriction of the Russian language
have become prominent institutional instruments through which an increasingly narrow conception
of Ukrainian national belonging has been legally enforced. In the 2010s, neither Russia nor the An-
ti-Maidan advanced a communist project, yet both deployed Soviet symbols in the course of that con-
flict. It was this appropriation, rather than any living communist politics, that supplied the occasion
for banning those symbols in Ukraine itself. The dismantling of Soviet monuments, the renaming of
toponyms, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the decommunization legislation, and the repeal of
the earlier language law together constituted a form of symbolic mobilization whose consequences for
Ukrainian society were anything but symbolic. In doing so, Ukraine belatedly joined the anti-commu-
nist memory regime that had emerged across Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s during
the period of the European Union enlargement. Understanding what this regime was, and how Ukrain-
ian anti-communism both resembled and departed from it, is essential to understanding what followed.
A growing body of scholarship
40
on anti-communism as a framework of memory politics in post-so-
cialist states suggests that it is best understood not as a self-evident reckoning with a traumatic past but
as a struggle for power attempting to establish the regime of truth. This regime simultaneously defines
how the past should be remembered, what political positions are legitimate in the present, and what fu-
tures are imaginable. As Zombory has shown,
41
Eastern European anti-communism was the outcome
of a structural exchange that took place during the accession of the Eastern European countries into
the EU. Whereas postwar Western European memory had been organized around the Holocaust and
the crimes of fascism, Eastern Europe supplemented this framework with a second foundational trau-
ma, the crimes of communism, positioning itself as the double victim of both regimes. In this process,
Eastern Europe brought communism and a claim to victim status as its specific historical experience,
while Western European institutions codified that narrative.
42
Thus, “EU enlargement appeared as a
39 David R. Marples, "Ukraine's Drive to Independence in 1991," Canadian Slavonic Papers 61, no. 3 (2019): 321-
45.
40 See Máté Zombory, "The Anti-Communist Moment: Competitive Victimhood in European Politics," Revue
d'études comparatives Est-Ouest 51, no. 2-3 (2020): 21-54, https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0021; Zoltán Dujisin, "A
History of Post-Communist Remembrance: From Memory Politics to the Emergence of a Field of Anticommunism,"
Theory and Society 50, no. 1 (2021): 65-96, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09401-5; Berthold Molden, "Mnemonic
Hegemony? The Power Relations of Contemporary European Memory," in EUtROPEs: The Paradox of European Empire,
ed. John W. Boyer and Berthold Molden, Cahiers Parisiens 7 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 104-30;
Jelena Đureinović, "Beyond the State Agency: Anti-Communist Memory Work in Post-Milošević Serbia," in Researching
Memory and Identity in Russia and Eastern Europe: Interdisciplinary Methodologies, ed. Jade McGlynn and Oliver T.
Jones (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 183-97, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99914-8_11; Jelena Subotić, Yellow
Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
41 Máté Zombory, "The Anti-Communist Moment.”
42 Georgiy Kasianov, "Istorychna polityka ta ontolohichna bezpeka: kontseptual’ni ramky ta analitychni
sposterezhennia," Intermarum: istoriia, polityka, kul’tura, no. 17 (2025): 19; Dujisin, "A History of Post-Communist
Remembrance.”
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process of integration through which continental civilization was reunited according to its supposedly
universal values.”
43
The memory of communism was thus canonized primarily as a memory of terror,
repression, and victimhood, even as everyday recollections in post-socialist states remained consider-
ably more ambivalent, combining memories of hardship with memories of social security, moderniza-
tion, and collective advancement.
44

Ukraine entered this field under rather different conditions. In Eastern European states anti-com-
munism was legitimized through the accession process to European structures. Ukrainian anti-com-
munism, in turn, declared to have been following the path of its Western neighbors, but attained legit-
imacy through the revolutionary impulses of the Euromaidan and the mobilizing effects of war. As a
result, Ukrainian anti-communism became simultaneously less consensual and more uncompromising.
Public opinion surveys repeatedly demonstrated that decommunization enjoyed only limited support –
in November 2016, only 35 percent of respondents supported renaming settlements and streets, while
57 percent opposed it, with a clear regional divide: support was 63 percent in Western Ukraine, 32
percent in Central Ukraine, 19 percent in the South, and 18 percent in the East;
45
the ban of communist
ideology enjoyed larger support, with, however, similar regional distribution trends.
46
. Simultaneous-
ly, local authorities frequently sabotaged the implementation of decommunization,
47
while scholars
48

and the Venice commission at the Council of Europe
49
also criticized the decision. Nevertheless, a vast
institutional infrastructure emerged around this project: the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory,
legislative mechanisms, educational reforms, cultural institutions, media initiatives, and civil society
organizations. Activists who had acquired revolutionary legitimacy through the Maidan and gained
sufficient influence over parliamentary decisions succeeded in pushing through an anti-communist
agenda, presenting it simultaneously as a mechanism of democratization and an instrument of national
consolidation, referencing Eastern European states as a role model. In practice, however, Ukrainian
anti-communism differed from its Eastern European precedents both in timing and scale. Across Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe, the reckoning with the communist past had concentrated on functionaries and
the institutions they had staffed: lustration was almost always confined to the public sector, party offi-
cials were generally subject to proceedings only where they had collaborated with the security services
or could be charged with criminal offences, and blanket rejection of all former functionaries was large-
ly absent.
50
That transitional-justice moment had passed two decades before Ukrainian decommuni-
zation started. The second, symbolic wave was by then receding as well: Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary,
and Poland had all restricted communist symbols, but criminal liability survived in only a handful of
jurisdictions, most states having shifted to administrative penalties.
51
Ukraine moved against this cur-
rent, criminalizing the production, dissemination, and public use of communist symbols with penalties
43 Máté Zombory, "The Anti-Communist Moment,” 36.
44 Berthold Molden, “Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations of Collective
Memory,” Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (2016): 126, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698015596014.
