Roots of Ukrainian resilience and the agency of Ukrainian society before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion

ABSTRACT When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians did not crumble under the unprecedented attack but showed steely resolve to fight for independence and the right to decide their own fate. In the Western media and scholarly analysis, the Ukrainian resilience is often associated with the leadership of the state, in particular President Zelensky. This article offers a different take on the issue of resilience in war and looks at the value foundations of Ukrainian identity, the decentralized nature of Ukrainian society and the vision of a better future as part of the Euro-Atlantic community to better understand Ukraine’s agency in response to Russia’s invasion. It draws on the original data, collected from interviews of three categories of Ukrainians, affected by the war: refugees, internally displaced people, and those living close to the frontlines.

Forces (TDF), while those without an inclination or ability for military service showed ingenuity in using everyday objects (from pickled tomatoes to sunflower seeds 1 ) to show Russians they were not welcome on the Ukrainian land.The bravery and everyday heroism of Ukrainians surprised many, spurring media, and analysts to look for a symbol of Ukrainian resistance and resilience, which they found in President Zelensky.
While Volodymyr Zelensky has offered strong leadership during Ukraine's darkest hour in its modern history, he also made mistakes when underplaying the threat of the invasion (Zelensky, 2022). 2 As some scholarly work has already been produced on the role of Zelensky in the war (Mendel, 2022;Onuch & Hale, 2022), with more underway, this article turns its attention to the Ukrainian people that came together to fight for the right to live in independent and free Ukraine.The objective here is to improve our understanding of the sources of Ukrainian resilience and the agency of the Ukrainian society in the war, both of which remain understudied a year and a half after the start of the invasion, and nine years after the annexation of Crimea and conflict in the Donbas (Graham, 2022).
Following the complexity-thinking-based framework, developed by Korosteleva and Petrova (2021), resilience here is understood as a quality of a system and a process of self-governance that presupposes adjustment to, learning with and transforming from change.In this interpretation, resilience is home-grown and relational.It does not result from externally funded initiatives but develops organically bottom-up and horizontally in times of crises and existential threat through a mesh of relations.
Part one of the article places the chosen framework within a broader debate on resilience in International Relations (IR) and emphasizes three sources of Ukrainian resilience, identified through original research, conducted in spring-summer 2022.The article argues that Ukrainian resilience is based (1) on the value of freedom, which helped Ukraine's diverse society to speak with one voice in the times of crisis; (2) the decentralized nature of the Ukrainian society and traditions of self-organization as well as (3) the vision of a better life as part of the European family and transatlantic institutions.While Ukrainian resilience is not a new phenomenon (Yermolenko, 2023), it came as a surprise to many, which this article links to poor understanding of Ukrainian society in the scholarly literature and media (Sheiko, 2022) and prevalence of realist views on the Russian-Ukrainian relations (Kissinger, 2014;Mearsheimer, 2014Mearsheimer, , 2022)).Part two summarizes three narratives on Ukrainian society as divided, weak due to the lack of engagement with organized civil society and destined to remain part of Russia's sphere of interest.Part three uses data from public surveys and 21 interviews with Ukrainians, affected by the war to dispel the myths of Ukrainian society as lacking agency, promoted by the above-mentioned narratives.The conclusion offers some ideas on supporting and harnessing the resilience of Ukrainian society for the country's recovery.

Resilience in times of war
Before Russia's full-scale invasion, the topic of Ukrainian resilience was discussed by a small circle of scholars, primarily focusing on the Donbas conflict (Boichak, 2017;Korostelina, 2020).Since February 2022, however, it has been at the center of media coverage (Kagan & Polyak, 2022;Tharoor, 2022), think tank reports (Hedenskog, 2023;Romanyshyn, 2023) and growing academic literature (Bidenko, 2023;Goodwin et al., 2023).Despite this explosion of interest, there is little cohesion in what is understood by resilience: A wide range of issues, from individual courage to proliferation of horizontal networks in the Ukrainian society, are covered by the term.This is not surprising, given that the concept still lacks a common definition, 3 even while states and international organizations actively incorporate it into their policies and practices.
