Translated by Andrew Kopets
What does it mean to be Ukrainian today? A question that, in post-Soviet society, had been avoided just twenty years ago, has now become a clear dividing line, cultural, linguistic, and political. Ukrainian identity, like Ukrainian people, is under fire, both, literally, with missiles and figuratively subjected to hostile narratives that for years embedded themselves into the cultural body of Ukrainian society. Russian identity in Ukraine has learned to disguise itself as Ukrainian, slipping in its symbols in place of local ones, presenting its memory as a “shared history,” offering its language as a “convenient alternative”. It worked like a virus seeking to replace a cell from within.
And yet now, Ukrainian-ness shines most clearly. It is not about ethnic roots or a set of folkloric accessories. It is about choice. A conscious, deliberate, and irreversible choice. It’s about the right to call things by their names, to reject imposed “sharedness” and to reclaim meaning. To be Ukrainian is to assert the right to one’s authentic self, a self that for centuries was diluted, rejected and replaced under the guise of “brotherhood”.
Ukrainian identity has shifted from heritage to a conscious stance. It is reborn whenever a Ukrainian refuses to internalize and accept Russian cultural codes; whenever language, culture, and memory cease to be neutral and become acts of political assertion. From an abstraction, identity grows into a symbolic act of freedom, a daily exercise of an inherent national and personal right to be oneself.
National Identity in the 21st Century
In a world where borders are becoming conditional and cultures interact at the speed of an internet connection, national identity is no longer a matter of ethnicity. It is not preserved in genes, fixed in folklore, or written into religious practice. Today, a nation is first and foremost a choice: a collective decision to stand together, to speak a shared symbolic language, to embrace shared meanings, and to assume collective responsibility. Benedict Anderson famously called a nation an “imagined community”—not because it is fictitious, but because it exists in the minds of people who may never meet, yet share the history, values, and political fate.
This “imagined community” resides within two intertwined dimensions: the objective and the subjective. The objective is measurable and verifiable. Citizenship. The language spoken in public spaces. State institutions that set the rules of the game. The territory within which a political project is enacted. Shared historical memory, serving not as a list of dates, but as an agreed-upon framework for interpreting the past. The subjective dimension is more elusive. It cannot be quantified: the sense of belonging, the inner solidarity, the willingness to share responsibility for the future. A person may lack the “perfect” objective markers, yet belong to a nation far more deeply than someone who is a citizen on paper but does not feel part of the community.
In Ukraine, this balance has long been disrupted. Imperial policies systematically erased the objective markers of Ukrainian identity—language, history, political agency, all while imposing foreign cultural codes under the guise of a “shared culture”. Russia engineered an environment in which a person could consider themselves Ukrainian, yet live according to Russian cultural coordinates in practice. For this reason, the question of identity in Ukraine is not theoretical, but is a practical matter of survival.
Today, being part of the Ukrainian nation is not about declaring, but it is about acting. Identity is grounded in the awareness that everyday choices, including the language you speak, the symbols you embrace, the history you defend, all shape the community you belong to. The nation ceases to be fate and becomes practice. And this is exactly how the Ukrainian nation is being forged today, through the conscious decision to step out of a foreign cultural code and reclaim the right to your own name.
Ukrainian Identity: A History of Constant Renewal
Ukrainian identity is sometimes portrayed as ethnocentric or excessively defensive. Yet, this defensiveness did not arise from a desire to shut the world out. It emerged from centuries of experience by which the neighboring states like Russia, Poland, Hungary, to varying degrees consistently sought to constrain the development of Ukrainian culture, language, and political agency. When your identity is systematically replaced with a foreign one, any attempt to reclaim it is branded as “radicalism”, which it is, but only in the eyes of the aggressor. In reality, it is a basic act of self-preservation.
