The Ukrainian/Russian conflict and its Imagined Communities

A topic that in days attracted the attention of media worldwide

In these hours, western media are bombarding the network with news of the recent attacks that Russia moved against Ukraine. These events arise socio-political questions among civil rights, nationalism, and identity. The Russian forces, in fact, recently invaded the perimeters of Ukraine, entering the region of the Donbas, a strategic region whose main resource derives from coal mines.

The region of the Donbas is the land that comprises the two newly auto-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk; pro-Russian zones which since the clashes of 2014 witnessed intermittently fights with the Ukrainian government which doesn’t want the regions to be annexed to Russia. 

One week ago, the Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the recognition of the two auto-proclaimed republics and mobilized the Russian forces crossing the Ukrainian border. Today the rumbling sound of explosions not only woke up the city port of Mariupol but also surprisingly struck the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

But why is all of this happening now? What are the reasons for which two Slavic countries keep fighting each other, spreading public concern in Europe and in the world, which fears the threat of a world conflict in the middle of the European continent?

Why did the clashes of 2014, which saw the annexation of Crimea to Russia, were not enough to stop the conflict between the two former major forces of URSS?

To understand these events, we need to go back to the Soviet Union to try to imagine how these Slavic communities identify themselves.

1991 saw the end of the USSR era. The powerful Soviet Union crumbled in pieces, scattering into many peripheral states, and giving birth to “buffer states” such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine that separated geographically Europe and Russia.

During the USSR the two contested territories were donated to Ukraine as a symbol of brotherhood between Russia and the other countries of the Soviet Union. Even though at that time there was no problem, since the Soviet Union was one and united, after 1991 and the fall of the Union, things changed preparing the field for the development of the recent conflicts. Being Russophones and filo-Russian, the two territories witnessed the sociocultural and political clashes derived from their ethno-politic origin. With the request from the Ukrainian government to be comprised in the NATO, which would mean that Russia could not intervene with its forces anymore, without clashing with the forces of the united nations, and therefore feeling it as a threat to its borders, Russia rushed its move by mobilizing more than 120000 soldiers to the national borders of Ukraine and officially invading it the 22nd of February saying that it is a “military measure necessary to bring peace and justice to the ones who were subjugated and discriminated by the fascist government of Ukraine”. On February 24 the Russian leader Vladimir Putin authorized a military operation against Ukraine he said, “aimed to protect the people that have been bullied and subjected to genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years”.

The imagined community of Ukraine

The Ukrainian part of the country under the URSS spoke both Russian and Ukrainian, but only around 30% of the population is a native speaker of Russian at the moment.

Under the URSS the use of Ukrainian was prohibited in the administrative field, but the language continued to be widely used around the country, becoming the national language of Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union.

As it is stressed by Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities (whose second edition had been published right after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991), nationalism is fostered by printed and not-printed media encouraging a certain language use among others for forming that peculiar, imagined community within the same territory called nation.

As claimed by Benedict Anderson in p.84: “The lexicographic revolution in Europe, however, created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages were the personal property of quite specific groups”. As specified in his book, “in the eighteenth century, Ukrainian (Little Russian) was contemptuously tolerated as a language of yokels. But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky wrote his Aeneid, an enormously popular satirical poem on Ukrainian life. In 1804, the University of Kharkiv was founded and rapidly became the center for a boom in Ukrainian literature. In 1819 the first Ukrainian grammar appeared – only 17 years after the official Russian one. And in the 1839s followed the works of Taras Shevchenko, of whom Seton Watson observes that ‘the formation of an accepted Ukrainian literary language owes more to him than to any other individual. The use of this language was the decisive stage in the formation of a Ukrainian national consciousness’. Shortly thereafter, in 1846, the first Ukrainian nationalist organization was founded in Kyiv – by a historian!” (Imagined Communities p.74).

Since the division from the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and its government has been trying to foster its national identity by taking political measures against the Russian language and its speakers and creating the imagined community of Ukraine that did not exist before 1991.

Ukraine comprised Russian speakers, it was part of its identity, but political influences from Europe and NATO, and the consequent clashes with the Russian government, made the Ukrainian want to create, and imagine, a community who didn’t comprise the Russian qualities. A monolingual, mono-ethnical community that was separated from the Russian, being justified by their nationalistic political measures of conservativism by depicting the Russians as invaders as the evil force of communism trying to deprive them of their lands and national identity, attempting to establish the myth of a monoethnic and monoglot society.

With regards to Soviet-independent Ukraine, I tried to go back and collect some key events (also thanks to holy Wikipedia), to understand what could foster that particular sense of nation that the last few years brought Ukraine to the point of fighting against people of its own country, as the Russian speakers of the two regions of Crimea and Donbas, and develop that anti-Russian identity which made Ukraine closer to the annexation in Europe and the United Nations.

