Strategic Horizons --
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Abstract
This article examines Ukraine’s evolving foreign policy role conceptions through the lens of national identity and sovereignty formation under external threat. Focusing on four critical stages—from post-Soviet independence to the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion—it argues that Ukraine’s self-image as an independent actor has been progressively forged through conflict with Russia. Initially, sovereignty was ascribed through international recognition and nuclear disarmament. Over time, however, it became an achieved status, asserted through democratic uprisings, public mobilization, and military resistance. Drawing on constructivist and realist insights, the article traces how Ukraine’s identity shifted from ambiguous post-Soviet statehood to a deliberate Western alignment rooted in rule of law, anticorruption, and political autonomy. Russian aggression has acted as both threat and catalyst, accelerating state-building and solidifying Ukraine’s sovereign posture. The study contributes to broader debates on how small states construct self-image and navigate contested sovereignty in the shadow of hegemonic powers.
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When new states emerge onto the global stage, they face an immediate triad of imperatives: to build a nation, construct functioning institutions, and project a coherent identity to the international community. The manner in which states pursue these objectives varies, but the international system—the structural environment in which they operate—exerts a powerful socializing force that shapes their foreign policy role conceptions.
Ukraine’s independence in 1991 marked its formal separation from the Soviet Union, but not a clean break from its geopolitical past. While Kyiv began integrating into the Western orbit, it simultaneously maintained close ties to Moscow through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). For years, Ukraine navigated a multivector foreign policy, balancing its relationships with Western powers—particularly Europe—against its enduring entanglements with Russia and other post-Soviet republics.
Yet Russia was never just another socializer. As the Soviet Union’s successor, Moscow retained a unique and complex hold over Ukraine, shaped by imperial history, linguistic overlap, and political inertia. Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, therefore, evolved in a fundamentally different register than its relations with the West. Not only did foreign powers project roles onto Ukraine, but so too did Ukraine’s citizens, whose attitudes informed and constrained the decisions of political leaders.
Since the Cold War’s end, the strategic environment has shifted dramatically. An increasingly assertive Russia, culminating in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has catalyzed a profound reevaluation of Ukraine’s self-conception. Critical questions arise: What role does Ukraine now claim on the world stage, particularly in relation to Russia and its post-Soviet peers? How have role conceptions evolved alongside Moscow’s geopolitical resurgence? How do emerging states stake claims as legitimate international actors? And crucially, how do Ukrainian citizens interpret their nation’s independence, identity, and trajectory?
This article argues that Ukraine’s self-image as an independent actor has hardened over time, forged in response to Russia’s revived imperial ambitions and efforts to reassert control over its so-called “Near Abroad.” What began as a fragile post-Soviet state, often dismissed as weak or failing, has transformed into a highly competent actor under the pressure of existential crisis. The 2022 Russian invasion did not collapse the Ukrainian state; it galvanized it. The heightened sense of national cohesion traces back to 2014, when decentralization initiatives empowered local governance, and Russia’s aggression crystallized the imperative of sovereignty. In short, war accelerated state-building.
This article analyzes Ukraine’s emerging foreign policy role conceptions through a lens often overlooked in role theory: the domestic public. Traditionally, scholars have approached role theory from the top down, focusing on decision makers as the architects of national identity. This study takes a different tack. It argues that public attitudes—shaped by regional identity, historical experience, and perceived external threats—play a critical role in defining how a state understands and enacts its place in the international system.
The academic literature has largely neglected how ordinary citizens conceive of their country’s foreign policy role. Domestic dynamics exert a decisive influence on national role conceptions. Political leaders serve as conduits for the beliefs and expectations of their constituencies, which often diverge sharply across regional, linguistic, and cultural lines. These internal divisions shape the contours of foreign policy as much as structural pressures do.
As Grossman observed in the Russian case, changes in role conception—particularly those articulated by elites—often precede shifts in state behavior. Understanding these role conceptions, then, is not merely descriptive; it offers predictive insight into the future trajectory of foreign policy.
This article examines Ukraine’s evolving foreign policy role conceptions as a newly independent state, with particular focus on sovereignty—initially framed as distinct from Russia and, over time, defined increasingly in opposition to it. The analysis traces Ukraine’s positioning vis-à-vis Russia and other key socializing actors, notably the European Union. It argues that Ukraine’s role conception has undergone four major transformations: the post-Soviet transition (1991–2004), the Orange Revolution era (2004–2014), the aftermath of EuroMaidan and the Donbas war (2014–2022), and the current period following Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In addition to role theory, the article engages the literature on state size and foreign policy behavior, highlighting Ukraine’s strategic posture as a norm entrepreneur—a role often associated with small states navigating asymmetrical power relationships. The analysis draws on polling data from the Pew Research Center, the School for Policy Analysis at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, each offering critical insight into domestic perceptions of Ukraine’s international identity.
A brief note on data limitations is warranted. This study relies heavily on public opinion polling, which, while illuminating, presents methodological challenges. In conflict zones, sampling bias becomes particularly acute. Authoritarian environments, too, can distort responses, as fear and surveillance compromise the integrity of self-reporting. Notably, Crimea is excluded from this analysis due to the absence of credible, independent polling at the time of data collection.
Although this article primarily employs the lens of role theory, alternative explanations merit consideration. National identity in Ukraine has been shaped not only by structural positioning and external socialization but also by elite manipulation, economic conditions, and enduring legacies from the Soviet era. These factors, often interwoven, help explain variations in both public perception and state behavior.