Russia stands as the longest-lasting and most aggressive example. The Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876 banned the Ukrainian language from education, publishing, and public life. Soviet russification carried this project to completion, producing generations of “Soviet people” who lived in a Ukrainian environment while thinking through Russian cultural codes. This was a deliberate social experiment designed to replace Ukrainian identity. Although, Russia was not alone. The interwar Polish state pursued a policy of “pacification” in relation to the Ukrainian movement in Galicia and Volhynia. Ukrainian schools were shut down, the local church was restricted and Ukrainian intellectuals were persecuted. The Bereza Kartuska concentration camp existed for the extrajudicial detention of activists from ethnic minorities, primarily Ukrainians. Polish authorities sought to assimilate Ukrainians into the project of a “single Polish nation,” where Ukrainianness was tolerated as folklore, yet denied political subjectivity. Even place names were altered to erase Ukrainian presence from public space. Hungary, which controlled Transcarpathia in various periods, especially before 1918 and during the occupation of 1938–1944, actively pursued Magyarization. Ukrainian schools were replaced with Hungarian ones, Hungarian administration pushed out the local language, and Ukrainian identity was either ignored or reduced to a regional dialect stripped of political rights. Today, Budapest systematically promotes the narrative of “Rusyn” separateness from Ukrainians, reproducing old imperial practices.
These regimes differed in form but produced the same outcome. Ukrainian identity was forced to survive between a number of external centers of power, each annexing its cultural territory. This is why Ukrainian identity has never been ethnocentric. It was not built on ideas of blood purity or fantasies of ethnic exclusivity. On the contrary, it has always remained open—polyethnic, receptive to diverse cultural experiences. Yet, it could not afford to dissolve. Wherever Ukraine failed to defend its boundaries, they were subjected to foreign cultural projects.
The contemporary Ukrainian focus on language, memory, and an independent historical vision grew out of centuries of pressure, when the right to name ourselves as a distinct community had to be reclaimed again and again. Ukrainian identity is not about distancing oneself from others; it is about resisting assimilation within a foreign cultural framework.
Language as the Core, but Not the Only Foundation
Language is a crucial layer of identity, yet it is a mistake to reduce all of Ukrainianness to a linguistic feature. Ukrainian is neither a totem nor a dogma. It functions more like a culture’s nervous system, transmitting experience, humor, worldview, and historical memory. When a language disappears, the living link to one’s own tradition vanishes, a loss that cannot be restored through decrees or laws.
Ukrainian history has made language a sensitive issue. After centuries of Russification, Polonization, and Magyarization, language ceased to be merely a tool of communication. It became a battlefield not because Ukrainians sought linguistic maximalism, but because language proved to be the last frontier separating Ukrainian identity from complete assimilation into foreign projects. For imperialistic agents linguistic substitution has always been a key instrument. Once a name is changed, a toponym, the accent, suddenly you are “part of an empire”, not quite the same as you were yesterday. Russian identity infiltrated Ukrainian cultural spaces for decades under the guise of “natural bilingualism”.
Yet one thing is crucial: Ukrainian identity does not exclude those who are only approaching the language. Language is not a barrier; it is a doorway, opening ever wider. One becomes Ukrainian not by mastering perfect grammar, but by recognizing that language is the foundation of a community’s future. It is what makes identity whole.
Language is not the sole marker, yet without it, a nation loses the ability to speak for itself in its own words. This is its irreplaceable value: it does not define Ukrainianness on its own, but it makes its existence possible. Ukrainians do not possess a “grand protective ocean” shielding them from invasion, nor a complex system of beliefs and strict rules like those that allowed the Jewish people to preserve their identity through centuries without a state. But we have the Ukrainian language.
Russian as a Channel for Hostile Narratives
The problem of the Russian language in Ukraine has never been about phonetics or daily habits. It is about how narratives are embedded through language. For decades, Russian has been the principal instrument of imperial policy: through it, Russian ideas of “shared history,” “brotherly peoples” and a “common cultural space” were spread across Ukraine. Wherever Russian was spoken, meanings that undermined Ukrainian agency subtly took root. Even today, during wartime, Russians demand state status for the Russian language in Ukraine. Through pressure, force, and aggression Russian became the channel through which the empire communicated and spread narratives with the local population.
This is not the fault of individuals, but the outcome of a system. Since the times of the Russian Empire, Russian language had been considered an element of “ruling elite prestige”. Russian was spoken by administrators, officials, the army, universities, but also swindlers, thieves, and sex workers. The Soviet era only reinforced this hierarchy, by which Ukrainian was considered rural, everyday, “peasant” language. At the same time Russian was the language of career, culture, and modernity. In this model, choosing Russian was imposed as a “factor of success,” while Ukrainian was automatically marginalized.
This behavioral inertia persists today. The assertiveness of the Russian-speaking model reflects an imposed expectation that Russian should be the language of “convenience”, a reflex in which two people switch to Russian not because it is better for communication, but because it was traditionally considered “normal”. This model displaces Ukrainian from the public sphere even without direct coercion: it is enough for one speaker to assert themselves more insistently, more confidently and the linguistic space automatically shifts toward Russian.
