Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has deeply transformed both the victim and the aggressor states and upended the international order with a return to wars of conquest. This special issue of Nationalities Papers features original research that offers new perspectives on how Russia’s war against Ukraine has reshaped political, cultural, and societal structures at multiple levels. The collected studies provide diverse findings and analytical lenses through which to understand how states, institutions, and communities interpret, respond to, and are transformed by the experience of war. This introduction provides an overview of the studies in this special issue, organized into four thematic areas.
The special issue opens up with a meta-analysis by Sereda and Mikheieva, whose article How (Not) to Study a War-Affected Society: Challenges of Knowledge Production in Ukraine and Elsewhere, starts from the observation that the Russian invasion has fundamentally disrupted how we create, frame, and validate knowledge about Ukraine. The authors argue that scholars must move beyond Western-centric “macro-level” generalizations to embrace more reflexive, localized methodologies. It proposes that researchers prioritize the lived experiences of war-affected individuals and treat “naming” as a critical tool of hybrid warfare. The terminology used to describe the war directly shapes international policy and public perception and therefore scholars need to be attentive to the various choices. Finally, the authors advocate for a “practical turn” in academia that blurs the line between research and civic activism, ensuring that knowledge production actively contributes to social resilience and decolonial narratives.
Geopolitics and Security
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine fractured long-held assumptions about global stability, revealing the fragility of international law and the vulnerability of the post-Cold War order. Three articles in this special issue critically approach the failure of the international community to deter Russia’s escalation from the limited post-2014 military aggression to wider war.
To this day, some analyses posit that the extent of Russia’s integration with the West is causally connected to the war. If Russia were more integrated – economically, politically, and militarily, these arguments go, the integration could have prevented Russia’s aggression since Russia would not have felt excluded and aggrieved. Conversely, these accounts imply, post-war stability and security in Europe call for closer integration of Russia. In her article “The War in Ukraine: The Deterrent Effect of Weaponized Interdependence”, Kulakevich (Reference Kulakevich2024) convincingly pushes against this narrative, arguing that deep economic interdependence encouraged rather than restrained the Kremlin by convincing Russian leaders that Western governments would avoid measures that could disrupt trade, energy, and financial networks. By using extended deterrence game-theoretic analysis, her study shows how mechanisms such as energy supply chains and market integration were supposed to guarantee stability, but in fact were turned into strategic instruments of coercion. Kulakevich’s analysis explains the failure of deterrence not through the prism of insufficient capability but through interdependence that produced misplaced confidence in mutual restraint.
That the war in Ukraine has exposed the structural vulnerabilities of the international order and revealed how mechanisms of collective security proved unable to respond effectively to Russian aggression is by now an established fact. But what exactly are these vulnerabilities and weaknesses? In other words, what safeguards failed to hold and why? In“Long Live Article 2(4) of the UN Charter? Four Ways to Save the Peaceful Rules-Based International Order after Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”, Polak (Reference Polak2024) provides valuable details by examining the crisis of the international order triggered by the Russia’s invasion through the lens of international law and argues that the paralysis of the United Nations Security Council in 2022 revealed the structural fragility of the collective security system. Polak outlines four potential reform paths to target this issue: reinterpreting membership norms, empowering the General Assembly, establishing alternative coalitions of enforcement, and developing a “UN 3.0” architecture that restores legitimacy to international law.
Another insight into the causes of deterrence deficiency is offered by Polianskii (Reference Polianskii2024). His article “Inside Vladimir Putin’s Hall of Mirrors: How the Kremlin’s Miscalculation of Western Resolve Emboldened Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”, centers the importance of informational misperception and examines how Russia’s leadership misread Western resolve by creating an information environment that reproduced its own propaganda and suppressed external critique. Rather than being driven by a self-perception of weakness vis-a-vis the West, the Russian regime seems to have felt strong enough to assume that the West would be effectively deterred and would not provide any help to Ukraine.
While these studies reveal the fragility of the international order, another group of articles investigate the transnational processes and domestic responses of Ukraine’s neighbors in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion, which triggered a great refugee wave.