Consider the Party of Regions, which campaigned in eastern Ukraine on a platform of linguistic rights for Russian speakers. The party’s success culminated in the 2012 language law, which granted official status to Russian in regions where more than 10 percent of the population identified it as their native tongue. This legislative move legitimized the use of Russian in public administration and education across much of the east. In doing so, it entrenched regional linguistic divides and fueled a polarizing dynamic between Ukrainian and Russian identities. By claiming to defend minority rights, the Party of Regions effectively reframed linguistic plurality as a proxy for geopolitical alignment—Moscow versus Kyiv.
Economic dynamics have played a parallel role. Drawing on Horowitz’s framework, Ukraine exemplifies an “unranked” system, where ethnic identity does not map neatly onto social class. In such systems, upward mobility remains possible across group lines, limiting the structural incentives for interethnic conflict. However, persistent economic deprivation has still provoked political mobilization—often nationalist in character. Scarcity, in short, has sharpened identity rather than blunting it.
Finally, while this article emphasizes the Russia–Ukraine dyad, it does so for analytical clarity—not because Western influences are insignificant. NATO expansion, EU accession policies, democracy promotion, and Western financial assistance have each shaped Ukraine’s political identity and strategic orientation. That said, the agency of Western actors deserves a more thorough treatment than space here permits. Their impact remains a vital part of the broader story, even if not this article’s central focus.
New States and Socialization in the International System
Role theory maintains that new states do not enter the international system with fully developed role conceptions. Instead, they are shaped through a dynamic process of socialization—what scholars term role bargaining—whereby the emerging state negotiates its identity through repeated interaction with other actors. This process is not passive. It requires the “self”—Ukraine, in this case—to engage with a range of external interlocutors, from Russia and Belarus to Germany and beyond, each of which holds expectations about how the new state should behave.
Thies argues that new states face the most intense pressures to conform to prevailing norms, especially from neighboring powers. These expectations do more than suggest behavior; they often demand that the new state define itself in opposition to its predecessor. In Ukraine’s case, asserting its independence meant not merely breaking from the Soviet Union but distinguishing itself, politically and symbolically, from Russia itself.
Upon entering the international system as a sovereign entity, Ukraine confronted competing socialization pressures. From the West came the expectation that Ukraine would shed its Soviet legacy and adopt the norms of market capitalism and liberal democracy. This transformation demanded not only institutional reform but also cultural change—most notably, a reckoning with entrenched corruption, a holdover from socialist political traditions.
Russia, by contrast, cast itself as patron of the post-Soviet space and treated Ukraine as a dependent client. Within the framework of the CIS, Moscow expected Kyiv to remain politically deferential and economically cooperative. For a time, Ukraine complied, pursuing a multivector foreign policy aimed at balancing East and West.
But this balancing act ran aground on the question of identity. Building a distinct Ukrainian national identity proved incompatible with continued subordination to Russia. The project of nationhood required more than sovereignty—it demanded symbolic separation from the former imperial center. That proved the most difficult role to perform.
The emergence of Ukraine as a new state was not a spontaneous event but the product of high-stakes bargaining—first between Kyiv and Moscow, then between the world’s two superpowers as the bipolar world was coming to an end. At the center of this negotiation stood a hard reality: Ukraine had inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Determining the fate of those weapons posed one of the most complex challenges of post-Soviet nation building.
Analysts have examined the role conceptions of Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders within the framework of nuclear nonproliferation regimes. In this context, role theory has proven more effective than traditional approaches in explaining foreign policy behavior. Scholars such as Ryan K. Beasley & Juliet Kaarbo and Klaus Brummer & Cameron G. Thies have emphasized the socializing function of the international system, whereby a state’s identity—and its conception of appropriate behavior—is forged through interaction with other actors enacting complementary roles. Success in enacting these roles depends not only on self-definition but on external recognition through sustained engagement and role bargaining.
Ukraine’s nuclear inheritance alarmed the international community. With the bipolar world collapsing, responsibility fell to Russia and the United States to manage the disarmament process. The result was the 1994 Trilateral Statement, signed in Moscow by Presidents Bill Clinton, Leonid Kravchuk, and Boris Yeltsin. The agreement committed Ukraine to eliminate its strategic nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances—a defining moment in Ukraine’s early role conception as a cooperative, non-nuclear state.
Domestic politics shaped Ukraine’s role bargaining more than most external observers realized at the time. Nationalists in the Rada resisted denuclearization, citing fears of future Russian revanchism—especially regarding Crimea. Others, however, argued that Ukraine had little strategic choice. Given its limited resources, fragile economy, and lack of operational control over the arsenal, maintaining a nuclear deterrent was untenable.
The broader international context reinforced this view. The United States had already begun implementing the START treaty signed by President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, setting a precedent for strategic reductions. Ukraine, eager for international recognition and dependent on Western goodwill, ultimately accepted the logic of denuclearization. It was not an act of naïveté, but one of constrained agency—a calculated decision to trade unusable power for a seat at the international table.
Independence as a foreign policy role was bestowed upon Ukraine by the international community, but it came with conditions—chief among them, the relinquishment of its nuclear arsenal. Sovereignty was acknowledged, but only in exchange for strategic disarmament. That trade-off, once viewed as prudent statecraft, has come under renewed scrutiny considering Russia’s escalating aggression.
Would Ukraine’s trajectory have differed had it retained its nuclear weapons? Almost certainly. Moscow may have shown greater caution, and Ukraine’s foreign policy role conceptions—particularly its posture toward Russia—might have evolved along more assertive lines. But such counterfactuals offer limited value in today’s strategic environment. What matters is the structure of the security commitments Ukraine received at the time.