Currently, three main interpretations of the concept are discernible in IR: resilience as persistence, agential self-reliance, and processual duality (Borbeau, 2018).In the first one, resilience is understood as preservation of who you are even in the context of crises and shocks.It is about "bouncing back" to life before the crisis and is thus static as it does not envisage any transformation (Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams, 2011;Tierney, 2014).The reading of resilience as agential self-reliance is applicable to individuals, who are said to possess a set of qualities, enabling them to successfully deal with adversity.It is also the view promoted by many international organizations, for instance by the United Nations (UN) (Borbeau, 2018, p. 20).
The third interpretation of resilience as a processual duality is based on two propositions: (1) resilience is a process, and not simply a quality or capability, (2) which can encompass both the preservation of the status quo (or "persistence") and transformation.It can be seen as scalable, meaning that for some a resilient response to the full-scale war will be to maintain a sense of normality amid chaos by sticking to familiar routines or habits (persistence), while for others it will involve learning new skills, changing a profession, or reinventing yourself in a new country (transformation).
The framework of resilience, developed by Korosteleva and Petrova (2021) falls into this category.Here, resilience is applicable to both an individual and a collective, e.g., a family, organization, community, or nation.It is context specific, where both space and time (or timescape), in particular past, present and future interpretations of life, captured within the framework by the concept of identity, are meaningful.Resilience builds on societal traditions that were passed from generation to generation, feeding on everyday practices of self-organization, shaped by the aspirations of a good life.It emerges from the mesh of relations that an individual or a collective have developed throughout their lives and "cannot be built on external templates or financial injections" (Korosteleva & Petrova, 2021, p. 10).External actors can still support local resilience, yet they should pay active attention to the local dynamics, the networks and values developed and relied upon by communities thus learning from the people on the ground.
The Russo-Ukrainian war that started in 2014 and entered a new phase with the full-scale invasion in 2022 is approached here as a case study of national resilience, which in times of trauma is usually based on community factors and broader physical and social ecology (Goodwin et al., 2023).That is why, the Project "Understanding communities in crisis through the lens of resilience: the case of Ukraine," 4 hereinafter the Resilience project, which provides data for this article focused on relations of research participants with other people, non-human species (pets, animals, insects, etc.) and physical spaces.These relations were explored in the context of the mesh of present practices, traditions from the past and future visions of a good life.
There were three criteria for inclusion: physical presence in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, age between 18 and 80, and possession of at least some of the elements of resilience, identified in previous research (Korosteleva & Petrova, 2021), such as the ability to self-organize/act under pressure, access to support networks (friends, family, neighbors, etc.), willingness to learn from change and having a vision of a good life.The interviewees included internally displaced people (IDPs), refugees in the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU), and Ukrainians, who continue living close to the frontlines.
As the applied framework of resilience was already tested by Korosteleva and Petrova in the context of Belarusian presidential protests, the aim was not to test its viability, but to identify key sources of resilience in the new context.Given the limitations of the project, imposed by the short timeframe, the semi-structured interviews were designed to capture elements of resilience, pertaining to the present, past, and future dimensions of participants' lifeways.This article will focus on three sources of resilience, identified within the project 5 : the value of freedom, traditions of decentralized, horizontal self-organization and vision of the Ukrainian future as part of the Euro-Atlantic community.
The resilience of Ukrainian society did not emerge out of the blue in 2022 but evolved throughout Ukraine's long history (Yermolenko, 2023) and was already visible in 2013-2014 during the Revolution of Dignity and the conflict in the Donbas.The mobilization of the whole society in response to Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 still was largely unexpected (Bidenko, 2023).The next section looks at three narratives, prevalent in the scholarly literature on Ukraine and Ukrainian society, which contributed to the limited knowledge of Ukrainian society and its resilience before the invasion.

