The future of Ukraine depends on its relations with the EU. What is the law governing accessions? What are the main challenges facing Ukraine on the path towards EU membership? Going through the pre-accession scrutiny in times of war, Ukraine sets a unique precedent, where more experimentation could be possible to mitigate a huge risk that the EU repeats and amplifies the same mistakes it made in the Western Balkan countries – making the region a hostage of its contradictory and lethargic politics for too long. The evolution of EU enlargement law and the legal-political framework surrounding accessions across the different rounds of EU enlargement demonstrates that EU law is flexible while the practice of its application is volatile and deeply political. Enlargement practice shows that applying pre-accession conditionality may cause significant delays, while not delivering the results expected of it. A new approach to regulating accessions to the EU needs to be tested out before it is too late. This approach should build on Article 49 TEU and seek at least some depoliticisation of the enlargement process to guarantee the rule of law without dubious pre-accession techniques. Such an approach would speed-up accessions while making EU enlargement more predictable, serving the interests of Ukraine and other partners.

The war in Ukraine has fostered a renewed sense of common purpose and solidarity in the West. It has also exposed deep-seated divisions regarding the provision of military support to Ukraine and the fate of the European strategic architecture. While some states have committed high levels of military support to Ukraine, others have limited their help to token military aid. This paper examines why democratic allies diverge in their foreign policy on Ukraine and Russia using an integrated framework of strategic, economic, and domestic incentives and constraints. It offers a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 32 Western allies to uncover causal paths leading towards the provision of military support to Ukraine. The findings highlight the role of defence spending, geography, and threat perceptions during the first year of the war. Ultimately, the analysis identifies four causal paths covering 9 of the 13 greatest military aid contributors to Ukraine, as well as 14 of the 19 token aid donors. It reveals the Baltic states and Poland as the most typical military supporters, while Belgium, Romania, and Canada feature as typical token contributors.

This article aims to explicate the mechanisms underlying Poland’s support for Ukraine amid the Russian invasion by unravelling the puzzle of the swiftness, strength, and scope of Poland’s efforts, thereby challenging the latter’s potential explanations on the grounds of political realism. The authors achieve that by tapping into Ontological Security Theory (OST) and investigating how the ontological security needs of Poland, first, underpinned and directed the strategy and conduct of its security and foreign policy towards Ukraine during the first year of the war, which constituted a critical period for Poland’s national and identity security; and, second, how those needs fuel Poland’s diplomatic resolve and efforts to persuade the West to support Ukraine. This process is unpacked through an outline of the historical-cultural roots of Ukraine’s significance for Polish national identity, a review of Polish national security and foreign policy strategy documents, and an analysis of Polish political discourse regarding Poland’s national identity and Ukraine’s relevance to it. While drawing their conclusions, the authors focus on their applicability beyond the case of Poland.

This article explores the socio-political landscape of Donbas through a lens of post-colonial studies, revealing the Russian colonial past and neo-colonial ambition. By uncovering the interplay of cultural, political, and economic challenges the author identifies the key elements of the region’s identity and draws on historical analysis and personal reflections on the Russo-Ukrainian war. The article explores how Russia managed to dominate the discourse in Donbas, as well as the reasons why a significant part of the Donbas people accepted Russian dominance over the region and the creation of self-proclaimed states without great resistance. The study underscores the necessity to work on the decolonization of Donbas’ identity as the pivotal point for fostering reconciliation processes in the long-term occupied territories of Ukraine.

This article compares late Imperial Russia (1850-1917) and its successor states — post-revolutionary independent Ukraine (1918-1919) and early Soviet Russia and the USSR (1918-1923) — focusing on the conception and implementation of state policy toward the Jews. It argues that Russian Imperial, Ukrainian nationalist and Soviet socialist policies treated the Jews essentially as a distinct ethno-confessional or ethnic collective entitled to state protection and group rights, thus anticipating (in Imperial Russia) and de-facto realizing (in independent Ukraine and Soviet Russia) the rights of minorities stipulated in the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty and implemented by the Versailles system in interwar Europe. The article shows how by establishing and maintaining separate Jewish institutions (sophisticated state apparatuses staffed by qualified, dedicated Jewish bureaucrats), the states developed and even promoted a collective Jewish identity and collective Jewish rights, starting with state protection and official recognition of Judaism and the Jewish way of life in the late Russian empire, to state-sponsored Jewish national and cultural autonomy in the Ukrainian National Republic, to official recognition as a Soviet nationality, and territorial and semi-political autonomy in the USSR.