45 Rating Group, “Attitude toward Certain Historical Figures and De-Communization Process in Ukraine,” 17
November 2016, https://www.ratinggroup.ua/en/news/otnoshenie-k-otdelnym-istoricheskim-lichnostyam-i-processu-
dekommunizacii-v-ukraine.
46 Rating Group, “Attitude toward Certain Historical Figures and De-Communization Process in Ukraine.”
47 UNIAN, “Prystrasti za dekomunizatsiyeyu,” 2 June 2016, https://www.unian.ua/society/1363662-pristrasti-za-
dekomunizatsieyu.html.
48 David R. Marples, “Open Letter from Scholars and Experts on Ukraine Re. the So-Called ‘Anti-Communist
Law,’” Krytyka , April 2015.
49 Venice Commission, Joint Interim Opinion on the Law of Ukraine on the Condemnation of the Communist and
National Socialist (Nazi) Regimes and Prohibition of Propaganda of Their Symbols, CDL-AD(2015)041-e (Strasbourg:
Council of Europe, 2015), https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/216281.
50 Helga A. Welsh, "Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European Experiences after 1990,"
Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 3 (1996).
51 Georgiy Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish': A Punitive Turn in the Memory Politics in Ukraine, 2006-2025,"
Memory Studies (2026): 2, https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980261460344.
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of up to five years imprisonment, rising to ten for officials, repeat offenders, and those acting through
the media. Kasianov points to another pattern: legal repression fell disproportionately on marginalized
populations.
52
Between 2015 and 2021, 334 criminal cases under Article 436-1 “The production and
distribution of communist and Nazi symbols, and the propaganda of communist and National Socialist
(Nazi) totalitarian regimes” were initiated, with 24 obtained convictions; between 2022 and mid-2025
the corresponding figures grew to 896 and 307. Of the 279 convictions in the later period for which the
courts recorded social status, 124 were of the unemployed or informally employed, 84 of pensioners,
and 23 of persons with disabilities; the remainder were people of low-skilled occupations, most with
secondary or vocational education.
53
The offences involved a hoodie bearing "USSR," a flag carried
through a city in the hope of selling it, a postcard handed to another person, and, in at least twen-
ty-one instances, the act of liking someone else's post.
54
This situation opens up a further question:
why should a law framed as a defense against external aggression have found its subjects among the
unemployed, the retired, and the disabled? Therefore, it is not the severity of the sanctions alone, but
their class dimension that becomes visible under a closer examination.
The anti-communist consensus inscribed into the memory politics of Eastern European states cre-
ated a rhetorical “trap”: once anti-communism becomes synonymous with democracy, freedom, and
Europeanness, questioning its assumptions becomes exceedingly difficult. Opposition is no longer
treated as political disagreement but as evidence of moral deficiency, and anti-communism becomes a
universal precondition for legitimate participation in public life. This condition affects all temporal di-
mensions simultaneously. In relation to the past, memory legislation prescribed normative interpreta-
tions of the Soviet period, condemning communism, framing it as external and imposed upon Ukraine,
and criminalizing its symbols. In relation to the present, this narrowed the spectrum of available po-
litical positions, limited political participation, restricted oppositional politics, as well as curtailed the
representational possibilities of significant social groups. In relation to the future, anti-communism
foreclosed the very horizon of imaginable alternatives. It appropriated and redefined the category of
revolution itself: celebrating Euromaidan as a progressive revolution, it elevated popular mobilization
as the defining feature of revolutionary action while rendering its socially transformative content sec-
ondary. Meanwhile, the idea of social revolution in its emancipatory sense was archived, as Traverso
has argued, "in the ‘totalitarianism’ chapter in the history of the twentieth century"
55
and labelled crim-
inal. By constitutionally enshrining the aspirations of EU integration and NATO accession, lawmakers
outlined a Ukrainian future in which social-revolutionary transformation had no place. Any attempt
to challenge post-socialist neoliberalism, like in other Eastern European states, was denounced in
Ukraine as "ethically dangerous and unacceptable, resuscitating the ghost of totalitarianism"
56
both
by the state actors and civil society. Speaking of the future in terms of class, redistribution, public
ownership, or social protection shifted at best to the very margins. Any vision of social transformation
extending beyond the horizon of liberal democracy and market capitalism was disqualified in advance.
With it, the nation was firmly established as the primary subject of collective life, insisting on the unity
of interests of all those who belonged to it.
This rhetorical “trap” is further reinforced by the logic of victimhood on which the anti-communist
framework rests. As Behr et al. has shown, anti-communism triggered "the escalation of victimization
52 Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish,'" 16.
53 Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish, 14.
54 Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish,'"11.
55 Enzo Traverso, Le passé, modes d'emploi: Histoire, mémoire, politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), 88, quoted
in Máté Zombory, "The Anti-Communist Moment: Competitive Victimhood in European Politics," Revue d'études
comparatives Est-Ouest 51, no. 2-3 (2020): 32.
56 Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druţǎ, “Zombie Socialism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and
Eastern Europe.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, nos 4-5 (2016): 525-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2016.
1266273.
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in historical debates"
57
– a competitive inflation of suffering claims that forecloses critical deliberation
by replacing it with moral norms. Victimhood, by virtue of its association with innocence, confers
moral authority: it legitimizes the actions of the victimized group while simultaneously deflecting
scrutiny of its own conduct, since the victim, by definition, cannot be held responsible for the circum-
stances of its suffering.
58
In its most elaborated forms, victimhood shades into what has been described
as victimhood nationalism, a form of nationalism built on the memory of collective suffering, in which
the binary opposition between guilt and innocence becomes the primary lens through which political
reality is interpreted.