Refugee Policy and Humanitarian Response
With nearly 8 million Ukrainians seeking refuge in the EU states at the end of 2022 (UNHCR, 2022), the war in Ukraine has provoked societal debates across Europe, compelling neighboring states to reimagine the moral and political foundations of solidarity. The scale of displacement was unprecedented in recent European history, and so was the activation of the EU Temporary Protection Directive for Ukrainian refugees EU-wide. At the same time, the refugee burden was not uniformly distributed across the EU states. Poland and the Czech Republic have been among the main refugee-receiving states, hosting more than 1.5 million and over half a million Ukrainians, respectively, with the Czech Republic having the highest per-capita intake in the Union.
In their article “Temporary Protection for Ukrainian Refugees in the Czech Republic and Poland,” Macková et al. (Reference Macková, Zogata-Kusz, Filipec and Medová2024) compare the temporary protection measures introduced by these two neighboring EU states, highlighting how both went significantly beyond the legal obligations set out in the EU Temporary Protection Directive adopted in 2001, but activated for the first time in 2022. Both Poland and the Czech Republic rapidly put in place temporary protection frameworks granting Ukrainians the right to reside, work, access healthcare, and education almost on similar level with citizens, framing their response as an expression of political commitment and regional solidarity rooted in shared historical experience and geographic proximity. Macková et al. see these receptive policies reflecting and being guided by what they identify as the concept of deservingness. Deservingness structures perceptions of moral and cultural eligibility for protection of a particular refugee group. While sharing the initial receptiveness, the two countries diverged in the implementation and long-term orientation of protection policies. Poland maintained broad entitlements and a stable legal status under its Special Law, whereas the Czech Republic’s Lex Ukraine packages evolved toward greater conditionality, gradually limiting welfare benefits and shortening assistance periods. With close analysis of what makes refugees seen as more or less deserving of protection and how and why this perception forms and changes, the study contributes to the study of refugee reception policies more broadly, in addition to shedding light on how the states that received the largest number of Ukrainian refugees formulate their policies towards them.
The socio-political aspects of the deservingness logic are further explored in “Communicating Assistance to Ukrainian Refugees: Does Empathetic Communication Make a Difference?” by Ringlerová and Krotký (Reference Ringlerova and Krotký2025), who use a survey experiment conducted in the Czech Republic to examine how different communication frameworks shape public support for assistance to Ukrainian refugees. The survey experiment reveals that empathetic appeals do not significantly increase support compared to pragmatic or efficiency-based messages. The findings suggest that public solidarity is shaped less by emotion than by rationalized notions of fairness and deservingness.
Taken together, these studies reveal that the unprecedented reception of Ukrainian refugees in neighboring EU states was guided by a pragmatic and locally grounded understanding of solidarity. The refugee response illustrates a broader European trend in which humanitarian commitment remains substantial yet conditional, lying on the intersection of political pragmatism and historically grounded perceptions of shared identity.
The rest of the articles in the issue delve into the national, cultural, and linguistic identity dynamics both in Russia and in Ukraine, which are crucial to fully understanding the roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
History, Memory, and National Narratives
The divergence in identity politics that emerged already in the late Soviet period and grew progressively since, accelerating rapidly after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, is a key causal factor in Putin’s fateful decision to send his army into Ukraine to return Ukraine to its “rightful” place under Russia’s control (Popova and Shevel Reference Popova and Shevel2024). Historical narratives became weapons in the war, with Russia asserting its supposed historical right to rule Ukraine, and Ukraine embracing a competing reading of entangled history that stresses Ukraine’s and Ukrainian’s historical distinctiveness and Russia’s centuries-old attempts to crush the quest for political and cultural autonomy in Ukraine.
In this special issue, the article by Kasianov (Reference Kasianov2025) “History Politics in the Russian - Ukrainian Relations, the 2000s–2022: Shared Past as a Casus Belli ” details and contextualizes this battle of historical narratives, demonstrating how contrasting uses of history reveal competing narratives of legitimacy, victimhood, and belonging. Employing the concepts of mnemonic anxiety and securitization of memory, Kasianov shows how Russia and Ukraine each developed distinct trajectories of historical policymaking through the interpretation of the past as a matter of political security and legitimation. Mnemonic anxiety, defined by the author as the fear of losing control over historical narratives that sustain national identity and the securitization of memory, took contrasting forms in Russia and Ukraine. In Russia, it provided imperial continuity and foregrounded Soviet pride, while in Ukraine, it led to decommunization and legal defense against external revisionism.