American officials deliberately avoided a legally binding security guarantee, which would have required Senate ratification. Instead, the Clinton administration offered “security assurances”—a term of art crafted by Department of State lawyers to signal a commitment that stopped short of military obligation. The language implied moral support, not deterrence. The Budapest Memorandum, for all its diplomatic weight, offered reassurance—but not protection.
Scholars remain divided over whether Ukraine’s denuclearization was a strategic miscalculation or an unavoidable concession to geopolitical reality. The core questions—whether a retained nuclear arsenal might have deterred Russian aggression, and whether the cost of maintenance would have destabilized Ukraine’s fragile economy—remain unsettled.
Mariana Budjeryn, widely regarded as the leading authority on Ukraine’s disarmament, challenges the notion that Kyiv made a grave mistake. She emphasizes the geopolitical pressures driving disarmament and the technical impracticalities of maintaining or operationalizing the inherited arsenal, especially without full command-and-control capabilities. In her view, deterrence was illusory, and the choice to disarm was shaped more by constraint than by naïveté.
Others take a different view. Yuri Kostenko and Svitlana Krasynska, offering an insider’s perspective, argue that Ukraine yielded too quickly. They contend that Kyiv should have slowed the disarmament process to extract greater economic and security concessions from both Washington and Moscow. In their telling, Ukraine’s role as a cooperative state came at too steep a price.
Polina Sinovets offers one of the most comprehensive technical analyses of Ukraine’s disarmament, examining nuclear platforms and control systems through legal, political, industrial, and military lenses. Her work highlights the complexity of dismantling a nuclear infrastructure not designed for autonomous operation by a non-Russian successor state.
Expanding the comparative frame, JeongWon Bourdais Park and DaHoon Chung examine the denuclearization decisions of four post–Cold War states: South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Their analysis foregrounds non-realist variables—such as institutional norms, elite perceptions, and international legitimacy—providing a broader understanding of why states abandon nuclear capability despite material incentives to retain it.
An earlier contribution by Jeffrey Knopf underscores the role of security assurances in facilitating nonproliferation. Chapter 11 of his volume, titled “The ‘Model’ of Ukrainian Denuclearization,” offers a detailed account of the trilateral negotiations that led to Ukraine’s disarmament and the ambiguous guarantees that accompanied it. Together, these works reinforce the argument that Ukraine’s role conception as a responsible international actor was shaped not only by power dynamics but also by normative and institutional pressures.
Ascribed and Achieved Roles of State Sovereignty
All states enter the international system with a set of ascribed roles—sovereignty chief among them. For newly independent states, these roles often outnumber those that are achieved. Ukraine, upon gaining independence from the Soviet Union, was ascribed the role of a sovereign state and swiftly recognized as such by the international community.
On closer inspection, Ukraine’s sovereignty is far less clear-cut than its formal recognition in 1991 might suggest. This paper contends that sovereignty, as a foreign policy role, should be understood as both ascribed and achieved—its character shifting across distinct stages in the development of Ukraine’s political nationhood. This distinction is especially salient when sovereignty is viewed through two lenses: the international structure that confers legal status and the domestic arena where legitimacy is contested and constructed.
Ukraine’s role conception as a sovereign state has been shaped by persistent regional cleavages, uneven governance, and external pressure. At times, structure—the international system—has defined the terms of sovereignty. At others, agency—the choices and mobilizations of the Ukrainian state and society—has been paramount. Accordingly, I argue that the prominence of structure versus agency varies across historical phases.
At independence, sovereignty was ascribed. But in the three subsequent periods—after the 2004 Orange Revolution, the 2014 Maidan uprising and onset of war in the Donbas and especially following Russia’s 2022 invasion—Ukraine’s sovereignty must be regarded as achieved. In each of these moments, the state reasserted its identity and consolidated its role not through recognition alone, but through resilience and political will.
Role theory comprises two primary strands: structural role theory and symbolic interactionism. Both contribute to the broader agent-structure debate in international relations by linking identity to behavior—explaining not just what states are, but how they act.
Structural role theory, rooted in Waltzian structural realism, emphasizes the primacy of the international system in shaping state behavior. It posits that role conceptions emerge in response to systemic pressures, with states adapting to the expectations imposed by their relative position within the global order. Here, structure dominates agency.
By contrast, second-generation role theory—grounded in symbolic interactionism—shifts the focus to human agency. It centers on decision makers, their interpretations, and their interactions with other actors. This perspective acknowledges that leaders operate under cognitive constraints, bounded rationality, and inherent biases. Rather than assuming states respond automatically to structural incentives, symbolic interactionism treats role conception as an evolving product of social negotiation, perception, and learning.
Ukraine’s national identity has developed in four distinct stages, each shaped by shifting proximity to Western democratic norms and, increasingly, by deliberate separation from Russia. These stages chart not only the evolution of Ukraine’s self-image—how Ukrainians perceive their place in the world—but also the contested consolidation of sovereignty in the realist sense: control over territory, governance, and the legitimate use of force.
The first stage, from 1991 to 2004, was characterized by strategic ambiguity. Ukraine sought integration into the international system of liberal democracies but lacked consensus on its orientation. Identity remained fractured—torn between inherited Soviet structures and a nascent desire for autonomy. Constructivist dynamics played a significant role: state elites and civil society debated the meanings of “Ukrainian” identity, but the security apparatus remained inertial and susceptible to Russian influence.
The second stage erupted with the 2004 Orange Revolution. Here, a more assertive national self-image emerged. Ukrainians, rejecting electoral manipulation and post-Soviet stagnation, mobilized en masse to overturn a fraudulent presidential outcome. The Supreme Court, under intense civic pressure, annulled the results. Viktor Yushchenko—a pro-Western reformer—assumed the presidency, and Ukraine pivoted again toward Euro-Atlantic norms. Still, the revolution remained unfinished. It challenged the existing order but failed to institutionalize its gains. In realist terms, Ukraine had expressed a will to sovereignty but lacked the coercive capacity to defend it.