59
Applied to Ukraine, this logic sees the nation foremost as a perpetual victim of
external oppression – of empires, of Russification, of Soviet domination, of Russian aggression – mak-
ing it structurally difficult to ask whether Ukrainian political actors themselves bear any responsibility
for the country's trajectory both in the past and today. Explanations rooted in contradictory interests,
political choices, or institutional failure risk appearing morally suspect as they complicate the vic-
tim narrative. It is precisely a part of this logic that making the question of what has gone wrong in
Ukraine on Ukraine's own terms not merely uncomfortable but virtually illegitimate.
Anti-communism in Ukraine did not remain confined to the domain of historical memory. The fact
that historically communism in Ukraine was experienced primarily through the Soviet Union made
it possible to collapse the USSR in Ukrainian political discourse into a broader narrative of Russian
imperial domination. Thus, the condemnation of communism frequently merged with the rejection
of Russian culture and language. This conflation was also legally codified. Memory legislation and
decommunization laws explicitly equate the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, and successive forms
of Russian statehood as continuous manifestations of the same imperial project. Thus, the question of
Russian language in Ukraine has shifted away from the realm of cultural rights or administrative con-
venience and has been ultimately treated as a tool for maintaining and protecting the national project.
Since independence, Ukrainian language legislation in relations to Russian language has followed
a clear trajectory: from permissive arrangements that accommodated the country's linguistic diversity
toward increasingly restrictive regulations centered on the exclusive public dominance of Ukrainian.
While the constitution formally guarantees the free development, use, and protection of Russian and
minority languages, subsequent legislation progressively narrowed the practical scope of these guar-
antees. A decisive shift occurred after 2014: one of the first acts of the post-Maidan authorities was
the repeal of the existing law on regional languages, which had granted expanded rights to languag-
es spoken by more than 10 percent of the population in a given region. This trajectory accelerated
through a series of legal and institutional changes culminating in the Law on Ensuring the Functioning
of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language, which established Ukrainian as the obligatory lan-
guage of public communication and significantly restricted the field of use for minority languages.
60

The Law on National Minorities introduced additional limitations on languages associated with states
designated as aggressors or occupiers
61
– a provision that effectively targeted Russian. State institu-
tions responsible for monitoring linguistic compliance expanded powers of supervision over public
57 Valentin Behr, Muriel Blaive, Anemona Constantin, Laure Neumayer, and Máté Zombory, "An Anti-Communist
Consensus: The Black Book of Communism in Pan-European Perspective," Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest 51,
nos. 2-3 (2020): 17, https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055.
58 Elissa Helms, Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women's Activism in Postwar Bosnia-
Herzegovina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 4; Lilie Chouliaraki, Wronged: Victimhood in Public
Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).
59 Jie-Hyun Lim, "Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global
Accountability," in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories , ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian
Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 139.
60 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro zabezpechennia funktsionuvannia ukrains’koi movy iak derzhavnoi," no. 2704-VIII, 25
April 2019, Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy , 2019, no. 21, art. 81, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2704-19#Text.
61 Zakon Ukrainy "Pro natsional’ni menshyny (spilnoty) Ukrainy," no. 2827-IX, 13 December 2022, Vidomosti
Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy, 2023, no. 46, art. 114, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2827-20#Text.
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language use. The process reached its conceptual conclusion in the Constitutional Court's decision of
July 2021, which declared Ukrainian "the code of the nation"
62
and explicitly rejected the notion that
Russian-speaking Ukrainians constitute a distinct socio-demographic group. According to the court's
reasoning, Russian-speaking citizens possess sufficient command of Ukrainian and therefore do not
require collective protections. Their existence was reinterpreted as a consequence of historical Russi-
fication rather than an established social reality to be accommodated.
63
Yet this legal framework disregards the social reality it claimed to address. In 1991-94, 56.2 percent
of Ukrainians identified Russian as their “most comfortable” or “preferable” language of commu-
nication – the figure rose to 81.5 percent in the South-East.
64
Euromaidan and the armed conflict of
2014 did not dramatically alter nationwide distribution of the language of everyday use.
65
Moreover,
in 2015, 52 percent of Ukrainians supported granting Russian official status in regions where the ma-
jority desired it,
66
and on the eve of the full-scale invasion, “almost half of Ukrainian citizens actively
used that language [Russian] primarily or on a par with Ukrainian.”
67
Even in 2023, around 80 percent
of residents of Odesa and Kharkiv reported Russian as the language they use at home.
68
Behind these
figures stand concrete social groups that constitute a majority of the population in several regions.
Having served as the lingua franca of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, Russian in Ukraine
was never a minority language in the conventional sense: it was internalised as a first language not
only by ethnic Russians but by a wide range of ethnic groups
69
and people of various social origin –
teachers, industrial workers, students. Moreover, in the southeastern regions, this process began in the
pre-Soviet era, when the settlements in the region were transforming into industrial and commercial
centers of the Russian empire.
After the outbreak of the 2022 Russian invasion, legal restrictions in language use were accom-
panied by open stigmatization of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in public discourse. Depending on
the context, these people appeared as victims of Russification who needed cultural rehabilitation, as
carriers of foreign influence, as potential collaborators, as remnants of the Soviet past, or as a group
that did not exist.
70
.The minister of education has pointed at a “correlation” between missile strikes
on Ukraine and the Russian language.
71
A columnist in the country's largest online outlet argued that
"there are no Russian-speaking Ukrainians, only Russified ones," simultaneously placing on them "a
62 Rishennia Konstytutsiinoho Sudu Ukrainy u spravi za konstytutsiinym podanniam 51 narodnoho deputata
Ukrainy shchodo vidpovidnosti Konstytutsii Ukrainy (konstytutsiinosti) Zakonu Ukrainy, "Pro zabezpechennia
funktsionuvannia ukrains’koi movy iak derzhavnoi," no. 1-r/2021, case no. 1-179/2019(4094/19), 14 July 2021, 8, 18,
https://ccu.gov.ua/sites/default/files/docs/1_p2021.pdf.