Do conflicts abroad affect trust at home? While we know that conflicts impact trust in warring countries, we lack evidence on whether people in neighbouring, but non-involved, countries are also affected. We address this question in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which represented a large shock to the security and economy of European countries. Our identification strategy uses the overlap between the timing of the Russian invasion and the European Social Survey fieldwork in eleven European countries. We find that the invasion increased respondents’ trust in their country’s politicians, political parties, and national parliament, as well as satisfaction with the government. Further analyses using other surveys and previous conflicts suggest this effect depends on proximity to the conflict and the political regimes of the attacked country. These findings contribute to our understanding of the complex and indirect effects of conflicts on domestic political trust.

The central European loess-paleosol sequence (Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 6–2) at three sites located in northwestern Ukraine, in the transitional area between the oceanic and continental climates, has been studied using micromorphological, grain-size, pollen, and magnetic methods. The sequence is characterized by a well-developed pedocomplex S1 (correlative of MIS 5), comprising four soils, and three interstadial soils within loess L1 (MIS 4–2). The soils of S1 are synsedimentary, indicating a dynamic depositional environment with pulses of aeolian sand sedimentation from late MIS 6 to MIS 5a. From various cryogenic features, the permafrost aggradation for MIS 6, 4, and 2, and deep seasonal freezing for MIS 5d and 5b were reconstructed. Distinct redoximorphic features of the loess units, widespread solifluction, well-developed periglacial phenomena, and very low magnetic susceptibility values for the loess-paleosol sequence of northwestern Ukraine reveal its similarity to those of the central European loess subdomain of the northern European loess belt. The low concentration of ferrimagnetic minerals in the parent material and intensive processes of physical and chemical weathering are reflected in the specific model of magnetic enhancement of the studied sequence, which is transitional between the “Chinese” (pedogenic) and “Alaskan” (reducing-pedogenic) models.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

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 essay argues that Russia's war on Ukraine and the post-Soviet experience, more generally, reveal ethical, empirical, and theoretical problems in the study of nationalism in the region; namely, the tendency to designate anti-colonial, non-Russian nationalism as a “bad” ethnic type and the related tendency to see opposition to it as a “good” civic, nationalist agenda while in reality, the latter agenda can be imperial. Conflation of imperialism with civic nationalism and underappreciation of the democratic potential of non-Russian nationalism are problematic. The essay argues that these problems stem from theorizing about ethnic and civic nationalism that is rooted in abstract principles and does not take into account the empirical realities in which specific policies originate. I suggest that a more ethically and theoretically accurate characterization of types of nationalism as good or bad can be achieved by applying a methodology that takes into account not only formal markers of “ethnic” and “civic” policies but also the realities proponents and opponents of a given policy seek to establish and undo, the methods by which these realities come into being, and the constraints on employing illiberal methods that political actors face.

In this essay, we bridge the gap between two understandings of the power of the European Union (EU): as a normative actor, guided by ethical principles and empowered by the internal market, and as a geopolitical actor, building its own military capabilities and ready to defend its interests through deterrence and defense. In view of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we challenge the established “values vs. interests” dichotomy and argue that defending liberal democratic values is an essential foundation of the EU's existing and potential geopolitical power. We show how, over the last decade, opting for short-term expediency and capitulating to a kind of realpolitik “regime indifference” in dealings with authoritarian regimes at home and abroad have severely weakened the EU and also diminished Ukraine's capacities to defend itself as it fights for these shared values on the battlefield. We argue that it is in the EU's strategic interest to strengthen its commitment to values-based foreign and defense policies, revive a meritocratic and credible enlargement process, and work with the United States to provide more effective military assistance to Ukraine in its fight for liberal democratic values and a rules-based European security order.