A decade later, the third stage—EuroMaidan, or Maidan 2.0—brought that struggle to the fore. The ousting of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 marked a deeper rupture with Russia and a popular reassertion of Ukrainian identity. This time, the movement fused liberal-democratic aspirations with an existential national imperative. Constructivist forces—collective memory, historical grievance, cultural pride—galvanized the public, while geopolitical tensions escalated. Identity had become inseparable from security.
The fourth and current stage, launched by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, is a war for national survival. Ukraine no longer merely articulates sovereignty—it enforces it on the battlefield. The state’s self-image has hardened into a strategic identity, grounded in both moral conviction and material resistance. Realist principles dominate: power, deterrence, territorial integrity. Yet the war has also forged an unprecedented civic nationalism. Identity and sovereignty now cohere not as aspirations but as facts.
Following independence, Ukraine’s evolving role conception—its understanding of itself as a state actor—was shaped most acutely by its triangular relationship with Russia and the United States. In the early 1990s, the George H. W. Bush administration treated the Russian Federation as a stabilizing force within its so-called Near Abroad, implicitly relegating Ukraine to the periphery of Western strategic concern. Russia, then viewed through a realist lens as a declining but still coherent power, remained Washington’s chosen instrument for post-Soviet order management.
That calculation changed under the Clinton administration. By the mid-1990s, US policy shifted from reliance on Moscow to investment in Kyiv. As one analyst put it, Washington began treating Ukraine as the keystone of a new Eastern European security architecture. This realignment materialized in hard commitments: Ukraine became the first CIS country to sign a cooperation agreement with NATO under the Partnership for Peace in 1995. The following year, Kyiv formally expressed its intent to join the European Union. Ukraine’s strategic orientation had begun to tilt decisively westward, reflecting a shift in both external role ascription and internal self-image.
Sovereignty, however, remained contested. The international system—structured by norms of state recognition—ascribed sovereignty to Ukraine in 1991. But sovereignty in a broader sense, defined as the actual capacity to control territory and resist coercion, remained elusive. That form of sovereignty had to be achieved—first in 2004 during Maidan 1.0, and again in 2014 during Maidan 2.0—by a citizenry that rejected Russian interference and affirmed its own political agency. These uprisings were not mere protests; they were civic affirmations of Ukraine’s identity as an independent actor. In both instances, sovereignty ceased to be a legal abstraction and became a realized national role.
The final stage, post-2022, marks the most perilous yet decisive phase. With Russia’s seizure of Crimea, orchestration of proxy warfare in Donbas, and full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the stakes have shifted from political autonomy to national survival. This escalation has profoundly altered Ukraine’s self-image. No longer content to passively claim sovereignty, the Ukrainian state now asserts it in realist terms—on the battlefield, in diplomacy, and through national mobilization. Constructivist dynamics reinforce this shift: shared trauma, wartime sacrifice, and resistance have crystallized a collective identity rooted in defiance and independence. Ukraine is no longer simply demanding recognition—it is enforcing it.
Independence as Self-Image
To grasp Ukraine’s self-image as a sovereign actor, one must confront the country’s enduring regional fissures—cleavages that have long fractured its internal consensus on identity, orientation, and allegiance. As Keith Darden and Lucan Way aptly observe, “Ukraine is a country that is deeply divided on virtually every issue pertaining to relations with Russia or the West.” Independence—seemingly a foundational consensus following the Soviet collapse—has proven no exception. While the 1991 referendum reflected overwhelming support for statehood across all oblasts, subsequent decades revealed a fragmentation of public opinion. By the time of the EuroMaidan uprising in 2014, survey data indicated widening regional disparities in how Ukrainians conceived of independence—not merely as a legal status, but as a lived role within the international system.
These divergences illuminate a core constructivist dynamic: identity is not a static inheritance but a product of social interaction, historical memory, and regional context. In western and central Ukraine, independence came to embody Euro-Atlantic alignment and civic nationalism. In the east and south, by contrast, lingering Soviet nostalgia and cross-border kinship ties complicated the internalization of a Western-facing self-image. Ukraine’s role conception as an independent actor thus evolved unevenly—shaped less by abstract principle than by geography, language, and historical experience.
For Ukrainians, independence was not an abstract ideal in 1991—it was a concrete, near-unanimous assertion of national self-determination. The Act of the Proclamation of Independence of Ukraine passed by overwhelming margins across all regions: 83.9 percent in Donetsk, 83.86 percent in Luhansk, and even in Crimea—then overwhelmingly ethnic Russian—54.19 percent voted in favor. At that moment, the country’s self-image aligned with its formal sovereignty: Ukraine had declared itself independent, and its people had ratified that claim with unmistakable clarity.
But by 2011, the consensus had collapsed. A nationwide survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology revealed stark regional divergence. While Kyiv, the West, the Center, and the North remained committed to independence, the East and Crimea leaned decisively against it, and opinion in the South was split. What had once been a unified national affirmation had fragmented into competing regional narratives—some loyal to the ideal of a sovereign Ukrainian state, others still tethered to the gravitational pull of Russia.
This transformation was no accident. As Iryna Bekeshkina argues, post–Orange Revolution politics weaponized these divisions. The political battlefield split in two: parties courting the Ukrainian-speaking electorate pushed for European integration, while those aligned with Russian-speaking constituencies favored rapprochement with Moscow and the Customs Union. Here, constructivist theory provides critical insight: identity and self-image are not fixed—they are forged through political struggle, elite manipulation, and regional experience. The result was not merely a divided electorate, but a bifurcated national consciousness, in which the very idea of independence carried radically different meanings depending on which oblast one called home.
