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.

Critical approaches to research on war-affected societies emphasize the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge. Presently, research on war-affected societies is undergoing a shift toward localization with a call for more “voices” with local knowledge and expertise. This research is an attempt to analyze the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-affected societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and feeding media discourse. The research focuses on the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014 as a prism through which to examine the main challenges for localized knowledge production. We consider several aspects of knowledge production including the problems and issues of framing and wording that define the character of the conflict, challenges of research design and data collection, researchers’ positioning dilemmas, participants’ responses, differences between policy and academic research, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is to engage with and attempts to advance the literature on knowledge localization. We argue that a move toward the localization of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. Based on our own experience of fieldwork during wartime, we point out possible ethical and methodological challenges and offer workable responses to them.

This article examines Putin’s expectations prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seeks to answer the following question: Why did Russia invade Ukraine regardless of the West’s threats of severe economic penalties raising the cost of an attack? I argue that the confidence in Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, despite his awareness that the stakes could go well beyond the borders of Ukraine and increase the cost of war for the Kremlin, was based on Putin’s calculations that the West would be reluctant to change or substantially displace established rich-get-richer economic structures and would not apply high costs on the Kremlin for military aggression against Ukraine in case of a successful blitzkrieg campaign. By utilizing an extended deterrence game analysis, the article demonstrates how Russia, Ukraine, and the West interacted in decision-making, taking into account the reactions and choices of the other players, and adds to the current body of knowledge by introducing an expanded approach to deterrence strategy based on economic interdependence and the scale of the anticipated conflict.

A centralized authority with a monopoly of force is fundamental to eradicate war between states. Unfortunately, due to the outdated power structure of the Security Council, it has once again proven incapable of reacting, this time, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Given the unprecedented potential that Russia’s unlawful use of force has of restructuring the international scene, this piece considers it crucial to adapt our international peacekeeping institutions to counter the emergence of a new disorderly and war-prone status quo. Thus, four legally and politically viable ways in which the international community can effectively express its outrage, avoid permanent member impunity, and reassert the United Nations’ legitimacy and relevance are proposed.

Why did Vladimir Putin order the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, despite numerous warnings from Western countries about the consequences of such an action? This article argues that misperceptions about having the upper hand vis-à-vis Western countries, formed and proliferated among the Russian leadership, emboldened the Kremlin to launch the military invasion of Ukraine, assuming that the West would stand down in the face of the attack. Based on a detailed analysis of Russian elites’ discourse through the theoretical lens of interdependence studies, this study demonstrates that Putin miscalculated Western resolve largely because of two key misperceptions. First, Putin’s elites were convinced that the West was asymmetrically dependent on Russia, viewing it as a strategic resource that would tie the hands of Western and EU countries, eventually making them accept the outcome of the war. Second, the Kremlin believed that Ukraine occupied a secondary role in Western interests that would further limit the West’s involvement in the conflict, as it would not risk exposing its dependence on Moscow for the sake of an issue that, in the Kremlin’s eyes, was marginal to European and American security.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

European countries have been important supporters of Ukraine since the 2022 invasion by Russia. Responding to the invasion, however, was not the only challenge facing these countries in 2022. A tough domestic economic situation caused by high inflation and skyrocketing energy prices gave rise to public resentment accusing governments of favoring Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees over their own citizens. Yet, communicating governments’ policies on Ukraine efficiently and having the public on board matters because lack of public support may endanger the countries’ ability to help Ukraine in the war. Given the importance of political communication, we use the case of Czechia to explore the role of empathy in political communication between Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees. We build on existing studies which suggest that empathy in communication has the potential to decrease polarization of public opinion and that candidates using empathetic communication are viewed more positively. First, in a rhetorical analysis, we demonstrate that empathy with citizens’ concerns is not a part of the government’s defense of its refugee policy. Then, in an original survey experiment, we show that contrary to expectations, expressing empathy with citizens’ concerns does not significantly increase public support for help to refugees.

The article summarizes the history of the Russian–Ukrainian encounters in memory politics from the 1990s to the start of the 2020s. It compares and contrasts Russia’a and Ukraine’s perceptions of the issues, goals, tasks, and methods of historical policy. Having a shared history and similar challenges in developing identities and tackling the politics of commemoration, the cultural elites and governments of both countries approached the task of identity-building from opposite perspectives. These differences stemmed from different interpretations of one’s nation’s place and role in world history. The article summarizes all critical points of disagreement regarding how the two countries understood their shared past and interpreted it. It observes the history of the joint initiatives between Russia and Ukraine to reconcile confronting narratives. The analysis shows how the shared past perceived and conceived in divergent ways amounted to the mnemonic anxiety and securitization of the collective memory clash of antagonistic versions of the past and triggered the conflict and war.