Since the Euromaidan of 2013-2014, the Ukrainian government has issued several laws aimed at encouraging Ukrainization in the media, in education and other spheres. In February 2017, the Ukrainian government banned the commercial importation of books from Russia, which had accounted for up to 60% of all titles sold in Ukraine. On May 23, 2017, the Ukrainian parliament approved the law that most broadcast content should be in Ukrainian (75% of national carriers and 50% of local carriers). The 2017 law on education provides that the Ukrainian language is the language of education at all levels except for one or more subjects that are allowed to be taught in two or more languages, namely English or one of the other official languages of the European Union (i.e., excluding Russian). The law does state that persons belonging to the indigenous peoples of Ukraine are guaranteed the right to study at public preschool institutes and primary schools in “the language of instruction of the respective indigenous people, along with the state language of instruction” in separate classes or groups. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has expressed concern with this measure and with the lack of “real consultation” with the representatives of national minorities. In July 2018, The Mykolaiv Okrug Administrative Court liquidated the status of Russian as a regional language, on the suit (bringing to the norms of the national legislation due to the recognition of the law “On the principles of the state language policy” by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine as unconstitutional) of the First Deputy Prosecutor of the Mykolaiv Oblast. In October and December 2018, parliaments of the city of Kherson and Kharkiv Oblast also abolished the status of the Russian language as a regional one. In 2022 a law requiring all print media to be published in Ukrainian came into force. It did not ban publication in Russian however it stipulated that a Ukrainian version of equivalent circulation and scope must be published – which is not a profitable option for publishers. The law was said to disenfranchise the country’s Russian speakers. In the Constitution of Ukraine adopted by the parliament in 1996, article 10 reads: “In Ukraine, the free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine, is guaranteed”. The Constitution declares the Ukrainian language as the state language of the country, while other languages spoken in Ukraine are guaranteed constitutional protection.

In 2006, the Kharkiv City Rada was the first to declare Russian to be a regional language. Following that, almost all southern and eastern oblasts (Luhansk, Donetsk, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts. In August 2012, a law on regional languages entitled any local language spoken by at least a 10% minority to be declared official within that area. Russian was within weeks declared as a regional language in several southern and eastern oblasts and cities. On 23 February 2014, a bill repealing the law was approved by 232 deputies out of 450 but not signed into law by acting president Oleksandr Turchynov. On 28 February 2018, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled this legislation unconstitutional. In December 2016, the importation of “anti-Ukrainian” books from Russia was restricted. In February 2017 the Ukrainian government completely banned the commercial importation of books from Russia, which had accounted for up to 60% of all titles sold. 

All the above-mentioned events, kindly provided by Wikipedia and other user-generated encyclopedias, exemplify what has been widely exemplified in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, in other words, that language plays a central role in the structure of nationalism, racial recognition, and national ideology.

What I am trying to say here is that Ukraine and its government try to foster its national identity by taking political measures against the Russian language and its speakers and creating the imagined community of Ukraine that did not exist before 1991. Ukraine in fact, always comprised Russian speakers, that always have been part of its Slavic community, however, by creating, and imagining, a community who didn’t comprise the Russian qualities, as above exemplified, a monolingual, mono-ethnical community which was separated from the Russian, that justified their nationalistic political measures of conservativism by depicting the Russian as invaders as the evil force of communism trying to deprive them by their lands and national identity, therefore fostered the consequent political and military clashes with the Russophone communities and consequently with the Russian government.

(Not) Conclusive thoughts

What I wanted to stress with this article is the ideological and political power that printed and not-printed media exercise in constructing a peculiar image of a national community. Using Benedict Anderson’s words: “so often in the ‘nation-building’ policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth” (Imagined Communities, p.114). What I believe is in fact that what has been recently depicted by the Western media is probably just one facet of the historical, sociological, and political medal which lies between the two Slavic communities of Ukraine and Russia.
To summarize, below could probably be the main two points of view from both sides:

Filo-Russian point of view = the two auto-declared states and their Russian inhabitants witnessed the discrimination as being Russian; the politics of Ukraine are contrasting Russia’s interests, and the two territories need to be annexed to Russia, reasons that led to the mobilization of the Russian military forces.

Ukrainian/European point of view = Russia is claiming back the territories that were part of the old URSS, starting with Ukraine, the old barn of the URSS. With this move Russia is violating the sovereignty of the state of Ukraine.

In addition, the recent approval of Belarus to permanently host Russian nuclear weapons raises further questions among how the Slavic communities imagine themselves while at the same time depicting the Other. With regards to the imagined community of Belarus, it can be stated that its people are of the same ethnicity as Ukraine and Russia. Even though they speak similar languages, different political movements and pressures put them against each other.

Further research is needed in order to socio-culturally and politically analyze the relationship within these countries. Furthermore, the image of dead soldiers, civilians and children of Ukraine, is depicted by the Western media as being national heroes and martyrs for defending their country from the unstoppable and evil forces of Russia. At the same time less is mentioned about the repetitive attacks that have been made against the Russian speaking communities of the Donbas in the last decade. 

Western countries are condemning the Russian action by sanctions and taking off honors from also Russian people not involved directly in the conflict, since the actions of the ex ‘red nation’ are considered not being honorable. More than ever, the Russian community is being depicted as being ruthless and merciless barbarians by western media and this could bring up cultural issues and sociological questions among how a nation and its whole community is imagined and described through the western media.

I wrote this article in few days, not without the fear of others’ criticism, with the intention to bring up further discussions and debates among the topic that is fermenting the media world widely, also with the hope to also raise my own and other’s awareness and reflect on how much it is important to discuss about these events that bring up old questions among nationalism, culture, and media.

I think of ICU as being an imagined community where culture and nationality are dealt with peacefully in a utopian environment of multiculturalism and polyglossia, where everyone’s rights are safeguarded. I believe that especially in these times ICU is the right place in Japan where to raise the voice among these happenings, and I hope that in future I will have the chance to broaden my knowledge and further deepen the research among these topics.

Peace to the world.

【BUSSI, MARIO】