National Identity in Time of War: Ukraine after the Russian Aggressions of 2014 and 2022

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes changes in Ukrainian national identity in the wake of Russian military interventions of 2014 and 2022. It is based on five nationwide surveys from different years, from before the 2014 intervention to ten months into the full-blown invasion of 2022, and two series of focus group discussions conducted in the same cities (Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Chernivtsi) in early 2015 and mid-2022. My analysis demonstrates that in the wake of foreign aggressions, national identity not only became more salient to Ukrainians, it acquired a more radical meaning, thus imbuing the supposedly civic attachment to homeland with potentially exclusive ethnocultural content.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Armed Forces of Ukraine under whose protection I was able to work on this article in Kyiv at the time of Russian invasion. My work was facilitated by a non-residential fellowship awarded by the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (Delmenhorst, Germany). Thanks are also due to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The 2012 survey was made possible by a grant awarded to me by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA from the Natalia Danylchenko Fund. The 2014 survey was commissioned by the Council of Europe. The February 2017 survey, designed in collaboration with Henry Hale, was funded from our research budgets at the George Washington University and Yale University, respectively. The May 2017 survey was made possible by a grant that the Research Initiative on Democratic Reforms in Ukraine received from the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Alberta. The 2022 survey and the 2015 focus group discussions were funded from grants awarded to me by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. The 2022 focus groups were commissioned by the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia.