From Frozen Conflict to Mobile Boundary: Youth Perceptions of Territoriality in War-Time Ukraine

Theoretical Orientations and Historical Background

Finnish geographer Ansi Paasi argues that we should always examine the ways in which boundaries are materialized and symbolized, and this seems all the more critical in times of conflict. ⁴ Clearly, struggles over life and death should not be reduced to discursive and representational practices. But geographers Dunn and Cons remind us that “sensitive spaces,” or spaces, like Ukraine’s eastern border region right now, “characterized by multiple modes of power and conflicting claims to sovereign control,” ⁵ are “zones in which reality and representation are especially and intimately linked.” ⁶ In such contexts, representations (e.g., around “porous borders”) may generate anxieties that can in turn lead to the escalation of conflict. What is more, Dunn and Bobick’s claim that Vladimir Putin’s new form of war relies as much on “information and image as on military capacity” ⁷ suggests that we should pay particular attention to representational practices. I use “borders” in their definition as “physical records of a state’s past and present relations with its neighbors” ⁸ and I reserve their use for the (pre-conflict) internationally recognized eastern border between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. As for boundaries, they will have a larger meaning, suggesting both fluidity and contestability. Unlike established borders, boundaries can be conceptualized as “mobile” without this constituting a paradox.

Historically, what now constitutes the territory of Ukraine was at the crossroads of various empires, and therefore a genealogy of the national idea in Ukraine reveals a nation-building project that has had to be (like many other national projects), at least in part contrastive. ⁹ Kuzio claims that “Ukraine’s struggle for independence was a simultaneous struggle against most of its neighbors who, at one time or another, have harbored territorial claims against it.” ¹⁰ At the time of the declaration of independence in 1991 (earned with 90 percent of the popular vote), nation-builders deemed separation from Russia in key spheres as critical. The formation of a Ukrainian sovereign state was accompanied in the 1990s by state policies that simultaneously affirmed a distinct identity for Ukraine and tried to protect it against excessive Russian influence. These policies include making Ukrainian the only state language and giving Russian the status of a protected minority language. This was accompanied by a project of linguistic Ukrainization, a kind of affirmative action initiative that aimed at alleviating past discrimination against the Ukrainian language and culture. Originally put into place primarily in the field of education to counter the effects of decades of Russification of schools, the goal was to bring the proportion of students studying in Ukrainian with the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in the population. ¹¹ Ukraine also settled on recognizing one citizenship (Ukrainian) rather than dual citizenship. The Ukrainian parliament denied dual citizenship to its Russian minority (around 21 percent of the population at the time of independence; 17 percent according to the last census) because it feared Russia’s continuing influence on and meddling in Ukraine’s domestic affairs. Those identifying as Russian or Soviet and who decided to apply for Ukrainian citizenship therefore had to accept to cut certain ties with Russia in favor of some degree of integration and participation in Ukrainian civil society. ¹² Such government policies reminded those living in Ukraine, as well as authorities in Russia, that Ukraine should no longer be viewed as a mere periphery or extension of Russian territory.

For many Ukrainian citizens, a friendly relation with neighboring Russia remained important, and this is reflected in some degree of geopolitical flexibility among the population, at least prior to the 2014 conflict. To be sure, there has been, since independence, significant support in Ukraine for European integration, as attested by the Orange revolution and the Euromaidan, in which young people in particular played a leading role. As some scholars have argued, what nation-builders aimed at with Ukrainian independence in 1991 was in large part direct contact with the West rather than a relation with it mediated by Moscow, and thus many citizens looked exclusively to the West. ¹³ Yet many Ukrainian citizens also looked to the Customs Union and later the Eurasian Union (introduced by Putin in 2011) as viable alternatives to EU membership. In a public opinion survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in May 2012, respondents were asked, “If Ukraine was able to enter only one international economic union, who should it be with?” Forty-one percent favored the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan; 37 percent favored the EU, 5 percent favored an “Other,” and 17 percent were undecided or failed to respond. ¹⁴ We must add that for some citizens, the two geopolitical orientations, European and Russian, were not incompatible. In 2007, a significant portion of the population (24 percent according to a press release from the National Institute of Strategic Studies [NISS]) supported both Ukraine’s membership in the EU and its participation in a union with the post-Soviet states of Russia and Belarus. ¹⁵ A 2010 poll claimed that 35 percent of Ukrainians wanted to develop close relations with both the EU and Russia. ¹⁶ What does this mean for Ukrainian sovereignty and the meanings of the eastern border? It is to this that we now turn.

Because the Soviet Union collapsed along internal lines, independent Ukraine’s eastern border is (or at least was, pre-conflict) the same as the eastern border of the Ukrainian SSR (established in the early 1920s and in place until 1991). ¹⁷ The eastern border of Soviet Ukraine was represented as an internal border on every Soviet map in circulation within the Union and was thus familiar, at least visually, to its inhabitants. ¹⁸ At the same time, there had been no permanent checkpoints on the ground but simply roadside signs greeting the eastbound traveler: “Welcome to the RSSR [Russian Soviet Socialist Republic].” Despite the fact that Ukraine and Russia were fundamentally in agreement over the location of the border, the eastern border’s delimitation and demarcation was a drawn-out process. ¹⁹ In 2004, thirteen years after Ukraine’s independence, presidents Kuchma and Putin signed the Agreement on the State Border between Ukraine and Russia that completed the delimitation process of the Ukrainian–Russian land border. ²⁰ The more controversial issue of the delimitation of the Azov Sea and the Kerch Strait was not settled by this agreement, however. ²¹ In 2010, an agreement on demarcation was signed, ²² and in 2012, then president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych announced that the delimitation of territorial waters was almost complete. ²³ By March 2014, when Russia took Crimea, the process had not yet been completed, and Ukrainian officials accused Russia of deliberately stalling the process. ²⁴ In June 2014, the Ukrainian government determined that Ukraine had the right to a unilateral delimitation of the border. ²⁵ According to the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, as of August 2016 Ukraine had lost control over 409.3 km ²⁶ of the 2292.6 km of border it shares with the Russian Federation as a result of the conflict in the east. If the Ukrainian state has recently focused on ways to reinforce its border with Russia, Russian authorities have framed their border with Ukraine alternately as artificial (recall president Putin’s 2015 depiction of Russia as the “largest divided nation”) and as necessary (Russia has so far resisted annexing the separatist stronghold in the Donbas, i.e., the Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] and the Luhansk People’s Republic [LNR]).

Ukrainian citizens’ perceptions of their country’s eastern border changed significantly following the seizure of Crimea. A poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in February 2014, immediately prior the annexation of Crimea, reveals that a majority favored independence for Ukraine and Russia but wished for friendly relations with their neighbor and for simplified border processes. According to KIIS, as of February 2014, 68 percent of Ukrainian citizens “don’t want visas and borders with Russia, but at the same time don’t want to be united with Russia in a single state.” ²⁷ In other words, for a majority, sovereignty was critical, but unimpeded mobility across the international border was also important. A minority, 12 percent of respondents at the time, wished for Ukrainians and Russians to be reunited into one state. ²⁸ By December 2014, nine months after the intervention in Crimea and with suspicion of Russian incursions into the east, 50 percent of Ukrainian citizens wanted a closed border with Russia. ²⁹ The number of those supporting the reunification of Ukraine and Russia into one state declined to 3 percent. ³⁰ Supporters of Ukrainian independence were also at an all-time high of 92 percent. ³¹ The anxiety produced by what was largely viewed as Russian aggression translated into new bordering practices as well: in some Ukrainian oblasts on the border with Russia, civilians volunteered to dig anti-tank trenches. ³² Local politicians recommended the construction of a wall, a project now under way and funded by the Ukrainian government. ³³ The fortifications have been referred to either as the “Ukrainian Wall” or the “European Wall,” and these interchangeable names suggest that the eastern boundary is critical not only to Ukraine’s national project but also to the supranational project that is EU integration. Then Ukrainian prime minister Arsenyi Yatseniuk stated in 2104 that the wall being built had two main purposes: to limit Russian incursions and to obtain a visa-free regime with Europe ³⁴ (though if we believe the KIIS survey quoted above, many Ukrainian citizens also wished for similar freedom of movement [visa-free travel, etc.] with the Russian Federation, perhaps revealing a general desire for mobility in a globalized world).

Arguably the current conflict has altered popular perspectives at the expense of flexibility in geopolitical orientations, ³⁵ consolidating the need for a strong or even closed eastern border so that (at least in the short term) circulation and freedom of movement is associated with Ukraine’s European borders. More generally, scholars have noted the intensification of anti-Russian feeling, ³⁶ including the decline, among the population of Ukraine, of pro-Russian separatism. ³⁷ Strong expressions of support for territorial integrity have emerged from Ukraine’s so-called Russian-speaking east (e.g., the oblasts of Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Sumy). Some scholars have proposed that the so-called fault line between “Eastern” and “Western Ukraine” has now been replaced by one between the Donbas and the rest of Ukraine. ³⁸ It is within this context that we must interpret the interview material presented below.

Methodology and Data Analysis

Scholars have recently emphasized the importance, for studies of citizenship and identity politics in Eastern Europe, of paying attention to citizens’ “lived experience” in “changing geopolitical contexts.” ³⁹ For the purposes of this study, this meant paying close attention to ordinary citizens’ own representational practices around sovereignty and borders using an interpretivist approach geared less at producing facts than at generating meaning. ⁴⁰ My choice of qualitative interviews was dictated by the need to access data not accessible through direct observation, ⁴¹ that is, narratives and imaginaries of the border. Because the project involved conducting one-time in-depth interviews with participants, I chose the semistructured interview format. ⁴² In this way, I combined the features of a structured interview in which the same questions are asked of all respondents (making it easier to compare responses across informants) and the features of a conversational interview that allowed me to improvise and thus provided enough flexibility for new data to arise. My informants’ perspectives can be understood as emergent, which is to say that they arose or became articulated in novel ways through the act of telling. Participants were provided with the opportunity not only to tell me but also to show me how they viewed Ukraine’s eastern boundary. I encouraged them to draw or find maps of Ukraine and Russia that represented their vision of territory and borders, and several informants looked up and showed me different maps on their smartphones to support their arguments.

What makes young people of the post-Soviet generation theoretically interesting and relevant is their engagement, from a young age, with the pedagogies around Ukraine’s nation-building project, especially since these have been uneven (e.g., the content of schools’ humanities curriculum has fluctuated [becoming more or less pro-Russian] with different presidents), and their effects unpredictable. Young people of the post-Soviet generation are also exposed, through media and travel, to various spaces and ideologies. This includes exposure to supranational projects (European Union, Eurasian Union) with various claims on borders and proposals for enhanced or impeded mobility. It has been proposed that age rather than regional belonging is now a major determinant of geopolitical orientations, with the young generation more likely to support EU integration. For example, a poll conducted by GfK revealed that among those respondents with a position on integration, 73 percent of those aged sixteen to twenty-nine favored an Association Agreement with European Union while among respondents aged forty-five and older, only 45 percent favored the EU. ⁴³ There has been talk of a “generational rift,” with Yaroslav Hrytsak claiming that young Ukrainians have more in common with other young Europeans than they have with their fellow citizens fifty and older. ⁴⁴ What is more, youth have often been associated (both symbolically and in their actual leadership roles) with pro-EU protests, and the question becomes whether this new generation is exhibiting a more consolidated sense of a Ukrainian European self. It is therefore imperative to examine how young people view their eastern border with Russia in the aftermath of Crimea’s annexation.

Random selection was not appropriate for a small sample, so rather than aiming to collect a sample representative of larger citizen opinions, or even youth opinions in Ukraine, I sought to conduct in-depth interviews with young citizens who had diverse experiences in terms of occupation and region of origin. Respondents were sought through existing contacts and postings on the institutional websites in the following spheres: education (schools and universities), the business community, office workers (governmental and nongovernmental organizations), and the service industry. Recruitment documents made it clear that I was looking for a wide range of perspectives and I designed my questionnaire to be as neutral and open-ended as possible so that it could more easily generate various (and possibly contradictory) territorial views. My sample includes twenty-five young Ukrainian citizens (aged eighteen to thirty years) from different socioeconomic strata (including office workers, factory workers, homemakers, scholars/students) and different oblasts across Eastern, Western, Central, and Southern parts of Ukraine. In-person and skype interviews were conducted with young Ukrainian citizens permanently residing in Ukraine from the following oblasts: Kyiv (five interviewees), Lviv (two), Donetsk (two), Luhansk (one), Zaporizhia (one), Dnipropetrovsk (three), Kharkiv (two), Sumy (two), Rivne (one), Odessa (one), Kherson (one), Ternopil’ (one), Transcarpathia (two), and Chernihiv (one). Participants were reached in various regions of Ukraine by skype (nineteen participants) or interviewed in person (six participants) ⁴⁵ in two major North American cities, one in the United States and one in Canada, while they were on short visits there (i.e., as part of summer work programs, short-term academic training, or tourist visits). In order to ensure diversity of views among those interviewed in North America, I sought out and included as part of my sample informants with viewpoints not likely to correspond to those articulated by mainstream North American media. Interviews typically lasted between forty-five and ninety minutes, and informants were given the choice to use Ukrainian or Russian; some also used surzhyk, a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian. My research questions covered three major areas: (1) respondent perceptions of what territories are disputed in the current conflict, and why; (2) respondent imaginaries of their country’s eastern border with Russia: its (actual/desired) location and form; and (3) the extent to which respondents connect identity and territoriality.

My questionnaire included the category “border” (Ukrainian, kordon; Russian, granitsa), and while this turned out to be an important category for informants, inductive analysis revealed the existence, in many participants’ imaginaries and across regional belonging, of a more flexible boundary, one marked by (1) motility (the Merriam-Webster defines motile as “exhibiting or capable of movement”), ⁴⁶ and (2) the ability to both expand and contract. Though this local category was not named by participants (I call it the “mobile boundary”), I found evidence of it at various points in my interviews and articulated in various forms (metaphorically or more directly). Other salient themes that emerged in the process of data coding and memoing include sovereignty, identity, and territorial integrity/fragmentation, and I analyzed how these themes related to the “mobile boundary” and to one another. I compared data not only across interviews but also within them, tracking, among other things, seemingly contradictory statements or ambiguities by a single informant that could reveal important tensions (e.g., sovereignty as a supreme value combined with a desire to surrender the Donbas).

Article Structure

This article argues that a majority of young respondents in my sample imagine a threatening “mobile boundary” between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. I begin by examining Russian authorities’ (pre- and post-conflict) discourses on Ukraine and the claims made about a special historical and cultural relationship with Ukraine. In the following four sections, interview material is analyzed. In the first section on the mobile boundary, I show that informants disagree about the boundaries of disputed territory, with some identifying only the Donbas and others viewing Ukraine in its entirety as threatened. In the second section on territory and identity, I make the claim that a majority of informants view Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity as non-negotiable, even when they also claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” thereby suggesting that fluidity in identity does not justify the “mobile boundary” in the form of territorial incursions. In the third section on the Donbas, I address informants’ ambivalence toward a territory deemed marginal in many ways and argue that despite some informants’ willingness to surrender the disputed territory to Russia, it is their fear of Russian encroachment beyond the Donbas that leads them to continue supporting the war effort. The last section returns to the mobile boundary by examining how informants signify, metaphorically, impending Russian encroachment. I show how the perceived motility of the boundary goes beyond expansionism to include the possibility of a receding boundary, resulting, within my sample, in a feeling of profound territorial indeterminacy.

The Familiar Estranged? Russian “Intensities”

Before moving on to recent Russian discourses, I offer a quick glimpse of the ways in which the Russian leadership has viewed Ukraine since independence. Russian authorities have long made reference to their close relationship with Ukrainians by invoking the concept of shared peoplehood, a concept that as we shall see, acquires new meanings for Ukrainian citizens in times of territorial uncertainty. Russian state discourses around east Slavic unity (that of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians) are not new and in fact were a leitmotiv in imperial and Soviet historiographies. A late Soviet-era art book describes an eastern Slavic brotherhood thought to have existed since Kievan Rus’: “The period of . . . the 10^th to 13^th centuries . . . was the adolescence and youth of the three fraternal peoples—Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian which then lived as a single family of Slavs and comprised a single nationality.” ⁴⁷ According to Soviet historiography, Ukraine had been separated from Russia for a few centuries because of foreign oppression and had then voluntarily re-united with Russia [in 1654, with the Treaty of Pereyaslav between the leaders of the Cossack Hetmanate and the Russian Tsar], the two becoming “one nation” again. ⁴⁸ (In its national anthem, the Soviet Union was called the “new Rus” ⁴⁹ ). Soviet historians viewed Ukraine’s “desire for reunion” with Russia as “a major historical force in Ukraine’s past.” ⁵⁰ The belief in the closeness of eastern Slavs was expressed succinctly in the post-Soviet era by Alexander Lebed, a prominent Russian opposition politician in the 1990s: “What are they, the Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians?—Slavs, people of one root, as well as one language. . . . We are all part of the same fate and the same faith.” ⁵¹ In a 1997 address, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin drew on a similar repertoire to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the added dimension of a loss of “shared space”: “Russians and Ukrainians lived in a communal flat, so to speak. Our separation was painful. We had to divide the indivisible and test the resistance of normal human, even family, links. . . . We cannot get it out of our systems that the Ukrainians are the same as we are. That is our destiny, our common destiny.” ⁵²

During his leadership, Vladimir Putin has similarly referred to Ukrainians as the “same people.” On the occasion of the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of Kiyvan Rus’ in August 2013, Putin spoke of “common roots,” ⁵³ claiming of Russia and Ukraine that “we are all spiritual heirs of what happened here 1,025 years ago, and in this sense we are, without a doubt, one people.” ⁵⁴ The Russian president has simultaneously described Ukraine as a fragile state and questioned the historical, political, and territorial grounds for Ukraine’s (independent) existence, referring to the country as a krai (land or territory), ⁵⁵ or as “Little Russia,” a term borrowed from Russian imperial history. ⁵⁶ At a NATO meeting in Bucharest in 2008, Putin told then president of the United States George Bush “You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.” ⁵⁷ In an interview with German ARD TV that same year, however, Putin affirmed his commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. To the interviewer’s suggestion that after Russian intervention in Georgia, Crimea might be next, he replied, “Crimea is not a disputed territory. There has been no ethnic conflict there, unlike the conflict between South Ossetia and Georgia. Russia has long recognized the borders of modern-day Ukraine. On the whole, we have completed our talks on borders. The issue of demarcation still stands, but this is just a technicality.” ⁵⁸

Before moving on to more recent Russian discourses on Ukraine, it is important to locate these within the current context of Ukraine’s intended rapprochement with the EU, ⁵⁹ a project that Russian authorities have articulated in terms of impending Western encroachment. This will allow us to get a better sense of how the Russian leadership has perceived and framed the crisis, which in turn is critical in contextualizing Russian discourses. Before 2014, whenever issues of Ukraine’s integration into the EU and NATO membership came to the fore, Putin was adamant the West should not interfere in the relation between Ukraine and Russia suggesting, in 2008, that he would retaliate militarily if Ukraine joined NATO. ⁶⁰ In October 2013, then president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych was preparing to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union that was to ease trade and traveling restrictions between Ukraine and the EU. Yet the president later refused to do so, citing concerns about Ukraine’s already vulnerable economy and the potentially nefarious long-term consequences for his country of closer economic ties with the EU (there have also been allegations that pressures from Russia contributed to Ukrainian authorities’ decision to suspend ratification of the Agreement). Yanukovych’s unwillingness to sign the Association Agreement sparked protests in Ukraine’s capital that became known as the Euromaidan, in which protesters claimed the right to choose a European orientation over a Russian one as they also rejected what they deemed Yanukovych’s “corrupt” government. ⁶¹ Largely youth-led in the beginning, the protests swelled after the government’s violent crackdown on student protesters caused parents and other concerned citizens to join and stand with Ukrainian youth. Protesters and security forces were killed in subsequent clashes. This was followed by Russian action in Crimea and marked the beginning of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. In the aftermath of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, Putin equated the collapse of the Soviet Union with Russia being plundered and robbed, and asked, “Are we ready to consistently defend our national interests, or will we forever give in, retreat to who knows where?” ⁶² thereby highlighting what he deemed the indeterminacy of Russia’s borders relative to those of the European Union.

Follis calls the EU “an entity in a perpetual state of emergence” ⁶³ and coins the term “rebordering” to describe “both the talk and the practice of enforcing the boundaries of the European Union.” ⁶⁴ She speaks of rebordering as a hegemonic process that “unfolds within public discourse as well as in concrete actions and practices of politicians and state officials.” ⁶⁵ I mentioned above EU pressures to secure Ukraine’s eastern border so as to make visa-free travel to Europe possible for Ukrainian citizens. I would suggest that in Ukraine, some pro-EU citizens were also engaged in domestic forms of (symbolic) rebordering: so-called liustratsiia (lustration), a kind of cleansing or purification of unwanted elements. Lustration was, arguably, expressed in Euromaidan protesters’ physical removal of Soviet symbols (e.g., the UNESCO-protected Lenin monument in downtown Kyiv), but also constituted a project (one that continued to be pursued by some, though not all, Ukrainian lawmakers in 2015) to purge what became crafted as the entanglement of “Soviet/post-Soviet/Russian/communist” legacies and “corruption.” Transcendence of elements deemed by protesters to index “inappropriate, “backward,” or “uncivilized” behavior was construed as necessary for propelling Ukraine (unimpeded) toward a European future. ⁶⁶ Polling conducted during the Euromaidan reveals that most respondents did not associate the protests directly with action against Russia, however. Survey data suggest that the median protester did not appear to oppose the Yanukovych government’s wish to cultivate stronger ties with the Russian Federation but rather “cared more about the economic and political direction of the government’s domestic policies.” ⁶⁷ To draw a comparison with the rationale for Ukraine’s Orange revolution, a protester on Maidan told me in 2004, “The revolution is not about Russia—we have enough of our own bandits,” suggesting an internal purge or domestic process. Whatever the case may be (the extent to which Russia was part of the equation is a complex issue requiring further analysis), it is likely that Russian authorities’ perception of an advancing European frontier, and thus sense of threat, was exacerbated by the symbolically important boundary-making process arising from within Ukraine. Obviously, this does not in any way justify the violation of agreed-upon international borders or annexation of Ukrainian territory—that is, I am not suggesting that Russia’s actions are, therefore, reactive rather than proactive.

My point is that Russian authorities appear to have perceived two interwoven threats (again, whether or not one considers Russian fears to be well-founded is a different issue). One of these perceived threats is the prospect of the EU (and, as has been articulated in the Russian press, possibly also NATO in the form of military bases) right across the border in Ukraine, and the other is the prospect of having to come face to face with those western Ukrainian ideologies and values that are anti-Soviet and/or anti-Russian. As a prominent Russian scholar told me in 2009, “We don’t want Ukraine to become a big Galichina [Galicia, or Halychyna in Ukrainian].” Galicia is a western Ukrainian region associated, for many Russians and some Ukrainians, with nationalism and fascism, and the use of synecdoche in the scholar’s statement (the part [region] standing for the whole [country]) reflects a fear of the expansion of these ideologies until they are “at the gates” of Russia. For Russian authorities, the successful overthrow of Yanukovych by protesters on Euromaidan and the occupation of state buildings by pro-EU demonstrators that followed perhaps represented something like the advent of “Big Galichina,” itself putatively backed by the West. ⁶⁸

What kinds of articulations of territoriality and identity do we then see in Russian authorities’ discourses in the aftermath of Euromaidan? Responding to the Ukrainian government’s post-Euromaidan legislation against the Russian language, ⁶⁹ President Putin spoke of Russia’s moral obligation to protect the rights of so-called Russian-speakers ⁷⁰ or compatriots (sootechestvenniki) in Ukraine. Since 1999, the Russian Federation has had a “policy on compatriots” that seeks to bestow some rights and privileges on the populations that were “left behind” when Soviet borders receded. The definition of compatriot is rather flexible, however, referring to ethnic Russians in the “near abroad,” former Soviet citizens and their descendants, and also “titular groups [e.g. Ukrainians] retaining their Soviet traits.” ⁷¹ Indeed, “to be a Compatriot is not only a question of being Russian but of choosing to demonstrate this identity, and affiliation to Russia.” ⁷² As Knott suggests, the compatriot policy “does not offer rights which are not in situ within the home-state, but rather offers rights within the kin-state [i.e. Russia], such as facilitated migration rights.” ⁷³ These rights constitute a form of “quasi-citizenship” ⁷⁴ : a way of restoring (and this, without having to move existing borders) certain citizenship privileges to those who had previously held Soviet passports and been unable to hold dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship following Ukraine’s independence. In the wake of Crimea’s annexation, the Russian government claimed that it had been called upon to protect compatriots from discrimination, and Vladimir Putin underlined the “real threats to the life and health” of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. ⁷⁵ Several months later in August 2014, the Russian president reiterated that Russia’s takeover of Crimea in March had been necessary to ensure the safety of a largely Russian-speaking population threatened by Ukrainian government violence. ⁷⁶ If the category “compatriots” is by no means new in Russian authorities’ discourses, its securitization clearly is. ⁷⁷

In 2014, President Putin also delimitated, discursively, a variety of territories and centers that he deemed closely connected with Russia. This included a region called “New Russia”: “What was called Novorossiya back in the tsarist days—Kharkov, Lugansk, Donestk, Kherson, Nikolayev, and Odessa—were not part of Ukraine back then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. Why? Who knows. They were won by Potyomkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.” ⁷⁸ Other statements identify particular Russian “centers” on Ukrainian territory: in the aftermath of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, a region with a high percentage of self-identifying ethnic Russians, Putin hailed the region as one of Russia’s important spiritual centers, emphasizing its “invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia” (he added: “Crimea is where our people live”). ⁷⁹ Discourses about Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, emphasize it as a main Russian religious center, as when Putin states that “we are not simply close neighbors, but, as I have said many times already, we are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” ⁸⁰ In these discourses, we see deployed not only different territorial configurations but also particular notions of peoplehood (“compatriots,” “our people,” “one people”). ⁸¹

Here, it is not as simple as saying that in Russian authorities’ views, “Ukraine is Russia,” because this may not be completely or always true in Russian discourses. Rather, we see parts of Ukraine more subtly framed as the stage of what I would call different Russian intensities. Intensity speaks to the degree or amount (concentration) of a quality, condition, or particular property—here, Russian-ness. In Russian authorities’ discourses, certain Ukrainian territories index Russian “spiritual” intensity, while others index “ethnic,” “linguistic,” or “cultural” intensity. Of course, these are recombined and may be “layered” too, as in the above statement about Crimea being (a) the home of “our people,” (b) a sacred place, and (c) a strategic space, suggesting that strategic and affective connections can coexist openly. In addition, intensities can be turned up or down as needed. These are claims that are dynamic and sporadic—they continuously shift, with one concept or construct of the familiar taking precedence over others for some time and then receding into the background, only to be invoked again under new circumstances. What is more, the concept of “intensity” refers not only to a “degree” or “concentration” but also indexes passion and emotion. Discourses of connection between Russia and Ukraine are also often expressed in affective registers: from registers of nostalgia (e.g., “Together we [Ukraine and Russia] built . . . ”), to expressions of friendship or kinship (“brotherhood”), to registers of pain and sacrifice (e.g., in the case of battles fought or of Russian blood shed on what is now Ukrainian territory). In my view, conceptualizing presence and what is deemed familiar within Russian discourses as “intensities” allows us to view Russian statements as flexible and context-dependent, serving different purposes or political agendas through time, for example, mobilized in response to the perceived threat of emergent geopolitical configurations (or more specifically in response, from Russia’s perspective, to what Meinhof has called Europe’s “migrating borders” ⁸² ). More importantly for our purposes here, “intensities” allow us to frame Russian statements as parts of discourses whose meanings are not foreclosed; ⁸³ in other words, as statements that can be read very differently by the differently positioned Ukrainian citizens engaging with them. It is to these interpretations that we now turn.

The Mobile Boundary

How do Ukrainian citizens imagine, dialogically (i.e., in relation to Russian and/or separatist actions and discourses), their country’s territory? My argument in this section is that there is no agreement among young people on what constitutes “disputed territory” in this conflict. Different informants mark the boundaries of Russian/separatist territorial interests at different locations on the map of Ukraine, with some emphasizing this boundary’s potential instability through time. What comes across is the profound indeterminacy of the boundary for young interviewees.

When I asked my informants, “In this conflict, which territories (if any) would you say are disputed,” I expected most (if not all) of them, regardless of political leaning, to identify the Donbas. While about a third in my sample did so, the majority identified areas both smaller and larger. (The reader will note, as I present informants’ statements, that many interviewees equate the intentions of the separatists and the intentions of Russia, sometimes suggesting that pro-Russia fighters in the east are Russian “hires” or “pawns.”) ⁸⁴ Mykhailo, ⁸⁵ a twenty-six-year-old bank clerk from the eastern Ukrainian oblast’ of Dnipropetrovsk states, “Russia does not even want the Donbas. The Donbas is just a diversion. [Russia] only started a conflict there to divert attention from Crimea. As soon as Crimea is fully secured, they will withdraw from the eastern oblasts.” In this scenario, the boundary originally moves westward into Ukraine, only to move back eastward to coincide once again with the pre-conflict international border. Masha, a twenty-two-year-old office worker from Eastern Ukraine (Kharkiv) tells me, “It’s simple—just get a map of natural resources in Ukraine and follow its lead and you’ll understand exactly which regions Russia wants. Putin speaks of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people,” but Russia is not interested in their neighboring nation, actually. They’re not interested in the people that live there, they want the part [kusok] of Ukrainian territory with the minerals and industry, the part that was developed during Soviet times. Russia is only interested in the development of its economy, so it wants the [industrialized] East and South.” Here, the hypothetical boundary would cover a wide region of Ukraine. Hanna, a twenty-nine-year-old scientist from Central Ukraine, tells me: “[Russia wants] at least the eastern half [of the country], the half that is Russian-speaking, so everything east of the Dnipro River. Including Kyiv, of course—they want the Pecherska Lavra Monastery absolutely, because they see Kyiv as the spiritual origin of Russia. It’s not true, but they rewrote history that way.” Danylo, an office worker from Western Ukraine (Ternopil’), states that “Russians think everything is theirs except Halychyna (Galicia in Western Ukraine). Of course they would like to take Halychyna along with the rest of Ukraine, but they can’t—they’d have to kill every single person in order to seize it.” In answer to my question of what territories are disputed in Ukraine, Katya, a nurse from Donetsk answers: “the Donbas . . . of course Russia wants the whole Ukraine.” Lyuda, a twenty-two-year-old NGO worker from Central Ukraine, states, “Ultimately, Russians are not interested in this or that specific territory within Ukraine. What they want is Ukraine in its entirety. What Russians want, ultimately, is a center for their state. What they need from Ukraine is that it provide them with a history. You see, if Ukraine joins the EU, Russia loses its status and its history . . . it finds itself without roots. Theirs is a huge country but without roots. . . . They have no religious center—everything came from Kyivan Rus’.” (It is noteworthy is that informants’ theories both converge with and diverge from Russia’s explanations of their connections to Ukrainian territory: Kyivan Rus’ is an example of convergence, though there is clearly no agreement on the logic of the attachment).

What we see from this sample of statements is that there seems to be no consensus regarding what territories (if any) are disputed: from “nothing” (at least in the east – Crimea is a different story) to “everything.” Thus, the boundary appears “mobile” across informants. The boundary could also manifest itself as mobile for individuals, however. In answer to the question of which territories were disputed, Dimitri, a factory worker from Zaporizhia, pores over the map of Ukraine I’ve provided, reciting, “[Russia would want] Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv . . . yes, that’s it. Well, maybe Odessa. Maybe only the southeast. Not the Western part. Although Vynnytsia, Zhytomyr . . . maybe Kirovohrad” before adding with a sigh, “We can’t predict where the border could be in the future [My ne mozhemo peredbachyty de mozhe buty kordon u maybutn’omu].” Other informants identified “safe zones” that they later felt compelled to include within disputed territories.

As has been noted, many informants tend to conflate the intentions and strategies of Russia and separatists. To view Russia as the main actor or puppeteer (despite Russia’s repeated denial of involvement in Eastern Ukraine, except perhaps for what it acknowledges as “volunteer fighters” from Russia) allows informants to tap into a repertoire of Ukrainian historiography and social memory associated with Russian imperialism. The recent takeover of Crimea and incursions into the east thus appear to be history repeating itself, a lived proof of Russian designs on Ukraine. The different boundaries delineated by my informants correspond to what they view as different Russian logics of expansion or “projects.” Ukraine is desired alternately for its resources, its spiritual significance, its putative closeness in language and identity, and so on. We can observe how for my informants, the boundary between “disputed” and “safe” then depends on some territories remaining meaningless, irrelevant, or uninteresting to Russia. But as these different (Russian) “projects” are imagined as potentially overlapping or unexpectedly regaining prominence, identifying “safe zones” becomes increasingly difficult. An added dimension to this is that we appear to be dealing (and this will come across more strongly in later sections) with an imaginary of the boundary that is not limited to its ability to expand (i.e. not reduced to expansionism) but also allows for the possibility of contraction. For informants, the conflict may evolve into further territorial expansion, or Russia/separatists may retreat and ultimately occupy nothing on mainland Ukraine. In other words, sovereignty is either completely and profoundly threatened or not really threatened at all (at least in the east). This reveals a perception of Russia as unpredictable, unbounded, uncontained/uncontainable, undefinable; mobile in space, mobile through time. It points to the fundamental plasticity, in my informants’ imaginaries, of Russia’s western boundary, and thus to a state of fundamental territorial indeterminacy.

Territory and Identity: Intersection and Divergence

This section examines the extent to which respondents naturalize Ukraine’s (pre-conflict) eastern border. I argue that while those who agree that the border is in the right place use different rationales to justify their belief, these rationales arise explicitly against the logic of Russian encroachment. Even those informants who acknowledge Ukrainian–Russian fluidity in identity refuse the view that the latter justifies a fluid (or “mobile”) boundary.

When I asked my respondents, “Do you think Ukraine’s eastern border (the pre-conflict, internationally recognized border) is in the right place? Is it correctly positioned?” ⁸⁶ the majority (nineteen informants) said “yes,” though as we shall see in the next section, for some (eight of the nineteen), it turned out to be “yes and no.” First I deal with statements from those for whom the answer was a clear “no” (four informants). Some imagine the border between Ukraine and Russia as lying west of the Donbas. Sergei, a thirty-year-old businessman from Luhansk who identifies as ethnic Russian, states, “Seventy to eighty percent of Donbas people support Russia. We want to be with other Russians [across the border]. It’s good if everything is in one, if all Russians are together. Like Crimea, in the West they called it the ‘annexation’ of Crimea, but for people there, it was a re-unification with Russia. We, too, in the Donbas, want to board the mothership, so to say.” Sasha, a twenty-eight-year-old high school teacher from Dnipropetrovsk, claims that “Historically, Ukraine was split between two empires: Russian and Austro-Hungarian. Of course, we all read textbooks in school telling us that Ukraine is one entity, and now the Ukrainian government keeps repeating that Ukraine is ‘one and indivisible.’ But really, did Ukraine become more integrated in those years of independence? If you want to see a different map, there’s one on YouTube that shows, with lit candles, the regions of origin of the Heavenly Hundred [Nebesna Sotnya, those pro-Europe protesters who died on Euromaidan in 2014]. ⁸⁷ If you look at it, all the candles are in Central and Western Ukraine! There’s almost nothing in the south, and maybe one in the Donbas . . . [there are in fact three candles in the Donbas, I come to realize after he has found the map on his phone] Doesn’t that tell you something? . . . I cannot say where the border [between Ukraine and Russia] should be exactly, but I don’t think the [pre-conflict] one is accurate either.” “Don’t you know history,” an informant from Central Ukraine asked, “the southeastern territories of Ukraine are Russian.” The above arguments for redrawing the boundary are based on two logics: the idea that parts of Ukrainian territory belong historically to Russia, or that shared peoplehood dictates reunification with Russia. The informant showing me the map with candles uses the second logic but from a different perspective: in claiming that Ukrainian national integration has been uneven so that citizens in the east are unwilling to die for the Ukrainian nation, ⁸⁸ he appears to suggest that while eastern Ukrainians are in the Ukrainian nation, they are not of it in important respects. ⁸⁹ Markian, a twenty-one-year-old construction worker from one of Ukraine’s westernmost oblasts also asserts that the (pre-conflict) border between Ukraine and Russia is incorrectly positioned, but in this case that Ukraine’s eastern border should stretch farther into Russia, encompassing “at the very least the Kuban’ region,” a region he believes was historically populated by ethnic Ukrainians. “If Russia wants to play this game we can play it too,” he adds.

Turning now to those of my respondents who said yes, the (pre-conflict) international border is correctly positioned: their justifications for saying yes vary. These include references to the “naturalness” of the physical border, as with informants from Eastern Ukraine who said, “There was always a border, even in Soviet times,” or “Yes, the border is in the right place. We haven’t known anything else.” Yulia, an eighteen-year-old student from an oblast’ bordering the Donbas (Kharkiv), states, “The Ukraine before the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk: that would be my Ukraine. You know, the picture [of Ukraine] in tenth-grade Geography class.” (Benedict Anderson speaks of communities “imagined as sovereign” through maps and other representational devices, ⁹⁰ and the latter appear to have been effective in independent Ukraine.) Some informants believe that there is a correspondence between the existing eastern border and other kinds of boundaries, as with Halyna, a thirty-year-old homemaker from Western Ukrainian, who claims: We [Ukrainians and Russians] are different “linguistically and religiously,” or Katya, the twenty-five-year-old from Donetsk who states, in Russian, “We Ukrainians have our own language [meaning, Ukrainian],” adding, “it doesn’t matter whether we speak Ukrainian or Russian, we are different. And when ‘brother’ [brat] comes to our territory, comes to destroy our home, it can take a hundred years to heal that wound.” Informants would also invoke differences in “traditions: food, dress” or “quality of life: Russia is poorer than Ukraine, except in Moscow.” Stereotypes around political culture, could also become the marker of difference. Maksym, a twenty-one-year-old businessman from southern Ukraine (Kherson), called Russians “‘genetic slaves’ who wait for a leader to solve everything for them,” making the motion of bowing [hands stretched out in front of him, palms turned toward the ground] to punctuate his statement. The very use of “genetic” here seems to naturalize differences in political culture in a way that denies any sort of cultural (or other) kinship with Russians. Other respondents invoke differences in historical experience. Victor, a twenty-one-year-old student from Donetsk, states, “There are many commonalities, but they are different countries anyway: Ukraine always fought off different empires. Russia never had to fight for its survival in this way.”

For some informants who agree that the pre-conflict eastern border is correctly positioned, the physical border and cultural boundaries do not necessarily correspond. Vladimir, a 20-year-old from Central Ukraine states: “Of course I think Russians and Ukrainians are one people, one language and one cultural family. We lived in peace for many years, respected, helped, and supported each other. I think the border is correctly positioned, because Russia and Ukraine had gotten each area after the end of the USSR. Both countries had found a border solution many years ago.” In other words, here the fact of cross-border (supranational) cultural unity does not render physical borders (sovereignty) irrelevant. In the same vein, Tanya, a twenty-two-year-old medical assistant from Western Ukraine states: “Yes, [the current border] is in the right place. I agree with Russian officials when they say that Ukrainians and Russians are one people. We are one people but both Ukraine and Russia have their own borders and I think it’s wrong [for Russia] to take pieces of Ukraine. We can be one people but still maintain our own borders.” However, she adds that if a majority in Ukraine voted to join Russia, then Ukraine should join Russia. Nastia, a homemaker from Eastern Ukraine who identified as being from a mixed Russian–Ukrainian marriage, tells me that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has reminded her of her parents’ divorce when she was a child, that it evokes, for her, the same kind of sadness. What she calls Russia’s “invasion” of Crimea (movement across borders) represents, for her, grounds for a “cultural” divorce. These statements frame Ukrainian territorial sovereignty as critical. But in this case, it is not the “cultural/national substance” of Ukraine that justifies retaining the border as is. Rather, it is the belief that the border represents an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, that it is a guarantee of mutual respect. Here, the border constitutes, to restate Wilson and Donnan’s definition, a “physical record of a state’s past and present relations with its neighbors,” ⁹¹ where the relation is imagined as one of cooperation. That is why the border’s violation can signify a rupture in the long-standing cultural bonds between Ukrainians and Russians.

Myroslava, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer from Sumy in eastern Ukraine, argued instead for Ukraine’s territorial integrity based on the Donbas’s economic importance: “It’s a crucial region for Ukraine’s economy because there’s coal mining and other industry,” she claimed, and “Donetsk is, or at least was, a growing city. We should not have given it up so easily, we should have defended that region better.” Her statements reveal a belief that pro-EU citizens and anti-EU (or ambivalent citizens) nonetheless shared something fundamental. She states about EU supporters that “young people especially, because we have a longer future ahead of us, are looking for a better life, for example the possibility of finding a job in a field we like, of leading a life that is economically stable, with social protections. . . . The kind of life we see people leading in Europe.” Later on in the interview, however, she adds that “Many people [in Ukraine] don’t want to choose [between a European or Russian orientation]. They want friendly relations with both. . . . In the Donbas but also in other eastern regions of Ukraine, many people have jobs in industry that depend on Russian demand for material. If these orders don’t come in anymore, they will lose their jobs, and what do you think, of course those people just want to live a normal life.” This “normal life” turned out to have the same attributes as the “better life” she invoked earlier, suggesting that pro-EU protesters were not alone in their quest for dignity (the protests had been dubbed the “revolution of dignity” [revolutsiia hidnosti]). For this informant, the importance of territorial sovereignty is reinforced by the perceived shared struggle of all Ukrainians (the idea of a shared struggle for well-being among Ukrainian citizens has not typically been emphasized by parties to the conflict).

Some respondents agree with pre-conflict territorial borders but leave the choice to people of the Donbas, as with Petro, a twenty-seven-year-old government worker from Central Ukraine, who states: “Personally, I would keep the same borders. But if the people of Donestk and Luhansk want more autonomy, I think they should get it. They are concerned with their cultural rights and the protection of the Russian language, and they also have a different vision for their own development. The Ukrainian government should allow those regions to conduct a legitimate referendum, a referendum in which international observers are present. If those regions vote for more autonomy, then perhaps federalization would end up being a solution for Ukraine.” Here, regardless of the informant’s preference, the people in the conflict zone are deemed the ones who should decide. He also imagines a situation in which the boundary with Russia would still exist but where there would be a thickening of internal boundaries (i.e., the boundaries between oblasts). In this scenario, the cultural rights of Donbas inhabitants should be protected not through Russian encompassment but rather by allowing the region a degree of recognition and autonomy.

For many informants, the congruence of identity and territory (one that traditionally characterizes nationalism) appears important, justifying Ukraine’s pre-conflict border, but also, potentially, the extension of Ukraine’s border into Russia, and the extension of Russia’s borders into Ukraine. For others, the “glue” that holds Ukrainian citizens together is of a different nature: economic interdependence, shared struggle for “better life,” etc. For yet other informants, the identity/territory convergence remains insignificant (some recognize and/or claim hybrid or fluid identities) yet in their narratives, territorial integrity remains critical. In their view, fluidity and flexibility in identification do not justify the motility of the border in the form of Russian incursions. What then explains the latter informants’ strong attachment to the pre-conflict eastern border? There are no doubt several factors at play, here. One possibility is that they identify strongly with the Ukrainian state and its power (one that would, putatively, be undermined by Russian incursions in the east). Perhaps this kind of identification, which might reveal a civic attachment rather than an exclusively ethnonational attachment, signals a nation-building project that has produced in citizens a sense of patriotism (one no doubt exacerbated by the seizure of state territories). Another and perhaps entangled reason for framing sovereignty as the highest value might be the emphasis in the last decade on boundedness as a condition for eventual European integration and indeed as part of what makes Ukraine a “normal” European country. In other words, the European Union’s message that boundedness is necessary to boundlessness (the latter in the form of free flows to and from Europe) may account for citizens’ attachment to territorial integrity. Perhaps it is one of the paradoxes of nation-building in the “post-national” era that the naturalization of the border can occur, for some citizens, without a strong sense of national affiliation or even national distinctiveness and be the effect instead of a supranational project.

The importance of Ukrainian sovereignty for my young informants could also be tracked to a form of personal identification with the conundrum faced by Ukraine as a “young” country, however. Reflecting back on the iconography of the 2014 Euromaidan, Marusia, a student from Dnipropetrovsk, tells me that Ukraine (the name of the country, Ukraina, is feminine) became embodied by young women on Kyiv’s Independence Square as a young bride marrying her bridegroom (i.e., the European Union). She explains that this represents Ukraine entering a “union” with Europe willingly, free from the intimidation and coercion of “elders,” including “elder sister Russia [Rosiya]” who always claims to know what is best for Ukraine. My informant articulates the desire for Ukraine’s sovereignty with young adults’ “natural” desire for independence and sovereignty over their lives, a connection further consolidated by her portrayal of Ukraina as a twenty-three-year-old woman (at the time of the protests in 2013–2014, it had been twenty-three years since the declaration of independence). She explains, “[At the time of the Euromaidan] Ukraine is presented in pop art as a young woman who should be able to make her own choices. . . . She’s just beginning her independent life, but still, she’s mature enough to choose whom she wishes to marry. Ukraine is 23 years old . . . I’m 23 years old, and that’s old enough to make your own decisions.” The importance of self-rule could therefore be articulated and, presumably, felt bodily through identification with Ukraine and the framing of a parallel “coming of age.”

If the attachment to Ukraine’s sovereignty can result from such factors as the belief in the congruence of nation and state, a realization of citizens’ interdependence, a civic connection with the Ukrainian state, or a desire to join a supranational entity (the EU), it can also be experienced in a highly personalized and embodied way, as when a young person identifies, age-wise, with Ukraine and speaks of herself as engaged in a similar struggle for sovereignty.

The Donbas: “Ours but Not Us”?