The portrayal of Ukrainian society before the invasion
According to recent research of the Ukrainian Institute, perceptions of Ukraine in Europe, the United States and Japan were based on reductive associations with Russia and a lack of cultural and historical knowledge of the country's development (Sheiko, 2022).Even in academia, not much was expected from Ukrainians on the eve of the invasion.Onuch and Hale (2022, pp. 16-23) identify five situational and five systemic reasons behind the surprise of most observers at Zelensky's leadership and Ukraine's whole of society response to the invasion.Given the more limited focus of the article and space constraints, three main narratives are identified here as prevalent on the portrayal of Ukrainian society before the invasion in scholarly literature, based on the qualitative analysis of top five pages of articles mentioning "Ukraine crisis," "Ukrainian crisis," and "Ukrainian society" on Google Scholar and over a decade experience studying Ukraine.
The first narrative presents Ukraine as inherently divided along the East-West axis (Zhurzhenko, 2002).The country's west and center, normally labeled "West," more ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian, is traditionally seen as pro-European, while east and south, or simply "East," home to a larger Russian and Russophone population-as pro-Russian (Petro, 2015).Apart from ethnicity and language, religion, regions, and regional patronal networks are identified as dividing lines (Wilson, 2015, p. 105), leading some to discussing the existence of "two Ukraines" (Riabchuk, 2002).Differences in electoral preferences of the country's diverse population were easy to capture on the maps, which contributed to the popularity of this narrative.Although the last two presidential elections in 2014 and 2019 did not confirm the polarization of Ukraine, with Poroshenko and Zelensky respectively securing the majority of votes throughout the country (Dickinson, 2021), Ukraine continued to be seen as divided (Matlock, 2021) or even on the brink of collapse (Sotiriou, 2016).From 2014, the conflict in the Donbas was used as another proof of divisions among Ukrainians, with analysts, often from the realist camp, citing "profound tensions" in Ukraine's nation and state-building processes to explain the "Ukraine crisis" (Sakwa, 2015), while ignoring or downplaying Russia's role. 6Ukrainian society, therefore, before the invasion was not seen as a force that could self-organize in support of its state, government, and the Armed Forces.
The expectations of Ukrainian resistance were also kept low due to the misunderstandings of Ukrainian civil society (Bidenko, 2023).The three revolutions-the Revolution on Granite in 1990, the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014-witnessed by Ukraine in less than three decades were often presented as an illustration of the immaturity of Ukrainian civil society (Cleary, 2016;Way, 2014), although some scholars celebrated them for the power of self-organization (Wynnyckyj, 2020) and mass mobilization of society across many divides (Onuch, 2014).
Moreover, as most Ukrainians were skeptical about civil society organizations (CSOs)-for example, in 2021 only 4% of citizens were involved in CSO activities, while 89% never donated to a civic intuitive (Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiative, 2021)-Ukrainian civil society was perceived as apathetic and inactive (Cleary, 2016).At the same time, people's self-organization and trust in informal networks was rarely considered.
The Soviet legacy provided a convenient explanation for the lack of civic activism in Ukraine.While CSOs and trade unions were allowed in the Soviet Union, their main role was to monitor and control the population (Kubicek, 2002), which led to low levels of trust in these organizations and only nominal commitment to them, even after the Soviet republics gained independence (Levada & Golov, 1993).While Ukrainians avoided organized civil society, the label Homo Sovieticus remained firmly attached to them, portraying an average citizen as a passive observer of their life, unable to have an impact on policymaking through civic engagement (Gatskova & Gatskov, 2012).
Alongside the narratives of divided and weak Ukraine, the insistence of prominent realist scholars and policymakers on honoring Russia's sphere of influence (Kissinger, 2014;Mearsheimer, 2014) did not leave much space for the agency of Ukrainians either.Reviewing literature, released on the situation in Ukraine after 2014, normally labeled "the Ukraine or Ukrainian crisis," Kuzio (2017, p. 12) found the category treating Ukraine as a pawn in the geopolitical game between Russia and the West the most numerous.
Based on historical ties, it was believed that Ukraine could "never be just a foreign country" to Russia (Kissinger, 2014).Ukraine has long been presented as an integral part of the Russian world through "common" history and religion, despite Ukrainians and Russians having radically different experiences of these shared times as colonized and colonizers respectively.Russia was therefore seen to be right to defend Russian speakers in the Crimea, Donbas and eventually on all Ukrainian territory, despite the lack of evidence this was necessary.Just like it was justified to be concerned about the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO and thus bringing Western missiles to its borders.Even after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholars defended Russia's "legitimate security concerns" and discussed how Ukraine's choices were a threat to Russia's sovereignty and territorial integrity, not vice versa (Kivimäki, 2022).It was suggested that since Russia was a greater power, Ukraine, just like the rest of what Russia calls its "near abroad," should accept its hegemony and in best case scenario settle for a neutral status in security sphere.In the "sphere of influence" rhetoric, Ukraine was denied agency, while Ukrainians were seen as objects, not subjects of their own story, destined to live in Moscow's shadow.
The next section will use secondary literature and original data to highlight factual and theoretical errors within the three above-mentioned narratives, while identifying key sources of Ukrainian resilience.

Ukraine after the invasion: In charge of its own destiny
The portrayal of Ukrainians as divided, weak, and destined to remain part of the Russian world is not a simple invention. 7These narratives are based on "a re-construction of the political and cultural realities of Ukraine" (Zhurzhenko, 2002), a Russia-centric interpretation of history, selective reading of opinion polls and election results, Western theoretical debates, cultural stereotypes, prejudices (Sheiko, 2022) and Kremlin propaganda.That is why while scholars and journalists have been trying to expose errors and incontinences within these myths for decades, they continue persisting. 8In this section, the emphasis will be on the aspects of the narratives that came crumbling after Russia's invasion in 2022, referencing public opinions, previous research, and data from the interviews, conducted by the author.
If Ukraine's divisions were as important as they had been presented, it is likely that Russia would have succeeded in taking over at least the regions, traditionally seen as pro-Russian.This has not happened though as the whole of Ukrainian society united in the fight against Russia's invasion. 9This is not to suggest that there are no divisions between Ukrainians from different regions: Divisions exist and have existed in Ukraine for centuries, but they neither carry the weight that had been previously ascribed to them, nor do they prevent Ukrainians from mobilizing into a united and powerful force in times of an existential threat.
One of the biggest mistakes in understanding Ukraine as a divided nation is the conflation of its Russian speakers with Russians.According to the latest census, which was conducted back in 2001, 17% of the Ukrainian population was Russian (Borysenko, 2017), but more recent polls, conducted after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the full-scale war, put this number at only 5% (Plokhy, 2016, p. 351;Ratinggroup, 2022).Furthermore, a number of surveys conducted within the last decade showed that only 1% of Ukrainians believed that the status of the Russian language was an important one and needed an urgent solution 10 (Kyiv International Institute of Sociology [KIIS], 2023a).In fact, Onuch and Hale's decade-long research showed that Ukrainians were not polarized into two halves linguistically, ethnically, culturally, or electorally, with the existence of a large middle ground, while economic divisions were more important in understanding modern Ukraine than language (2022, pp. 21-22).
Multiple polls (KIIS, 2023b;Raitinggroup, 2022Raitinggroup, , 2023) ) confirm that this is a whole of society war for Ukraine.Of course, they do not cover the occupied territories of the Crimea and Donbas, but it is worth remembering that neither of these territories was likely to break away from Ukraine without Russia's involvement: in December 2013, the majority of Ukrainians 80% in the East and 76% in the South (which included the Crimea) supported united and independent Ukraine (Grygorenko, 2014).In 2023 (without respondents on the occupied territories), 89% supported the Independence of Ukraine, while only 1% wanted unification with Russia (KIIS, 2023c).