The events of 2014 marked a critical inflection point in the evolution of Ukraine’s national self-image. As the Maidan Revolution unfolded and Russia seized Crimea while fueling insurgency in Donbas, Ukrainian public attitudes underwent a profound transformation—especially in the historically ambivalent South and East. What had once been regional hesitation hardened into civic clarity. For many, independence and identity ceased to be peripheral concerns and became matters of existential urgency. As Bekeshkina observed, “a large percentage of Ukrainian citizens who earlier were not at all concerned about their attitude toward Ukraine’s independence, their national identity, and many other issues, felt and became aware of their identity as Ukrainians.”
This transformation confirms a core insight of constructivist theory: identity is not merely inherited; it is activated—often in response to external threat. Russia’s aggression stripped away ambiguity. The second Maidan—Maidan 2.0—was not just a political uprising; it was a collective declaration of who Ukrainians believed themselves to be.
When I visited Kyiv in 2017 and spoke with Ukrainians who had taken part in both the 2004 and 2014 protests, a common reflection emerged. Many described the second Maidan as a personal and national decision point—a moment when lingering questions about identity and geopolitical alignment gave way to clarity. One interlocutor described how the events of 2014 helped resolve long-standing uncertainty, particularly among those who had grown up in a post-Soviet environment marked by divided loyalties. From those conversations, it was clear that for many, Maidan 2.0 signified more than regime change—it marked a generational shift toward a self-consciously European identity, grounded in liberal-democratic values and a rejection of Russian tutelage.
By 2016, the transformation in Ukrainian public opinion—particularly in the South and East—was unmistakable. Follow-up survey data revealed that in a hypothetical independence referendum, support had surged well beyond pre-crisis levels. In 2011, only 47.1 percent in the South and 53 percent in the East indicated they would vote for independence. By 2016, those figures had risen dramatically to 78.5 percent and 71.5 percent, respectively. This shift cannot be explained by internal developments alone. It was, in large measure, a reaction to Russia’s own actions—its annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and its broader campaign to destabilize Ukraine’s sovereignty. In seeking to reclaim influence, Moscow instead provoked a consolidation of Ukrainian identity and intensified the population’s commitment to national sovereignty.
Volodymyr Kulyk’s findings corroborate this trend. Comparing surveys from 2012 and late 2014, he documents a marked increase in respondents identifying as Ukrainian and a corresponding decline in those identifying as Russian. He further notes an “increased alienation from Russia and the greater embrace of Ukrainian nationalism as a worldview.” These patterns reinforce a central tenet of constructivist thought: identity is forged in opposition to threat. The Kremlin’s coercive strategy not only failed to realign Ukraine with Moscow—it had the opposite effect. It catalyzed a broader national consensus, one in which self-image as an independent, European-oriented state replaced the ambiguity of Ukraine’s post-Soviet years.
By 2020, as Ukraine marked 29 years of independence, public support for sovereignty had not only stabilized—it had solidified into a national consensus. In a hypothetical referendum, 84.4 percent of respondents affirmed they would vote for independence, with only 15.6 percent opposed. Crucially, this overwhelming support transcended regional, generational, and partisan divides. As polling data noted, backing for independence was the dominant position “in all regions, age groups, and among supporters of all major political parties.” What had begun as a contested and regionally fragmented proposition in 1991 had, by the end of the decade’s third decade, become a core component of the country’s collective self-image.
Longitudinal data from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) further supports this trajectory. Since 1992, the percentage of Ukrainians identifying primarily as national citizens has increased steadily, with notable surges during the pivotal years of 2004 and 2014. These peaks—corresponding with Maidan 1.0 and Maidan 2.0—reinforce the view that civic identity in Ukraine coalesces in response to moments of internal upheaval and external challenge. Simultaneously, the proportion of individuals identifying primarily with localities—villages, cities, or regions—has declined markedly since 2013, reflecting a shift from subnational loyalties to a broader national consciousness.
Pride in citizenship has also intensified. Between 2012 and 2020, the share of Ukrainians expressing pride in their national identity rose from 43 percent to 63 percent. This upward trend reflects not only growing emotional investment in the state, but also an expanding internalization of Ukraine’s sovereignty as legitimate, meaningful, and worth defending. In short, the foundations of a cohesive national identity have deepened—cemented not by ideology or elites alone, but by a population whose commitment to independence has been tested, and repeatedly reaffirmed, through adversity.
Survival of the Nation
A central argument of this article is that Ukraine’s self-image as a sovereign state has not only matured over time but has culminated in an existential struggle for national survival within the international system. What once unfolded through referenda, protests, and policy alignment now plays out under the harsh logic of war. Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, marked the end of Ukraine’s post-Soviet era of multivector diplomacy. Gone are the days of hedging between East and West. In its place stands a resolute, unambiguous assertion of national sovereignty, backed not only by political will but also by military resistance.
The war has accelerated Ukraine’s nation-building project. What had been an incremental evolution of identity—negotiated through elections, civic mobilization, and foreign policy realignments—has entered a new phase. The role-bargaining process that began in 1991 has now become kinetic. Ukraine is no longer merely asserting its preferred role as a democratic, independent actor; it is fighting to impose that role on an international system confronted with Russian revisionism. The battlefield, in this context, is not just a theater of military operations—it is the crucible of a redefined national self-image. As the world watches, Ukraine wages a war not only for territory, but also for the legitimacy of its identity, the permanence of its sovereignty, and its place in the post–Cold War order.
