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).