63 Oleksandr Kyselov, “How Language Is Weaponized in Wartime Ukraine,” Jacobin, 5 September 2025, https://
jacobin.com/2025/09/russian-language-ukraine-weaponized-war.
64 Volodymyr Kulyk, "Rodnoi iazyk i iazyk obshcheniia: na chto dolzhna orientirovat'sia iazykovaia politika?"
Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia: Dannye. Analiz. Diskussii, no. 3 (105) (2010): 77.
65 Volodymyr Kulyk, "Language Shift in Time of War: The Abandonment of Russian in Ukraine," Post-Soviet
Affairs 40, no. 3 (2024): 165, https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2024.2318141.
66 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, "Stavlennia do statusu rosiis’koi movy v Ukraini," 10 April 2015,
https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=517&y=2015&m=4.
67 Kulyk, "Language Shift in Time of War,” 160.
68 Rating Sociological Group, Eighth All-Ukrainian Municipal Survey, April-May 2023 (Kyiv: Center for Insights
in Survey Research, 2023), 154, https://web.archive.org/web/20250317124205/https://ratinggroup.ua/files/ratinggroup/
reg_files/municipal_survey_may_2023_ua_-_final.pdf.
69 Liudmila Kudriavtseva, "Status russkogo iazyka vs iazykovaia samoidentifikatsiia grazhdan Ukrainy," Slovo.ru:
Baltiiskii aktsent, no. 3 (2012): 35.
70 "Kremin zaiavyv, shcho ne isnuie rosiis’komovnykh ukraintsiv," NV, 22 November 2023, https://nv.ua/ukr/
ukraine/politics/taras-kremin-rozpoviv-chi-isnuye-ponyattya-rosiyskomovni-ukrajinci-50370471.html.
71 Iuliia Kharchenko, "'U takykh liudei ie problemy': Lisovyi zhorstko vyslovyvsia pro rosiis’ku movu, koly litaiut
rakety," 24 Kanal, 15 February 2026, https://24tv.ua/education/ministr-osviti-lisoviy-pro-movne-pitannya-shkolah-yak-vin-
povyazav_n3010237.
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share of responsibility for this war.”
72
The mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk has supported the launch of lan-
guage patrols to monitor Russian use in public spaces.
73
A well-known actor proposed beating children
for speaking Russian; a writer called for publicly reprimanding parents of "Russified" children.
74
The
current Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language went so far as to question whether
people who had not switched to Ukrainian could be considered homo sapiens at all.
75
What is striking
about these representations is that they assign Russian-speaking Ukrainians virtually every possible
status except that of ordinary citizens capable of defining their subjectivities themselves. They may be
victims, security risks, colonial subjects, or historical anomalies – what they increasingly cease to be
is a segment of population whose existence can be taken for granted.
Every time I hear that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are a “political construct,”
76
I find myself won-
dering who exactly the people around whom I spent my entire life were. Were my parents, whose
bedtime fairy tales gave me a sense of security, and my grandparents, whose accounts of their own
lives gave me a sense of continuity, simply victims who had failed to realize their true identity? The
teachers in my kindergarten and school or the professors at my university, who taught me to doubt, to
ask questions, to be curious, to analyze and to understand, were they at least “homo sapiens”? Were
my neighbors at the apartment block, who solidarily supported one another when times were hard,
and my great-grandparents in the village, who lived through every upheaval of the twentieth century,
nothing more than remnants of Russification? Were my friends, with whom I shared childhood secrets,
first loves, and discoveries of various kinds – in Russian, always – colonized subjects unable to eman-
cipate? Did all these people exist at all? Do I exist?
The question is not rhetorical. From a sociological perspective, what is unfolding can be understood
as a movement from ontological exclusion toward erasure.
77
Exclusion presupposes the existence of
a group that within a given picture of the world is denied rights, resources, or recognition. Erasure
refuses to accept the very existence of the group itself. If Russophone Ukrainians do not exist, then
there can be no legitimate representation of their interests, no claims-making on their behalf, and no
collective grievances requiring political attention. The disappearance of the category removes the pos-
sibility of political contestation altogether: one cannot organize, or demand recognition, as a member
of a group that official discourse insists is not there. This foreclosure has a determinate social address.
Attachment to Russian has not disappeared since February 2022, but it has become concentrated: it
persists most strongly among the working class, for whom questions of language and symbols remain
"far from pressing problems."
78
What presents itself as cultural policy operates as a "social struggle on
72 Dmytro Sinchenko, "'Russkoiazychnykh ukraintsev' ne sushchestvuet. Est' tol'ko rusifitsirovannye," Ukrains’ka
Pravda, 17 June 2022, https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/columns/2022/06/17/7352949/.
73 Vitaliia Kohuch and Andrii Harhara, "V Ivano-Frankivs’ku diiut’ movni patruli - iak vykoriniuiut’ movu
ahresora z ukrains’kykh vulyts’," 5 Kanal, 11 November 2024, https://www.5.ua/suspilstvo/v-ivano-frankivsku-diiut-
movni-patruli-iak-vykoriniuiut-movu-ahresora-z-ukrainskykh-vulyts-338243.html.
74 Mariia Kasii, "Po sr*tsi rizkoiu vidporoty, – aktor Bohdan Beniuk zaklykav byty ditei za rosiis’ku movu,"
24 Kanal, 29 April 2025, https://24tv.ua/show24/bogdan-benyuk-zaklikav-biti-ditey-za-rosiysku-movu-zayava-aktora_
n2810518.
75 "Vsi, khto vvazhaie sebe liudynoiu rozumnoiu, pereishly na ukrains’ku movu, – movna ombudsmenka,"
UNIAN, 5 January 2026, https://www.unian.ua/society/ukrajinska-mova-olena-ivanovska-zaklikala-ukrajinciv-pereyti-na-
derzhavnu-movu-13246389.html.