Paul D’Anieri rightly contends that the fusion of democracy and geopolitics lies at the heart of the current war—one that, in reality, began a decade earlier on a smaller territorial scale. As he observes, “democratization became merged with geopolitics, repeatedly disrupting the status quo and putting a core value of the West at odds with Russia’s sense of its security.” Ukraine’s westward turn—anchored in democratic aspiration—has thus provoked Moscow not only as a geopolitical affront but as an ideological threat. The result is a conflict not just over borders, but over models of governance as well .
Western support for Ukraine—particularly from the European Union and the United States—remains substantial but increasingly politicized. In Washington, military and financial aid has become entangled with domestic partisan conflict. In Europe, divergent national interests and institutional constraints complicate the development of a coherent strategic posture. These fractures weaken the normative clarity of the West’s response and offer diplomatic leverage to Russia.
The international response to Russia’s aggression has been anything but unanimous. In February 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter. While 141 states voted in favor, 7 opposed, and 32 abstained—including China, India, and key states across the Global South. The abstentions reflect more than diplomatic hedging; they signal the erosion of Western normative dominance.
Although this article emphasizes Ukraine’s role conception in relation to Russia and the West, China’s evolving posture warrants mention. Beijing has officially maintained a stance of neutrality regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war, abstaining from UN votes and declining to condemn Russian aggression. Yet this neutrality, often paired with implicit rhetorical support for Moscow, complicates Ukraine’s strategic narrative. For Kyiv, China represents both an economic partner and a normative challenge—an actor whose ambivalence toward sovereignty and liberal order undermines Ukraine’s attempts to socialize into a values-based international community. The absence of Chinese condemnation, especially in multilateral forums, dilutes the clarity of Ukraine’s victim status and signals to the Global South that geopolitical neutrality remains viable in the face of aggression.
Angela Stent observes that Russia has “largely succeeded in convincing [the Global South] that the West is to blame for both wars”—Ukraine and Israel—thereby reframing its aggression as reactive rather than imperial. This narrative manipulation serves Moscow’s broader aim: to disrupt Ukraine’s ongoing socialization into the liberal international order by sowing doubt about that order’s legitimacy.
Ukraine’s assertion of sovereignty and its evolving self-image as a democratic state are now challenged not only by Russian tanks but by a rival ideological coalition. More broadly, China’s partnership with Russia in challenging Western normative dominance places Ukraine’s conflict within a global struggle over sovereignty and legitimacy. As China and Russia promote alternative models of governance that downplay human rights and prioritize regime stability, Ukraine’s wartime identity as a democratic, sovereign state becomes a frontline assertion of liberal norms against authoritarian revisionism. As China and Russia work to recast global norms to favor authoritarian resilience, Ukraine’s national struggle becomes part of a larger contest: one between competing visions of order, legitimacy, and the future of global governance.
The existential fight for survival has sharpened, not shattered, Ukraine’s sense of nationhood. Russian aggression has not undermined Ukraine’s self-image as an independent actor; it has crystallized it. In the spirit of Charles Tilly’s dictum—” the state makes war and war makes the state”—Ukraine’s wartime mobilization has become a crucible of state formation. External threat, far from fragmenting the polity, has accelerated the consolidation of national identity and the construction of resilient state institutions.
While Russian aggression forged unity through resistance, Ukraine’s internal cohesion owes much to a quieter revolution: decentralization. Following the Maidan uprising in 2014, the state embarked on a deliberate strategy to shift power from the center to local communities. The result was not just administrative reform but a recalibration of political legitimacy. Authority no longer emanated solely from Kyiv; it was earned, exercised, and sustained by citizens at the local level. This shift, analysts argue, gave “Ukrainians the sense that they are building their own country.”
Decentralization empowered municipalities to govern their own affairs—from infrastructure to emergency services—creating tangible stakes in the survival of the state. It also laid the institutional groundwork for the war effort. When the Russian invasion came, it was not only the military that mobilized. Civil society, local governments, and regional leaders acted swiftly and autonomously, often outpacing central command. In this way, decentralization has not only buttressed national unity; it has helped midwife Ukraine’s rebirth as a resilient, participatory, and sovereign polity.
Attitudes toward Russia
Attitudes toward Russia in Ukraine have undergone a profound shift since the 2014 EuroMaidan revolution. Survey data from both Ukrainian organizations and the Pew Research Center indicate a marked deterioration in perceptions of Russia, reflecting the broader geopolitical realignment of the nation. In the early years of independence, Ukraine, like many other former Soviet republics, adhered to a multivector foreign policy, avoiding a definitive choice between East and West. This policy, however, largely mirrored regional divisions: the West and Center leaned toward Europe, while the South and East showed greater affinity for Russia.
The outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014, coupled with the annexation of Crimea, changed the equation. By then, the Donbass region, the last holdout for Russian alignment, was the sole area still advocating for a union with Russia and Belarus. The rest of the country, however, overwhelmingly chose European integration, signaling a dramatic shift in national sentiment. Even in the Donbass, attitudes soured rapidly. Over the span of just two years, the proportion of residents opposed to a union with Russia and Belarus surged from 8.5 percent to 31 percent, marking a decisive break from past allegiances.
Since 2014, attitudes toward Russia among Ukrainians have grown markedly more negative. A survey conducted by the Rating Group in April 2017 found that 57 percent of Ukrainians held a very cold or cold attitude toward Russia, while only 17 percent expressed a very warm or warm sentiment. The escalation of conflict in the East has been a catalyst for this shift, with anti-Russian sentiment rising in parallel with growing support for Western integration. By 2017, 53 percent of Ukrainians supported joining the European Union, while 46 percent favored NATO membership—up from a mere 34 percent in 2014. NATO support had been a gradual but steady trend, with figures below 25 percent during the 1990s and 2000s.