This article examines the divergent historical views espoused by Russian and Ukrainian societies and their representatives on topics such as the 1932-1933 famine, Stalinism, and the post-World War II Soviet Union. We draw on an original online survey, conducted simultaneously in January 2021 in Ukraine and Russia, to provide an in-depth analysis of views on history in Ukraine and Russia before the 2022 invasion. In Russia, we illustrate how little contestation there is of official narratives. This may signal the existence of an integrated mnemonic community after a decade of state-curated historical narratives, but it might also imply that Russian society is disengaged from history. In pre-2022 Ukraine, meanwhile, we identify persistent fragmentation in the ways in which society perceives history, largely centered along the country’s linguistic divide. However, a central finding is that Russian-speakers in Ukraine differ in their historical views from Russian citizens on key dimensions such as the memory of Stalin and the Holodomor. These results speak to the evolving and politicized nature of societal memory and provide an important baseline for interpreting potential mnemonic shifts that accompanied the full-scale war launched against Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

This article demonstrates how Crimean Tatars use memories of past displacements in their narratives of contemporary emigration and coping strategies in occupied Crimea. First, I present the significance of the first annexation of Crimea in 1783 by the Russian Empire and the 1944 deportation in the collective memory of Crimean Tatars. Second, I discuss the main motives for the displacement of internally displaced persons of Crimean Tatar origin in 2014 based on interviews conducted in L’viv. Drawing from interviews and focus groups that were conducted in Crimea between 2017 and 2019, I describe the influence of the memory of forced displacements on contemporary discourse and how it has evolved since Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine. Finally, I focus on how Crimean Solidarity activists employ memories of the first annexation and deportation to legitimize their resistance against Russia’s repressive policy in occupied Crimea. I argue that the 2014 annexation of Crimea was a retraumatizing event for many Crimean Tatars and that it has become an integral part of the grand narrative of their forced displacement from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The study explores the engagement of Russophone Ukrainians with educational policies that increase the status of the Ukrainian language, the standardized tests of Ukrainian, and the subject tests that could be passed in Ukrainian. It argues that this centralized unitary language policy has received support from Russophones. It does so by analyzing the language choices of Russophone students when taking standardized tests in various subjects, as well as admission policies and discussions of relevant policies in local media and social media of the Russophone city of Kharkiv. It shows that following the introduction of standardized tests, the value of Ukrainian has increased across various actors: students have been choosing Ukrainian more, universities have valued Ukrainian in the admission process, and local citizens have defended the status of Ukrainian, relying on decolonial rhetoric. It shows that the decolonial framing of the Ukrainization policies resonated with Russophones enough for them to support them, and not to result in a backlash.

In this article, we analyze the influence of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union on Ukrainian art-historical writing. As we shall reveal, the mechanisms of knowledge production created during that period continued to operate after the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine in 1991. The limitations that were imposed on the art-historical community, which can be regarded as colonial, shaped the crucial narratives (of the “triune nation”) and dictated the thematic scope of Ukrainian scholarship. The new notion of “mysteztvoznavstvo,” introduced in 1937 instead of the previously established Theory and History of Art, eventually led to a profound rift between Soviet Russian and Ukrainian scholarship and the Western world more generally. “Mysteztvoznavstvo” was supposed to be an umbrella term for art history, theory, and art criticism but ended up doing a disservice to each domain. Art theory in Ukraine was virtually nonexistent, whereas art history was mixed with art criticism, resulting in writing that did not meet widely accepted academic standards. This led to the isolation of Ukrainian scholars, who were confined to the Russian-speaking community and had very limited access to foreign scholarship. We also analyze the decolonization processes in the history of Ukrainian art prompted by the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine after 2013, such as The Revolution of Dignity and “decommunization.” We argue that horizontal art history and decolonial approaches cannot adequately be applied if colonial tools are still used by the discipline. Epistemic decolonization can only be achieved after challenging the standards of “mysteztvoznavstvo” and, thus, by dividing art studies into three separate domains: art history, art theory, and art criticism, as each discipline has its own goals and methods.

The 2022 war in Ukraine has produced the biggest virtual humor archive in the history of wars. We argue that Ukrainian war humor is a form of civic activism in the name of Ukraine’s sovereignty. This civic activism is defined by resistance, solidarity, vigilance, and dedication to victory. The war humor circulates locally as well as on a global stage. It expresses the government’s positions and the people’s voices and empowers those affected by this war. Ukrainian war humor documents experiences of war realities; provides moral commentaries and emotional and aesthetic interpretations; and articulates visions for the future of Ukraine as a sovereign European state.