76 Rishennia Konstytutsiinoho Sudu Ukrainy u spravi za konstytutsiinym podanniam 51 narodnoho deputata
Ukrainy shchodo vidpovidnosti Konstytutsii Ukrainy (konstytutsiinosti) Zakonu Ukrainy "Pro zabezpechennia
funktsionuvannia ukrains’koi movy iak derzhavnoi" no. 1-r/2021, case no. 1-179/2019 (4094/19), 14 July 2021, 8, 18,
https://ccu.gov.ua/sites/default/files/docs/1_p2021.pdf.
77 Kevin Richardson, "Exclusion and Erasure: Two Types of Ontological Oppression," Ergo: An Open Access
Journal of Philosophy 9, no. 23 (2023): 603-22, https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.2279.
78 Daria Saburova, "Novyi symvolichnyi poriadok: robitnychyi klas ta movne pytannia," Spilne / Commons, 25
December 2024, https://commons.com.ua/uk/robitnichij-klas-ta-movne-pitannya/.
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the basis of language"
79
– that is, a form of class struggle, an instrument through which a ruling class
consolidates its symbolic and institutional authority, and whose costs fall on those least equipped to
contest them.
The selectivity of recognition makes the point sharply. Ukraine recognizes and protects the cultural
and linguistic rights of other minorities – Crimean Tatar is preserved as the language of an indige-
nous people, and extended protections for the Hungarian minority have been agreed upon as part of
the EU integration negotiations. Russian, with a far larger body of speakers, is denied an equivalent
scope of use. The point I am making here is not the protection of the Russian language. To demand
protection would be to accept the premise on which the present policy rests – that language is a matter
of security – and merely to dispute which language the state ought to defend. The result would be a
deeper securitization of the question, not its resolution. The point is the lifting of prohibitions and the
destigmatisation of millions of Ukrainian citizens for whom, for a variety of reasons, Russian is a
first language – and therefore one of the instruments by which they comprehend who they are, orient
themselves in the society, make sense of the world, and take up a position within it. Treating Russo-
phone Ukrainians as a problem to be resolved rather than a social reality to be accommodated was
not an unavoidable necessity – heterogeneity can be arranged differently. The world offers numerous
examples of multilingual, multiethnic, and multi-confessional states, many of them post-conflict too,
that have developed workable frameworks for representing the interests of all linguistic and ethnic
groups, including the smallest minorities. Ukraine's borders enclosed precisely such a society – as-
sembled from the fragments of two empires, shaped by centuries of overlapping administrative, lin-
guistic, confessional, and cultural boundaries, themselves the sediment of conflicts and antagonisms,
many of which have not disappeared today. This need not have been an obstacle. Belgium, Canada,
Switzerland, India – all emerged from complex inheritances and found, however imperfectly, ways of
managing internal difference without denying that it existed and without recourse to war. Bosnia, for
example, arrived at a comparable arrangement after the war and with an intent to prevent it in future –
which is instructive in its own way. The model that Ukrainian state-builders reached for, however, was
that of the small, primarily ethnically homogeneous nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe and
the Baltics – states that had, on the one hand, succeeded in moving away from Russia and entering the
European Union, and whose demographic and social composition, on the other hand, differed funda-
mentally from Ukraine's own. The result Ukraine has ended up with was a nation-building project that
treated heterogeneity not as a resource to be mobilized for growth but as a threat to be neutralized. It
is this choice that this essay identifies as the critical turning point.
Securitizing the Nation: Threats and Fear
After three decades of defining the nation and determining who belongs to it, Ukrainian nation-build-
ing after the Russian invasion of 2022 has culminated in the trend that has been gradually developing
from the first years of independence – the securitization of the nation’s ethnic and civil components.
Language, culture, historical memory, political positions, and even the production of scholarly knowl-
edge came to be interpreted as matters of existential threat, simultaneously acting as sources of dan-
ger, objects of protection, and instruments of defense. This expansion of the security concept beyond
immediate physical threats is not a new phenomenon. The Copenhagen School argued as early as the
late 1980s that security is produced discursively: a securitizing move designates a referent object as
existentially threatened and thereby justifies the mobilization of extraordinary measures beyond the
normal bounds of political contestation.
80
This reasoning does not deny the existence of real threats
79 Saburova, "Novyi symvolichnyi poriadok."
80 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1998.
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but draws the attention to their implications for democratic processes beyond the immediate field of
military conflict.
Maria Mälksoo has argued that states under existential threat seek not only to secure their survival
but “to secure their being as a certain sort of being” – to preserve a particular vision of who they are
as a condition of their continued existence.
81
Ukraine is no exception. Waging war against Russia,
Ukrainian authorities have defined with considerable precision what kind of Ukraine is worth defend-
ing and what threatens that project. However, the consequence of turning social, political, cultural, and
ideological problems into security issues is that those who question the state's account of what Ukraine
as a nation and state is are no longer dissenters or opponents but enemies that need to be prosecuted.
For instance, convictions under Article 436-1 rose from twenty-four in the six years from 2015 to 2021
to over three hundred between 2022 and mid-2025, the large majority for posts, reposts, and, in at least
twenty-one instances, likes on social media.
82

Securitization narrows the space of acceptable disagreement selectively: one can criticize the gov-
ernment's economic policy, object to rises in taxes and utility tariffs, condemn the reforms of educa-
tion and healthcare, and speak publicly about the inadequacy of pensions. None of this carries any
legal sanction. Moreover, the current “cardboard protests” demonstrate that criticizing democratic
backsliding of the political regime from the position of the dominant ideology does not carry any le-
gal consequences either. By contrast, there is only one acceptable way to speak about the past, about
identity, the nation, culture, and language. Language policy cannot be openly debated because it is
held to concern national survival; memory laws cannot be questioned because they are held to defend
historical truth; restrictions on political organizations are justified as protecting democracy itself. The
more issues become securitized, the fewer remain available for ordinary disagreement. This asymme-
try is what securitization produces, as it begins to undermine politics itself, seeking to suppress or fix
“the inherent antagonism of the political.”