Russia's unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and Ukraine's response to it show us the importance of paying attention to what unites the country, not what divides it.It is argued here that one of such uniting factors is the value of freedom, which has provided the foundation for the resilience of Ukrainians.According to a poll in 2022, 71% of Ukrainians said that freedom was more important to them than equality, while only 23% said they would support restrictions of certain rights and freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, during the foreign aggression (Razumkov Centre, 2023).It was Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's most celebrated poet and a former serf, who made universal democratic freedom the cornerstone of the Ukrainian identity (Finnin, 2022).And it remains so today.For Ukrainians, freedom is not something abstract, but the ability to make decisions, to speak, to act, and recognition of the right (and obligation) of others to do the same (Wynnyckyj, 2022).It is therefore about having individual and collective agency (Wynnyckyj, 2022).
When participants of the Resilience Project were asked to explain what it meant for them to be Ukrainian and what associations they had with Ukraine, "free" and "freedom" were most common answers.The Russian world, on the other hand, was seen as an antithesis of the Ukrainian freedom.As one interviewee from the Luhansk region said, "I see the Russian hinterland, and how limited they are.I don't want that, we already have a different direction … I want to feel like a free person in my country."Another interviewee, who became an IDP in 2014 and a refugee in 2022, had experienced the lack of freedom already: You feel it instantly, when you have no freedom, no freedom of choice … .It's as if everything around you is changing, it seems to be the same city, the same people, but everything is different.As if it's filled with emptiness … And I'll tell you more … I just now remembered how I arrived in Kharkiv region.When I saw, after three months in Donetsk under occupation, the Ukrainian flag, I stopped in my tracks when I saw it.I nearly cried.Honestly, I can say that.I knew right away it was easy, I was free.
While building on the value of freedom, Ukrainian resilience has also emerged thanks to strong traditions of horizontal relations and self-organization in the Ukrainian society.The low level of participation among Ukrainians in organized civil society allowed analysts and policymakers to speak about the Ukrainian civil society as weak.The same analysts, however, missed the networks of self-organization, which have deep historic roots in Ukraine, not because they were invisible, but because they did not fit into the mold of organized civil society.
This informal civil society, however, is impossible to ignore.Following the works of Petrova and Tarrow (2007) and Udovyk (2017), it is posited that grassroot movements, volunteer groups and other forms of horizontal cooperation form an important part of Ukrainian civil society not only because they have been on the rise in the times of existential crisis, but also as they are the only form of civic activism possible on the occupied territories (Zarembo, 2022).These grassroot initiatives are not new for Ukraine: as a society that is suspicious of authority and hierarchy with a strong sense of autonomy from the state (Lutsevych, 2017), Ukrainians are used to coming together to find solutions to their problems, for example through toloka-a community effort to complete a large urgent task.A community -hromada-that is built on horizontal and decentralized relations is very important in Ukraine (Yermolenko, 2023), which is why it is not surprising that people all over the country and in diaspora self-organized to do whatever they could to defend Ukraine.It is estimated that around 80% of the Ukrainian population has been involved in defending the state in one way or another (Zarembo, 2022, pp. 57-58).85% say that people in their community help each other (Ratinggroup, 2023).Tasks undertaken by informal civil society include humanitarian aid, guerrilla movement on occupied territories, logistical support, and procurement of military equipment for the Ukrainian troops, information resistance, etc. (interview with an organizer of a volunteer network for the military).Among the interviewees, every person had experience of involvement in volunteer projects, with three being organizers of volunteer networks (one for the military and two for supporting IDPs-one since the start of the invasion, the other since the start of the conflict in the Donbas).Horizontal networks were equally important for younger and older generations, giving people the flexibility to choose an area where they saw themselves as most useful.Ukrainians that had to leave their homes due to the war continued building networks in new places, volunteering to help other refugees, collecting finances or supplies for the UAF or even looking after the animals, left behind by their owners.