This is how the empire’s cultural inertia operates—not through occupation orders, bans, or book burnings, but through influencing everyday decisions that may seem trivial, yet, over time, shape the landscape of cultural environment. Can there be “Russian-speaking Ukrainians”? The answer is assertive, but with an implied understanding that this Russian-speaking identity is not neutral. It did not arise naturally; it is the result of a systemic policy that attempted to assimilate entire generations of Ukrainians, by indoctrinating them into a foreign cultural paradigm aimed at imperialistic expansion. This is neither a stigma nor an accident, but a colonial legacy that must be studied and understood and taken into account in the context of modern policy-making.
Objective and Subjective Factors of National Identity
When we consider modern Ukrainian identity, it is tempting to look for it in obvious markers: language, passport, ancestry. These are objective, yet they do not provide the full context. To be Ukrainian today means combining these objective criteria with a conscious internal stance, translated into everyday decisions or context, making the identity truly real, rather than merely declarative.
Among objective criteria, a prominent place belongs to citizenship. It formally defines a member of a political community, while imposing legal rights and obligations. Nevertheless, a passport alone does not make a person Ukrainian.
When Ukraine restored independence in 1991, Ukrainian passports were automatically issued to all citizens of the former USSR who were permanently residing on its territory at the time of the declaration of independence. This included not only ethnic Ukrainians but also a significant number of Russians and their descendants who had settled here under the Soviet administrative system. According to the last population census in the Ukrainian SSR (1989), 11,355,582 people identified as Russian. It is reasonable to assume that this group, while formally equal in terms of rights, had a different political experience, as well as different cultural codes that did not align with the aspirations of Ukrainians to build their own state. Russian political will repeatedly influenced key events in Ukrainian modern history. For example, in the 1991 elections, they obstructed the pro-Ukrainian candidate Vyacheslav Chornovil and later actively supported pro-Russian parties, shaping political processes and state policy.
Equally crucial to holding citizenship is participation in the political nation—the understanding that your actions and voting choices affect the shared future of the country. Using Ukrainian language in daily life is another marker that allows one to be fully included as a participant in the cultural and social life of the community. Additional markers include lifestyle and cultural practices like taking part in communal celebrations, preserving ancestral traditions, reading Ukrainian literature and media, and engaging with the symbols and narratives of Ukrainian culture. Finally, an importnat market is respect for the Ukrainian political project through understanding its values and willingness to uphold them even in difficult times being essential.
Subjective criteria are no less important, distinguishing a formal passive “Ukrainian” from a politically active one:
- Self-identification: feeling part of the Ukrainian community, regardless of language or birthplace.
- Willingness to act for the Ukrainian community: volunteering, protecting cultural space, political engagement, linguistic resilience, etc.
- Sense of belonging: an internal awareness that one’s own life and future are closely related to Ukraine’s fate.
- Shared memory and symbolic space: sharing history, appreciation for cultural and historic figures, as well as cultural codes that create collective consciousness capable of surviving aggressive foreign narratives.
Every Ukrainian’s words, cultural practices, and political actions affect the country and its future. Being Ukrainian means not only “belonging,” but making a choice and acting on it. This choice is not about Ukrainian or Russian, it is about disengagement and responsibility.
Ukrainian identity today is born through action, determining whether a person is willing to support their community, stand with those defending freedom, or reconsider habits and language practices to avoid reproducing hostile colonial cultural narratives. Ukrainian identity is about a routine practice that repeatedly confirms the choice in favor of freedom.
In times of war, this governing principle becomes especially evident. Identity manifests in volunteering, readiness to serve in the military, and linguistic resilience manifested publicly through refusing to consume Russian content. It is expressed in how one reacts to injustice, how one speaks about Ukraine abroad, what political decisions are supported and the choice of political representatives. Each of these steps is part of a larger mosaic of shared responsibility.
Sources and Further Reading:
Benedict Anderson . Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Serhii Plokhy. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2015.
Timothy Snyder. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Orest Subtelny. Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Roman Szporluk. Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000.
Yaroslav Hrytsak. Essays in Ukrainian History: Making of the Modern Ukrainian Nation. Kyiv: Krytyka, 2019.
Всесоюзная перепись населения 1989 года. Национальный состав населения по республикам СССР.