83
Democratic politics presupposes disagreement. It requires
the existence of adversaries whose ideas may be opposed, but whose right to participate in public de-
bate remains unquestioned. As Mouffe has argued, the distinction between an adversary and an enemy
is fundamental to democratic politics.
84
Under conditions of securitization, however, this distinction
becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Once disagreement is interpreted as a security threat and
the opponent is transformed into an enemy, the question is no longer whether their arguments are con-
vincing but whether their presence is dangerous. As a result, public deliberation gives way to security
management. Questions that would ordinarily belong to the realm of political debate and are collective
by their nature – holidays to celebrate, rituals to follow, partnerships to pursue, political agendas to
discuss – become insulated from contestation and even get criminalized.
Paradoxically, this process depoliticizes precisely those questions that most urgently require po-
litical discussion. By fixing memory, identity, and belonging in advance, it forecloses debate over
what kind of society Ukrainians wish to be living in. The struggle over competing visions of the
common good is replaced by the administration of officially sanctioned truths. What disappears is not
conflict itself but the public space in which conflict can be expressed and negotiated. This produces
a striking paradox at the heart of contemporary Ukrainian public discourse. Dominant political and
academic narratives frequently emphasize unprecedented national unity: the war, it is said, has finally
consolidated Ukraine into a single political nation, dissolving the divisions of the past.
85
Yet the very
existence of so many prohibitions – on symbols, on language, on historical interpretations, on politi-
81 Maria Mälksoo, "'Memory Must Be Defended': Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security," Security Dialogue
46, no. 3 (2015): 224.
82 Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish.'"
83 Mälksoo, "'Memory Must Be Defended,'" 227.
84 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 6-7.
85 Olga Kutsenko, “From Divided Society to Civic Nation? The Rise of Civic Nationalism in Ukraine,”
Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 39, no. 1 (2026): 24-43.
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cal positions – points to the fact that there are views within Ukrainian society whose mere existence
is deemed incompatible with national cohesion. Unity, in this account, is thus perceived through the
elimination of dissent. Claimed to strengthen national identity, the process of securitization actually
leads to the narrowing of the political community, in which those who challenge that narrative in-
creasingly appear not as political opponents but as threats. The logic of securitization thus deepens
the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion based on either political stands or ethnicity by labeling these
people as a source of threat. What began as an attempt to define the nation evolves into an attempt to
secure that definition against alternative understandings of social reality.
The securitization of public life does not remain at the level of legislation and institutional design,
penetrating further into everyday interactions. Cases under Articles 436-1 were regularly initiated on
the basis of anonymous reports and complaints from vigilant citizens: neighbors, colleagues, acquaint-
ances.
86
Once threats are held to reside not only beyond the state's borders but within society itself,
fellow citizens become potential sources of danger. This is manifested through criminal prosecutions
for liking and reposting communist symbols on social media; fines for using the Russian language in
public; the unchecked stigmatizing rhetoric of officials and activists calling for harsh sanctions against
"unfit" citizens; threats from far-right groups that go unaddressed by authorities and are popularized
through media; and the persistent refusal of both academic and media analysis to treat these phenom-
ena as problems worthy of serious attention. The result, at the affective level, is a society dominated
by fear.
Typically treated as a psychological phenomenon, fear has social and political implications. While
individuals may experience what might be called "natural" emotional responses to immediate physical
stimuli, political emotions are responses to material and social developments, produced and sustained
institutionally.
87
Fear is one of the central political emotions. Hobbes gave political fear its canonical
formulation: the fear of death, the inevitable consequence of the war of all against all, pushes one
to surrender freedom to the sovereign in exchange for security. A major tragedy, like war, terrorist
attack, genocide, provides real grounds for manipulating fear, while simultaneously legitimizing a
social order that may deploy repressive means in response, perpetuating violence. In such moments,
intellectuals and politicians define who and what poses a threat and resort to fear as a “source of unity”
against the threat.
88
At the same time, the source of politically produced fear is typically presented as
moral or even existential, which means that the struggle against it appears not as a contest over power
but as a struggle for survival.
Fear of an external enemy has historically served as an instrument of popular consolidation and elite
control. As Robin has shown, fear is consistently deployed to instill specific political values: "the fear
of civil war is supposed to breed a respect for the rule of law, the fear of totalitarianism an apprecia-
tion for liberal democracy, the fear of fundamentalism support for toleration and pluralism."
89
Yet this
consolidation against outer threat does not presuppose the absence of fear directed inward – fear of
the authorities, sanctions, marginalisation and exclusion. On the contrary, fear is an instrument of ine-
quality, as it sustains hierarchies in which some determine what is to be feared and others comply.
90
In
Ukraine, fear operates manifold. Fear of death, destruction, various losses is experienced by millions
of Ukrainians as a response to the dangers of the war. Fear is utilized by authorities and public fig-
ures to mobilize people to fight the war on the frontline and to consolidate society against designated
86 Kasianov, "'To Discipline and Punish'"; Komarovskyi and Volokha, “Prison for ‘Likes’ in the Social Networks?”
87 See Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2014.
88 Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-15.
89 Robin, Fear, 4.
90 Robin, Fear, 18-20.
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threats. The qualities associated with these threats, however, are not confined to Russia and Russians:
they are present, in varying degrees, across a significant part of Ukrainian society itself. The result is
that fear of the external enemy and fear of repression or marginalization in one's own state and society
become superimposed. As Ahmed has argued, fear does not merely respond to pre-existing threats – it
actively produces the distinctions between those who belong and those who do not.