Formal civil society, that is CSOs, are not dormant in Ukraine either.They continue monitoring the actions of the Ukrainian government and advocating for Ukraine on the international arena (Zarembo, 2022).Since the Revolution of Dignity, the expertise of CSOs is actively sought by the government on a range of issues from judiciary to security sector reform (Kutsyk, 2023;Lutsevych, 2017).Of course, problems remain, but Ukrainian civil society, through its formal and informal elements, has demonstrated since the start of the invasion that it is anything but weak (Bidenko, 2023).In the circumstances of open warfare and occupation, it left no area of life outside of its attention, making it difficult to judge where it ends, and society begins (Zarembo, 2022).
Finally, the war has also challenged the rhetoric on Ukraine being locked in Russia's sphere of influence (Umland, 2023).In Russia's interpretation, Ukraine fell under the spell of ultra nationalist elements, who together with the Western actors try to separate the country against its people's will from its "big brother."While there is no proof of the spread of Nazism in Ukraine under the Jewish president, some find it hard to put the idea of Ukraine as part of the Russian world to rest.In Ukraine, however, it is vehemently rejected on all levels.In January 2023, 92% of Ukrainians wanted membership in the EU by 2030, and 86%-membership in NATO (NDI, 2023).Ukrainians want closer ties with their allies in the EU, while attitudes to Russia are deteriorating.If in 2020, only 43% trusted the European Union, in 2022 this number rose to 76% (Razumkov Centre, 2023).In 2023, 90% were not able to associate with the residents of Russia (Ratinggroup, 2023).
While some realist thinkers have changed their mind about Ukraine's ability to decide its own destiny, 11 the narrative on Russia's entitlement for a zone of influence, which includes Ukraine, is proving the hardest to shift.As the war drags on, more voices are heard about the need for negotiations, which could lead to territorial concessions and remove the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine (Nixey, 2023).For Ukraine, neither option is acceptable and seen as a stop-gap solution, which would pause the war, for it only to return with worse consequences (Prytula, 2023).As Bucha, Kherson and Izium have demonstrated, Russian control equals not only the loss of freedom for the Ukrainian population but also mass violation of human rights (Umland, 2023).That is why, any talk of territorial concessions is met negatively in Ukraine.In August 2023, 83.5% of respondents saw the liberation of all territories, occupied by Russia, up to the borders established in 1991 as the victory in the war (KIIS, 2023b), while 93% of Ukrainians believed Ukraine could be victorious (Razumkov Centre, 2023).
Simultaneously, most Western governments, while continuing supporting Ukraine, do not say "that Ukraine needs an unambiguous victory" or "that Ukraine's full territorial integrity must be restored" (Nixey, 2023).Similarly, they avoid formulating a clear path to Ukrainian membership in NATO (Nixey, 2023).Previous research has demonstrated that it is democracy and not NATO expansion that is most feared by Putin (Person & McFaul, 2022), yet the question of Ukrainian neutrality keeps coming back (Lutsevych, 2023).It is not just the Ukrainian leadership, however, that refuses to follow Moscow's demands, but the majority of Ukrainians.Ukraine was neutral before Russia's aggression in 2014 with the Ukrainian society having lukewarm attitude to NATO, but nearly a decade later, having experienced the destruction and pain that came with the full-scale invasion, most Ukrainians understand that for Ukraine not simply to survive but reach the development they desire is impossible without NATO membership (Lutsevych, 2023).