Demographic factors reveal significant variation in attitudes. Those who spoke Russian, identified as ethnic Russian or Orthodox, were older, and generally less affluent, were more likely to harbor pro-Russian sentiments. Furthermore, the influence of Russian media on public opinion has been profound. In 2015, 60 percent of respondents reported a negative shift in their views of Russian media, and by 2016, only about 5 percent of Ukrainians still turned to Russian television for news, underscoring the extent to which the conflict had reshaped media consumption and national identity.
Ukrainian public opinion toward Russia has fluctuated significantly over time, with a pronounced decline in positive sentiment beginning well before the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Regular joint surveys conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and Russia’s Levada Center have tracked mutual attitudes in both countries. Their findings reveal that Ukrainians maintained overwhelmingly favorable views of Russia between 2008 and 2010, with roughly 90 percent of respondents expressing positive sentiment. This period of stability began to erode between 2011 and 2013, as support dropped by 13 percentage points. The timing of this decline corresponds with the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, whose pro-Russian orientation—especially his signing of the 2010 Kharkiv Accords extending the lease of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol—likely contributed to the cooling of public opinion. Even before Russia’s direct aggression, Ukrainians were growing wary of the direction their government was taking in relation to Moscow.
Attitudes among Ukrainians toward Russia deteriorated sharply in 2014, reflecting the rupture triggered by the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s subsequent aggression. In February 2014, as protests intensified in Kyiv, the share of Ukrainians expressing a positive attitude toward Russia dropped from 78 percent to 52 percent. By September, for the first time since such surveys had been conducted, fewer than half of respondents—just 48 percent—viewed Russia positively. The decline continued into 2015, when favorable views of Russia reached a historic low of 30 percent, while negative sentiment surged to 56 percent, crossing the threshold into majority disapproval.
Polling conducted by the Pew Research Center reinforces these trends. In 2019, roughly 80 percent of Ukrainians expressed a lack of confidence in President Vladimir Putin’s handling of international affairs. Only 11 percent said they trusted the Russian leader, and just 32 percent held a favorable view of Russia overall. Linguistic divisions remained salient: among respondents who spoke only Russian, 48 percent viewed Russia favorably, compared to just 18 percent among those who spoke only Ukrainian. These figures underscore a hardening of public opinion along cultural and geopolitical lines, driven by years of military aggression, political interference, and declining trust.
National Role Conceptions and State Size
Role theory has long recognized a relationship between state size and foreign policy behavior. Maurice East contends that “there are profound and significant differences in the behavior patterns of large and small states,” differences he attributes to disparities in their “capacity to act.” Similarly, Breuning argues that “a state’s size implied the role it plays in international politics.” While Ukraine does not neatly fit the category of a small state, it nonetheless operates under constraints characteristic of secondary powers—particularly when navigating relations with great powers like Russia, the United States, or the European Union. Its position in the international system, defined by both geographic proximity to Russia and asymmetric power relations, limits its strategic options but does not foreclose its agency. Understanding Ukraine’s foreign policy behavior, then, requires analytical sensitivity to how role conceptions are shaped not only by material capacity, but also by identity, threat perception, and the evolving context of war.
There is some debate over whether Ukraine qualifies as a small- or medium-sized state, given its considerable population and territorial expanse. Yet in relative terms—particularly when measured against Russia—Ukraine is best understood as a small power. Accordingly, its foreign policy behavior often reflects the constraints and strategic calculations typical of smaller states operating within a system dominated by larger actors. For Ukraine, national identity and the assertion of sovereignty have become central to both foreign policy and domestic political development. As a post-Soviet state seeking to consolidate independence and distinguish itself from Russia, Ukraine exemplifies a broader trend in which “national identity is highly influential in affecting the actions that small states take in the international system.”
A more accurate analysis of national role conceptions requires the integration of both material and ideational factors. Breuning illustrates this dynamic through a cognitive model of the agent-structure relationship, emphasizing how perceptions of identity and capability shape foreign policy behavior. Ideational factors refer primarily to the decision maker’s perception of the state’s identity, cultural legacy, and domestic audience. Material factors, by contrast, reflect the decision maker’s assessment of the state’s capabilities and opportunities to act on the international stage. Together, these dimensions inform the national role conception as defined by the state’s leadership, which in turn shapes how roles are enacted in practice.
Given Ukraine’s relative weakness in material capabilities—particularly after relinquishing its nuclear arsenal—it is unsurprising that Kyiv has prioritized ideational instruments of statecraft. Rather than contesting Russia in conventional military or economic terms, Ukraine has asserted its sovereignty through the projection of a distinct national identity and foreign policy orientation. This turn to ideas over arms exemplifies a form of norm entrepreneurship typical of small states seeking to influence international structures without matching great-power resources. Ukraine positions itself as sovereign not by parity of force but by cultivating a self-image rooted in political independence and cultural differentiation from Russia. In this context, sovereignty becomes less a function of coercive power than a declarative posture—an assertion of identity on the world stage.