91
If securitization
establishes the boundaries of acceptable politics, fear becomes the mechanism through which those
boundaries are continuously maintained and enforced. Unity, in this account, is achieved less through
shared national aspiration than through the fear of being identified as standing outside the nation.
Thus, this form of integration is, paradoxically, a form of fragmentation, one that simultaneously
erodes trust and reinforces atomization. It prevents people from making independent judgments, from
realizing shared interests, and from building the forms of solidarity that collective action requires.
Instead, it increases social distance and generates suspicion. In interviews conducted for my doctoral
thesis, respondents consistently reported that they are able to discuss major political questions – the
ones that affect the life of the entire society and whose resolution requires public deliberation – only
within the smallest and most trusted circles of personal relationships, while becoming increasingly
cautious in their interactions with strangers, colleagues, and institutions. Public life contracts. Mass
politics becomes unattainable. Informal self-censorship expands. The result is collective withdrawal:
social relations become structured less by cooperation and solidarity than by the anticipation of po-
tential sanctions. In this sense, fear empowers the hegemony struggle of the ruling elites, in which
fear operates simultaneously through coercion, for those who comply being afraid of direct legal or
physical consequences, and through consent, for those who have internalized the boundaries of the
permissible. Thus, what presents itself as national unity at the level of social relations is backed not
least by fear.
The consequences of this affective climate are recognized in the field of knowledge production.
Fear increasingly structures academic life in Ukrainian studies at every level. The choice of research
topic, the formulation of research questions, the language in which findings are presented – all are
shaped by the anticipation of consequences. Entire domains of social life that generate significant
tension – violent mobilization, draft evasion, illegal border crossing, political imprisonment, language
conflicts – remain effectively underresearched because engaging with them carries political risk. Re-
spondents hesitate to express views that diverge from socially approved narratives or refuse to answer
altogether – the rate of non-response to sensitive questions in surveys and interviews has reached lev-
els that themselves constitute a finding about the state of public affairs.
92
Academic disagreements are
transformed into campaigns of denunciation, public shaming, and demands for ideological conform-
ity, expressed by the collective letter against “inconvenient” researchers, the blacklisting of academ-
ic publications, campaigns against lectures deemed politically inconvenient. One begins to wonder
whether a colleague has come to a conference to engage in debate or to report ideological deviations.
One hesitates before submitting a manuscript, uncertain whether a particular formulation violates an
existing law or will provoke accusations of disloyalty. Peer-review process is evolving into a means
of conveying threats. Even well-established scholars privately admit to self-censoring out of fear of
marginalization or misinterpretation. The implicit assumption behind every research is that the only
legitimate scholarly commitment during wartime is to serve the interests of the nation. Knowledge
production is subject to police-style surveillance, the borders of which are defined by political loyalty.
A public sphere governed by fear cannot reliably generate knowledge about itself, nor can schol-
arship produce reliable knowledge about the society it studies. A scholarship in which fear forecloses
91 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
92 See Kit Rickard, Gerard Toal, Kristin M. Bakke, and John O’Loughlin, “How Reliable Are Polls in Wartime
Ukraine?” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 830 (15 February 2023), https://www.ponarseurasia.org/how-reliable-are-
polls-in-wartime-ukraine/.
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departure from the dominant approach cannot avoid stagnation, as it loses the capacity to innovate.
Younger researchers will reproduce the same mode of thinking rather than propose new approaches to
the problems that matter. More broadly, the more dangerous certain questions become, the less capable
a society is of understanding its own condition, and the less capable it becomes of imagining alterna-
tives to that condition, or even improvements upon it. I include my own position in this description
not as a dramatic gesture. In writing this text I do not know how to establish whether I have violated
a law and have already become a criminal, or whether I will still be permitted to remain a sociologist
who asks questions about Ukrainian society and looks for answers to them. The fact that I cannot de-
termine this is not a private difficulty but an illustration of the state of the legal system that the Venice
Commission identified as “vague” when it issued its conclusions on the “decommunization” laws.
93
The war, of course, provides a real and immediate source of danger. Missiles, occupation, dis-
placement, and death are not imagined threats but lived realities – and for many of those who bear the
additional burden of linguistic or ideological suspicion, these realities are experienced with particular
intensity. It would be a profound misreading of this essay to suggest otherwise. Precisely because the
danger is real, it becomes an exceptionally powerful legitimating principle – one under which the
“redistribution of fear,”
94
rather than its reduction, becomes the primary governing logic. What is pre-
sented as a necessary response to existential threat is simultaneously a mechanism for consolidating
the symbolic power of a particular vision of Ukraine over all others. The society is thus becoming pro-
gressively less capable of debating what kind of society it wishes to be and increasingly less capable
of including within that debate all those who might have something controversial to contribute to it.
Only a public sphere, in which heterogeneity is treated as a resource rather than a threat, could provide
the foundation for the kind of unity that might actually sustain a society through war and beyond it.
Conclusion: Conditions for Change
Surveying thirty-five years of Ukrainian independence, a pattern becomes visible: as the state sank
deeper into various overlapping crises, the public agenda was dominated not by responses to the root
causes of crises but by decisions in the domain of identity politics, while deindustrialization, the dis-
mantling of the welfare state, and the concentration of wealth in oligarchic hands proceeded largely
outside public debate. The political community of the Ukrainian state was re-defined in national cat-
egories, and the development of the nation was treated as a self-sufficient end rather than as a means
toward improving the living conditions of the population. Over time, the conception of the nation
narrowed not through a movement from civic to ethnic nationalism, or the reverse, but through their
coexistence and mutual reinforcement. The two together narrowed the conception of the nation far
more severely than either would have alone: language, culture, ideology, civic orientation – all became
subjects of restrictive institutional regulation, producing an ideal type of Ukrainian citizen from which
deviation grew increasingly impermissible. The permissible variations of Ukrainian nationhood have
narrowed to the point where even the most committed patriot may soon find themselves unable to meet
its requirements. War then legitimised the securitization of the entire process, seeing the constitutive
elements of nation-building through the lens of threat and security.