In the Korosteleva-Petrova model, resilience is associated with the vision of a good life, a better future, which in Ukraine is intrinsically linked to the Euro-Atlantic integration.The people of Ukraine see their future as equals in the European family, not as Little Russians (interview with an IDP).When asked about Ukraine's future, every single interviewee confirmed their belief in the Ukrainian victory, and the majority spoke about Ukraine becoming either a "European democracy" or full-fledged member of the European Union and NATO.Those still insisting on viewing Ukraine as part of Russia's sphere of interest, need to realize one thing: spheres of interest are not granted by one great power to the other; they are neither inherited nor created by history or geography, but achieved through the power of force and/or the power of attraction (Kagan, 2022, p. 12).As this war demonstrated, Russia does not possess enough of either to draw Ukraine back into its own.Ukraine's course of development will be decided by its people.

Conclusion: Harnessing Ukrainian resilience for the country's recovery
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian society has been defying expectations, showing bravery, unity, strength, and resilience.Ukrainian resilience, while obscured by narratives of divided, weak, and stuck in Russia's sphere of influence Ukraine, surprised observers.This article discussed resilience as a home-grown process that did not result from externally funded projects, but emerged through a mesh of indigenous relations, piercing past, present and future timescapes.The value of freedom, traditions of self-organization and aspirations for joining Euro-Atlantic community were identified here as sources of Ukrainian resilience.The list is by no means exhaustive.It can provide, however, a starting point for discussions on how and in which ways Ukraine's international partners can support the country's recovery, without resorting to treating Ukrainians as passive observers.Resilience is home-grown, but it can be supported when and as needed from outside.
Keeping in mind the foundations of Ukrainian resilience, it is possible to identify policy areas of key importance for Ukrainians and find ways to support them.For instance, to foster freedom, which is about individual and collective agency, one of the policy areas that could be supported by donors is the reform of decentralization.While a lot has been achieved by this reform already (Bidenko, 2023), there is scope for improvement, especially on the lowest levels of self-governance in villages and towns.Supporting projects that enable army veterans (especially those who sustained life-changing injuries) to remain active members of society (and not repeating the Soviet policy of isolation) is another policy area with direct links to the value of freedom.
Horizontal networks in communities could be supported by investing in the development of the volunteer sector.The role of volunteers in Ukraine's resistance to Russia (starting from 2014) has been invaluable.Ukrainians tend to come together in times of need, but the tradition of self-organization is centuries old (e.g., toloka).Creating opportunities for preserving volunteer networks after the war must be a priority.Finally, creating space for consultations with the Ukrainian society (that is not restricted to organized civil society) in the processes of Ukrainian integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions is also a must.
If there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of the Russo-Ukrainian war, it is the realization by the Ukrainian society of its strengths, among which are love of freedom, horizontal solidarity, and commitment to democratic future.While there is no need to wait for the end of the war to harness these foundations of Ukrainian resilience for the country's recovery, Ukraine can only achieve its full potential if its partners accept the vision of the victory Ukrainians are fighting for, which presupposes the restoration of its territorial integrity and membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions.Notes 1.A resident of Kyiv was reported to down a Russian drone with a jar of tomatoes (Singh, 2022), while another Ukrainian woman was filmed offering a Russian soldier seeds so that they would turn into sunflowers when he died (Guardian, 2022).2. For more on Ukraine's approach before the invasion, see Seitz (2023).3.For the origins of the concept, see Borbeau (2018).Elena Korosteleva and Milja Kurki.6.For more on this role, see Kuzio (2017).7.For an in-depth analysis of the application of the Russia-centric lens to Ukraine, see Oksamytna (2023).8.For instance, on dispelling the myth of divided Ukraine, see Zhurzhenko (2002), Kobzova and Kobzar (2014), Grygorenko (2014) and Walker (2013).9.While Russia occupied 17% of the Ukrainian territory, at the time of writing, it did not have control over any whole region.10.Russia's invasion of Ukraine, both in 2014 and in 2022, influenced language use and preferences in the country.For more details, see Kulyk (2022).
4. The project was funded by Research England and Participatory Research Fund at the University of Warwick and conducted in the spring-summer 2022.It received full ethical approval HSSRC 90/22-23 from Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Warwick. 5. Further findings are prepared for release by the author and the project Co-Is