Ukrainian national identity has evolved through four critical inflection points: independence in 1991, the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Maidan Revolution and Donbas war in 2014, and the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. Each confrontation with Moscow’s pressure has strengthened—not weakened—Ukraine’s sense of self. From the outset, Ukraine faced a foundational dilemma: whether to pursue a monist, ethno-nationalist model of statehood or a pluralist, civic conception inclusive of its diverse population. In the early 1990s, the state leaned decisively toward the monist model, seeking to reassert a vision of Ukrainian independence rooted in the interwar period—an idealized, sovereign past untainted by Soviet domination. While pluralism was invoked rhetorically, in practice it was undercut by persistent fault lines—chief among them the status of the Russian language. The refusal to grant it official standing, despite the country’s sizable Russophone population, revealed the limits of inclusive identity construction and underscored the tensions at the heart of Ukraine’s post-Soviet state-building.
The second stage, marked by the Orange Revolution in 2004, reflected growing disillusionment with Ukraine’s stalled democratization and entrenched corruption. Yet unlike later phases, this period retained a measure of strategic ambiguity. Many Ukrainians still believed in the viability of a multivector foreign policy—one that balanced integration with the West and cooperation with Russia’s Customs Union. That illusion did not survive the Maidan Revolution a decade later. By 2014, Moscow’s aggression had extinguished residual hopes for equidistance. Positive attitudes toward Russia collapsed, and national identity began to cohere around a normative alignment with Western values: rule of law, liberal democracy, and institutional constraints on corruption. Identity, in this phase, was no longer just about cultural distinctiveness; it became aspirational, projecting a self-image grounded in Europe’s political ethos rather than in Soviet legacies.
The EuroMaidan uprising and Russia’s subsequent aggression in Crimea and Donbas marked a watershed in Ukraine’s struggle to define its national identity and foreign policy orientation. The 2014 crisis was not merely a political revolt—it was a contest over the very meaning of “Ukrainian.” Competing visions of identity collided: one rooted in a civic, European trajectory, the other tethered to a post-Soviet, Russocentric past. As one scholar aptly noted, the Maidan was a “struggle between different visions of what it means to be Ukrainian and who is to decide . . . what is Ukraine’s proper place in the world.” The extent to which these events reshaped Ukrainian self-image remains debated, but few dispute their catalytic effect. Since 2022, the debate has entered a new phase. Faced with an existential threat in the form of full-scale war, Ukraine’s identity has hardened—no longer just a matter of political preference but a line of national survival, drawn sharply against the Russian imperial idea.
Conclusion
This article has examined Ukraine’s evolving foreign policy role conceptions as a newly sovereign state navigating an international system dominated by great powers. It offers insight into how national identity consolidates under external pressure and how smaller states assert sovereignty in the shadow of hegemonic neighbors. While international socialization typically reflects the preferences of dominant actors, Ukraine’s trajectory demonstrates that identity formation under threat can produce defiance rather than deference. In Kyiv’s case, the competing influences of Russia, the European Union, and the United States shaped—but did not dictate—its path. I argue that Ukraine’s self-image as an autonomous actor crystallized in direct response to sustained Russian coercion. That self-conception, once tentative, hardened into a survivalist identity after the 2022 invasion, transforming sovereignty from a legal status into a national ethos defended by arms, diplomacy, and will.
Ukraine’s conception of state sovereignty has evolved through four distinct phases. The first began with independence in 1991, when sovereignty was largely ascribed rather than asserted. This was not a revolutionary break but a negotiated exit from the Soviet Union—brokered in part by the United States and ultimately ratified by the international community. Crucially, Ukraine’s decision to surrender its nuclear arsenal under the Budapest Memorandum redefined its position within the international system. By trading strategic deterrence for security assurances, Ukraine entered the post–Cold War order as a sovereign state with limited coercive leverage—recognized, but vulnerable.
The second stage of Ukraine’s sovereign development emerged with the Orange Revolution in 2004, when mass mobilization signaled a deliberate turn toward democratic governance and European values. This was not merely electoral contestation; it was a public assertion of political agency. The third stage—Maidan 2.0 in 2014—deepened this trajectory, reaffirming the country’s commitment to democratic principles and rejecting any return to Russian tutelage. I argue that while sovereignty in the immediate post-independence period was largely ascribed—conferred through diplomacy and international recognition—in the subsequent stages it was increasingly achieved. Through protest, reform, and resistance, Ukraine began to earn its sovereignty, not as a passive inheritance but as a conscious national project.
Since February 2022, Ukraine’s war for survival has intensified the nation-building process. Confronted with existential threat, Ukrainians have forged a hardened self-image as an independent actor—one no longer defined by proximity to Russia but by resistance to it. The logic is consistent with classical state-building theory: external threats clarify loyalties, consolidate institutions, and accelerate national cohesion. In Ukraine’s case, Russian aggression has served as both catalyst and crucible.
China’s unwillingness to meaningfully support Ukraine, even on humanitarian or territorial grounds, has further entrenched Kyiv’s alignment with Western democratic states. While Ukraine once pursued economic diversification that included Beijing, the war has prompted a re-evaluation of partners not just in material but ideational terms. This strategic distancing from China illustrates the sharpening of Ukraine’s self-image as a state committed to democratic values and rule-based international order.
If the threat persists, as it likely will, we should expect not fragmentation but further consolidation—of statehood, identity, and sovereign will. ♦
Dr. Anna Batta
Dr. Batta is an Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the Air War College, specializing in Russian foreign policy, Eastern European politics, and post-Communist studies. With a PhD in political science and conflict studies from the University of North Texas, as well as degrees in public administration and political science from institutions in Texas and Hungary, Dr. Batta brings a wealth of expertise to her research on authoritarian regimes, civil wars, and state-building in former Soviet states and the Balkans. She has held academic positions at Southern Methodist University and Eckerd College, earning recognition for her scholarly contributions, including the Martin Heisler Graduate Student Research Paper Award from ISA in 2012. Since 2017, she has also served as the language program liaison at the Air War College, furthering her commitment to international security education.
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