What has emerged from these processes is, in Foucauldian terms, a regime of truth: a framework
that organizes power relations within a society by producing a particular vision of reality not as the
outcome of social processes, historical developments, and power struggles, but as truth itself. Truth
stands above critique, doubt, disagreement, defining in advance what can be meaningfully said and
what falls outside the bounds of serious discussion. It does not even require consensus, it is just taken
for granted. The regime of truth about what Ukraine is as a state and society operates in precisely this
93 Venice Commission. Joint Interim Opinion.
94 Kyselov, “How Language Is Weaponized.”
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way, and it does so at two levels simultaneously. Firstly, it deepens the crisis of hegemony
95
rather than
resolving it: stable hegemonic power rests on the production of consent and requires concessions to
subaltern groups – it must offer enough to those it governs to make their compliance appear voluntary.
Resting on extensive civil society structures and a broad institutional infrastructure, this regime pro-
duces consent up to a point. But as the boundaries of the permissible narrow and concessions give way
to exclusion and compulsion, it relies increasingly on coercion: threats, prohibitions, marginalization,
and criminalization. Secondly, the same regime of truth governs the dominant political and academic
discourse about Ukraine through the proposition with which this essay began: that Russia is the sole
source of Ukraine's failures. However, if Russia explains everything, then nothing internal to Ukraine
requires explanation – and what requires no explanation cannot be analyzed, and what cannot be ana-
lyzed cannot be deliberately changed. This dynamic does not merely obscure the problem – it deepens
it and reproduces it continuously. It is not only that things have gone wrong in Ukraine. It is that the
conditions for identifying what went wrong, for discussing it publicly, and for studying it seriously
have themselves been eroded.
The war unleashed by Russia is, obviously, an enormous threat that is destroying Ukrainian soci-
ety and the Ukrainian state, and only its immediate end can significantly improve Ukraine's position.
But is there anything within the sphere of responsibility of Ukrainian actors that might have been
organized differently? This essay has been an attempt to identify some of those areas. Yet what it
describes only points to what has gone wrong. It maps the symptoms of a structural crisis; the next
step would be to examine their causes in depth. A proper diagnosis would require locating the source
of the crisis and formulating the means of addressing it. That demands answering not only what went
wrong but why: why these choices were made, who benefited from them and who lost, what alterna-
tives were foreclosed and by whom, and what social forces might yet produce different outcomes. It
would, moreover, be insufficient and ultimately unfair to direct this question exclusively at Ukraine.
As Ishchenko argues in this issue, Ukraine is not an anomaly but a norm, or even "the vanguard of the
world in crisis":
96
a country moving at the forefront of dynamics visible, perhaps, in less acute form,
across much of the globe, and showing the most extreme futures that may await other societies if the
trajectory remains unchanged. The hollowing out of democratic deliberation, the replacement of the
politics of redistribution by the politics of recognition,
97
the securitization of dissent, the concentration
of wealth amid the erosion of public institutions – none of these is uniquely Ukrainian. In this sense,
the question "what has gone wrong in Ukraine?" is a version of a larger question about what is going
wrong in the world of “democratic capitalism” after "the end of history" – and the urgency of asking
it is not diminished by the difficulty of doing so.
Importantly, that question cannot be answered from a position of fear. Any answer produced under
such conditions will have been shaped in advance by the boundaries of the permissible – alternative
accounts will be either structurally suppressed, never voiced at all, or driven toward radicalization, be-
coming the source of the next escalation within Ukrainian society. The de-securitization of the public
sphere and of the components of nation-building is a practical precondition for any serious conver-
sation about Ukraine's future. Concretely, it would mean returning politics to Ukraine: reopening the
space of contestation over power so that practices, rather than prohibitions, determine what counts as
true and what deserves support. It would mean creating conditions under which different visions of the
present and the future can be articulated – so that Ukrainians themselves, rather than the prescriptions
of any authority, can deliberate about where and how they wish to go. It would also mean restoring
95 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Class or Regional Cleavage? The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s ‘East/West’ Divide,”
European Societies 26, no. 2 (2024): 8-16, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2023.2275589.
96 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “The Broken Mirror of the World in Crisis,” The Ukrainian Forum, forthcoming 2026.
97 Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left
Review, no. I/212 (July-August 1995), 68-70, https://doi.org/10.64590/4rl.
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the conditions for genuine scholarly debate beyond propaganda and fearful analysis at the edge of
the permissible, never quite knowing which line will prove fatal. Neither is scholarship, and neither
serves Ukraine.
I am finishing this text in Kharkiv, as the fifth year of the war draws to a close. I write these final
lines on the day two Russian FPV drones fly into my neighbors' cars and kill them on the only road
into our district – the road where I know every tree at the verge and every crack in the surface, the
road that felt like the most mundane part of my existence and therefore, by definition, the one that
could hide no danger. These days I am afraid to drive home. Looking for a safer detour, of which
there is none, I think: yes, something in Ukraine has indeed gone wrong, if the safest place I have
ever known feels unsafe. Are the obvious crimes committed by Russia a sufficient reason to stop
speaking about Ukraine altogether or to postpone the study of Ukrainian society until the violence
ends? Does this fear cancel out all the others I have described in this essay? If anything, it sharpens
them. Fear of what comes from outside – bombs, missiles, drones, occupation – is compounded
by fear of what may come from within: prison terms for likes, violent conscription in the streets,
expulsion from the ranks of "homo sapiens" on grounds of language. Both narrow what people in
Ukraine are able to do with their lives. Precisely for this reason we must retain every opportunity
to study what is happening in our society, to discuss it, and to formulate alternatives. We cannot af-
ford to "read less" about Ukraine. We must attend to it constantly, in every dimension, while doing
everything possible to end the war immediately.
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