Ukraine is subject to two competing imperialist discourses which, in different ways, deny the prospect of a lasting peace. Russia’s colonial aspirations have been exhaustively documented. We are all too familiar with the denial of Ukrainian agency propagated by Putin, who insists that Ukraine is falsely aspiring to European identity, misled by the malign machinations of anti-Russian interests. Rather, for Putin, Ukraine’s place lies in lockstep with its Russian brother who has taken it upon himself to drag its foolish younger sibling from the imperial clutches of the West.
This is typically where our understanding of the conflict in the West ends. In this narrative, Ukraine is the heroic oppressed, who, against all odds, is fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights against power-hungry authoritarianism.
However, this analysis is itself demonstrative of the imperialism that structures Western foreign policy, and similarly, like Russia, denies Ukraine of agency. When, to emphasise the importance of defending Ukraine, we articulate its similarity to the West, when we talk about human rights, free markets, liberalism, democracy and the long list of closely held Western ideals, Ukrainian national aspirations become exclusively European.
Ukraine’s future thus becomes a binary, succumb to the dark clutches of Russian imperialism or join the freedom-loving West. This bulldozes the complexity of Ukrainian politics and Ukrainian people to occupy a singular identity: an oppressed nation, desperate to be plucked from the ravages of Russian imperialism.
This denies Ukraine agency in two ways. The first is that national sovereignty is important because Ukraine is Western. The logical conclusion is that self-determination is only valid if the country assimilates to Western ideals. The second is that Ukraine is homogenised into one great pro-western blob. With this framing, we will never achieve peace.
The perspective that Ukraine is one homogenous country denies the existence of fraught identities within Ukraine. Russian speakers have long witnessed their language rights eroded by the Ukrainian state; statues and monuments erected to the anti-Russian Ukrainian fascist, Stepan Bandera; and the threat, of those in the Donbas, of economic devastation by accession to the EU.
We have a tendency in the West to describe those in the Donbas who rebelled against the Ukrainian state in 2014 as “Russian-backed separatists.” Sinister “little Green men,” who planned and perpetrated a rebellion prompted entirely by Russia. The reality is more complicated. Rather those in the Donbas, after 20 years of identity erasure, oppression and the prospect of increased economic hardship rebelled against a state from which they had been repeatedly excluded from.
This is not to pass judgment, however, without acknowledging the lived reality and identities of those in the Donbas, as well as many others in Ukraine, we will never reach a durable and lasting peace.
“Ukraine 💛💙 Mariupol” by Loco Steve is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.