Understanding Ukrainian society before and after the Russian invasion

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a watershed moment in modern European history. It quickly became evident that the war would have significant consequences for Europe's security, politics, and economy. Ukraine is shaken by the invasion to an extent comparable to the devastation during the Second World War. As Editors of European Societies, we realized that there was little sociological research on Ukraine, one of the largest European countries. Only a handful of articles were ever published on Ukraine in European Societies or other leading general sociological journals. Thus, we initiated a Special Issue on ‘Understanding Ukrainian Society Before and After the Russian Invasion’, co-edited by two Ukrainian sociologists, Tamara Martsenyuk from the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Tymofii Brik from Kyiv Schools of Economics.

This Special Issue was a large collective effort lasting for more than two years. The Editors received 53 extended abstracts in response to the initial call, out of which 28 were invited to submit a full manuscript. After the peer review process, European Societies accepted for publication the 17 manuscripts that make up the articles of this issue. Writing up manuscripts and reviewing them offered hurdles, as some Ukrainian authors stayed in the country while others left and became refugees. Furthermore, recruiting Reviewers for the Special Issue manuscripts was a challenge due to the necessary area-specific knowledge. We also want to thank two Associate Editors of the journal, Türkay Nefes and Conrad Ziller, who handled a number of manuscripts. First and foremost, we are particularly grateful to the following Reviewers who contributed to peer review and decision-making:

Akaliyski, Plamen

Aksyonova, Svitlana

Andžāns, Māris

Barrie, Christopher

Boersma, Kees

Burlyuk, Olga

Byelikova, Yuliya

Carlsen, Hjalmar

Dimitrova, Antoaneta

Draznova, Lenka

Drbohlav, Dusan

Fedorenko, Kostiantyn

Hernández Aguilar, Luis

Hrycak, Alexandra

Jarosz, Ewa

Katchanovski, Ivan

Khanenko-Friesen, Natalia

Khutkyy, Dmytro

Koikkalainen, Saara

Krakhmalova, Kateryna

Kreis, Ramona

Kulyk, Volodymyr

Lazarenko, Valeria

Makhortykh, Mykola

Marchenko, Alla

Mikolai, Julia

Muszalik, Marta

Mykhnenko, Vlad

Narvselius, Eleonora

Nelson, Laura K.

Pawlak, Mikołaj

Phillips, Sarah

Popova, Maria

Pozniak, Oleksii

Radomska, Marietta

Riabchuk, Anastasia

Romanova, Valentyna

Schmäing, Sophie

Siim, Birte

Stecker, Christian

Stepurko, Tetiana

Stewart, Susan

Strelnyk, Olena

Umland, Andreas

Wallaschek, Stefan

Wynnyckyj, Mychailo

We do not intend to summarize the wide variety of studies included in the Special Issue here, but rather, we will outline the authors’ characteristics and a number of key topics that the articles cover. The Special Issue achieved a good balance of gender and institutional and national representation as 19 out of 34 authors are female, while half of the authors have either institutional affiliations in Ukraine or are Ukrainians who work in other countries.

Regarding the topics covered, Zaiets (2023) provides one of the first ethnographic accounts of the war from the frontline in the initial months of the Russian invasion. A number of contributions on local democracy (Schmäing 2023), civil society (Zarembo and Martin 2023), and fighting against corruption (Yanchenko and Zulianello 2023) give us some tentative answers about the resilience of Ukrainian society and newly-identified challenges during the war. Three articles of the Special Issue deal with various aspects of inequalities, such as the discourse on intellectual elites in Ukraine (Shchepetylnykova 2023), class conflict and regional differences (Ishchenko 2023), and health inequalities experienced by refugees after fleeing the country (Mazhak et al. 2023).

Types of solidarity is another central topic of this Special Issue; articles highlighting the comparison of Ukrainian and Syrian refugees on Twitter (Weber et al. 2023), the online mobilization of informal civic society in Denmark (Bang Carlsen et al. 2023), specific support given to Ukrainian refugees in two Polish cities of Lublin and Lutsk (Podgórska et al. 2023), as well as the unique challenges experienced by the members of the Ukrainian LGBTIQ community after leaving the country in the wake of the war (Shevtsova 2023). Górny and van der Zwan (2024) examine the wave of labor migration in the context of the early stage of Russian aggression against Ukraine that started in 2014. Two contributions explicitly examine forced displacement as the result of the ongoing war and explore the drivers behind the decision-making processes (Maidanik 2023; Tarkhanova and Pyrogova 2023). Further, Kuzmuk (2024) qualitatively explores post-migration Ukrainian refugee women’s experiences in Poland in the initial phase of the war. A contribution from Akaliyski and Reeskens (2023) maps Ukrainian values and places them between the Slavic-Orthodox and European contexts, while Goshylyk and Goshylyk (2024) explore the role of the Ukrainian–American non-profit organization in constructing diasporic Ukrainian identity through personal and collective narratives.

At the time of completion of this Special Issue, we do not know how long the war will last and how specifically it will end, yet we are convinced that increasing understanding of the Ukrainian society through a sociological lens will be important in the long process of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

Disclosure statement

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