The contrasting trajectories of historical interpretation are further highlighted in this issue by the empirical study conducted for the article “Fractured Pasts? Views on Soviet History Among Russians and Ukrainians Prior to the 2022 Invasion” by Krawatzek and Soroka (Reference Krawatzek and Soroka2025). The authors explore historical narratives and collective memory, spotlighting societal attitudes. Using survey data collected in Ukraine and Russia shortly before the full-scale invasion, Krawatzek and Soroka show the differences between the two societies and also the differences within. Amidst little variation within Russia and the then-existing differences between Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Ukraine, the finding that really stands out is the difference between Ukraine’s Russian-speakers and Russians in Russia on historical memory of key 20th century events. Despite domestic differences on historical memory within Ukraine, Russian-speakers in Ukraine have diverged from Russian citizens already before the full-scale invasion. Conducted before the full-scale invasion in 2021, the survey analyzed in this article provides a systematic empirical comparison of how ordinary citizens in Russia and Ukraine perceived the Soviet past, assessing attitudes toward the USSR, the legacy of Stalin, the Holodomor, and the meaning of the Soviet collapse.
Extending this discussion of historical memory with attention to another important minority in Ukraine, the article “Memory of Forced Displacements in the Discourse and Coping Strategies of Crimean Tatars in Post-2014 Crimea” by Muratova (Reference Muratova2025) examines how collective memory functions as a means of survival and resistance among Crimean Tatars in post-2014 Crimea. Through narratives of the 1944 deportation, she shows how historical trauma is reactivated under renewed repression, transforming memory itself into a form of political agency. Muratova’s contribution offers a valuable micro-historical lens on memory securitization through the collective trauma narratives of the Crimean Tatars. Utilising the methodology of semi-structured interviews and focus groups, Muratova’s study narrows down memory securitization to the level of lived experience that can be used as a community-driven effort to safeguard identity. Together, the three studies focused on historical memory give a comprehensive analysis of the use of historical interpretations that extend from the level of state policy to societal attitudes and lived experience.
Culture, Language, and Decolonization
In addition to historical memory, linguistic and cultural divergence has long been considered a potential source of tension and even a political fault line in Ukraine. Three contributions to this special issue examine how the boundaries of belonging within Ukrainian society are being reshaped in the linguistic and cultural spheres. More specifically, these articles examine how the post-2014 period featured processes and efforts toward the decolonization of language and culture to reclaim Ukrainian identity.
Vozna’s (Reference Vozna2025) “Ukrainian Russophones’ Engagement with Language Education Policies”, uses several original datasets on standardized tests and university admissions policies, as well as analysis of regional media and social media posts in the historically Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv, to examine how Russophone Ukrainians engage with state-led Ukrainization policies. The main finding is that a process of cultural realignment instead of exclusion is taking place. Following the introduction of standardized university tests, the value of Ukrainian increased: students more often chose it for exams, universities rewarded proficiency, and local communities defended its status using decolonial rhetoric. Vozna shows that, for many Russophones, adopting Ukrainian was less a matter of coercion than an act of civic self-identification.
In their study “Decolonizing Ukrainian Art History”, Demchuk and Levchenko (Reference Demchuk and Levchenko2024) explore how language itself becomes a tool of epistemic decolonization. The article examines the discipline of “mystetstvoznavstvo” or “the study of art” and its entanglement with Soviet and Russian interpretative frameworks. The authors argue that the decolonization of Ukraine’s art history discipline requires not only revising its canon but also reformulating its terminology, as wording is often used to reproduce hierarchies rooted in imperial scholarship. Specifically, they recommend not solely focusing on trying to reclaim individual artists as Ukrainian but dismantling colonial tools imposed during the Soviet era on the discipline. Their approach demonstrates that decolonization demands not only political independence but also the reclamation of epistemic agency within academic language and cultural interpretation.
The process of decolonizing meaning and expression is examined as performative and civic acts in “Ukrainian War Humor and Civic Activism in 2022” by Klumbytė and Yeremieieva (Reference Klumbytė and Yeremieieva2024). The authors explore how humor, satire, and online creativity became symbols and acts of civic mobilization during the full-scale war. Through digital memes, cartoons, and everyday acts of humor, Ukrainians transformed trauma into collective empowerment by using laughter to sustain morale and articulate political resistance.