In this section, I show how some informants view the Donbas as culturally, politically, and morally “other” and express willingness, at least in theory, to surrender it to Russia. I draw on these informants’ articulations of the threatening “mobile boundary” to argue that it is based on fear of Russian encroachment beyond the Donbas that they nevertheless continue to support the war effort in the east.

Some informants (eight in my sample: four from eastern Ukraine, two from Western Ukraine, one from Central Ukraine, one from Southern Ukraine) agreed that the pre-conflict eastern border was correctly positioned, only to add, as an aside (some did so dismissively, or in a lowered voice) a version of “Honestly, I would cut off Donetsk and Luhansk.” When I ask them why, these regions are described to me alternately as a “depressed area” [Rus. dipresivnyi region], “criminal oblasts in which people have gotten used to the criminal culture,” or “a Soviet nature preserve” (with the implication that Soviet life has remained intact there as opposed to in oblasts further west). Yulia, my informant from Kharkiv, an oblast bordering the Donbas, claims that “in the Donbas, older people especially live in the past, there is a desire to go back to something that they already experienced as citizens of Soviet Ukraine. . . . Those who support pro-Russian separatists want to take a step back in time, but the country has already been in the Soviet Union . . . we young people want something that hasn’t been done yet” (emphasis added). It is difficult to not read, in these statements, a notion of progress, equated with “the new,” the latter itself naturalized through its association with “youth.” What is being drawn here is a boundary between two distinct temporal/generational orientations: the “futurity” of Europe ⁹² versus the putative “regression” of a Russian orientation.

I am also told by an informant from Dnipropetrovsk in Eastern Ukraine that, historically, Russia had not selected “the best people” to send to Donetsk and Luhansk as industrial workers, or that these oblasts had been to the Russian empire what “Australia had been to England.” A respondent from Rivne in Western Ukraine claims that there are “not many ‘normal people’ there”—when I ask him whether he’s been there, he says “No! I’ve always been too afraid to go.” ⁹³ There is an implicit reference to the boundary between “civilized” and “uncivilized” here, one that has been increasingly articulated in the context of rapprochement with the EU. In the above responses, we see the Donbas imagined simultaneously as the land of “bandits” and the land of elderly nostalgic people: a space both wayward and backward. Because of this, it is also viewed as a potential liability in terms of European integration. Rather than imagined as a vibrant place (e.g., economically or culturally, as other informants had argued above), the Donbas is coded here as a kind of residue. This perception is no doubt connected in part to popular perceptions of the region as “Yanukovych’s stronghold.” If the Euromaidan protests were strongly against Yanukovych and what he putatively represented (“immorality,” “corruption”), to have ambivalent feelings about the Donbas, where a majority of his supporters resided, fit the logic of the protests. Informants had to walk a fine line, however, because where territorial integrity is strongly connected with sovereignty (understood here as self-rule), to bluntly reject a region construed as part and parcel of the Ukrainian state might appear unpatriotic, especially given the lives already sacrificed for the territory.

Interestingly, some of the informants who had earlier asserted the correspondence between cultural boundaries and the eastern Ukrainian border were also saying (though on the sly) that Donestsk and Luhansk were not really Ukrainian culturally, politically, morally, or temporally. It is on that basis that they thought Ukraine could “do without” those oblasts. ⁹⁴ In other words, they are simultaneously affirming and questioning the correspondence between national substance and territorial borders. The Donbas is simultaneously “us” and “not us,” “ours” but “not us.” So, to the question of whether the international border is in the right place, the answer could be “yes and no.” Statements like “personally, I would cut off the Donbas” (and this, even by young people inhabiting regions directly bordering the Donbas—Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk) then beg the question of why Ukraine should be at war, with great loss of life, if some citizens’ commitment to the Donbas is, at best, ambivalent. ⁹⁵ I put the question to my informants. And the answers bring us once again (but through the back door, as it were) to an imaginary of the threatening “mobile boundary.” Informants would say things such as the following, articulated by Masha: “If we don’t fight [Russians and Russian-backed separatists] in the Donbas, they will take more territory. If we show weakness, they will take everything. We have to hold the border, keep the front away from Ukraine”—“Ukraine” understood by this informant from Kharkiv as ‘non-Donbas’ Ukraine.” These kinds of statements suggest an Eastern Ukraine that is profoundly divided rather than homogenous, a process described by other scholars. ⁹⁶ In the same vein, Maksym from Kherson opined, “We have to fight! I know Russians—you give them your hand, they will take the whole arm.” Here, the articulation of a stereotype about Russians, one that I had heard in other contexts, indexes the fear of being tricked (“theft” in the face of “generosity”). In a similar logic, two informants (one from Zaporizhia and one from Dnipropetrovsk) explained that they ultimately supported the war effort because if Ukraine were to actually surrender the Donbas to Russia, their home regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk would end up sharing a direct border with the Russian Federation, a scenario that they considered potentially threatening to territorial integrity and wished to avoid. The latter logic raises the question of whether some of my informants might be imagining the Donbas as a necessary buffer zone, as a zone that is fought over to protect a Ukraine beyond the Donbas deemed more politically, culturally, morally, and temporally homogeneous. In other words, the imaginary of the threatening “mobile boundary” can mean that those who do not feel a strong attachment to the Donbas (its inhabitants and territory) nevertheless feel they have a stake in defending it, for in this view, to surrender the Donbas would mean to necessarily expose oneself to further encroachment by Russia.

The Mobile Boundary, Again

In response to why the Ukrainian army is fighting in the Donbas, my informants also express the threat of “total invasion” by Russia more metaphorically, that is, by speaking of movement across space not directly in the language of borders, but rather with reference to other realms of experience. Lyuda, my informant from Kyiv, explains, “Imagine that a bandit breaks into your house and wants to take over your kitchen and live there. If you let him settle over there, he’ll get established and become comfortable. Soon he’ll want to live in the next room, and then eventually he’ll want to take over the whole apartment. If we [Ukraine] show weakness, they will keep taking territory until they’ve taken everything. We must use force to keep the front away from Ukraine. We must stand our ground. If we let [the separatists] take the Donbas, soon they will take Kharkiv, Zaporizhia [i.e., move westward]. As soon as they succeed in taking one piece of territory they will build on it to invade more.” This informant articulated the threat as criminal transgression, where Ukraine is a house (private property). The scenario is perhaps also an indirect reference to Soviet expropriation of private houses for the creation of communal apartments, where the owner is dislodged or forced to occupy an increasingly restricted space, and as such it is interesting to contrast it with Yeltsin’s claim above that “Russians and Ukrainians lived in a communal flat, so to speak. Our separation was painful.” In my informant’s statements, it is further movement (made possible by progressive occupation) that is framed as the biggest threat. The boundary is mobile as a result of the bandit’s growing desire for space as he enjoys the comfort of occupying more and more rooms in the house. (This resonates with the statements of another respondent, who did speak of a frozen conflict in Ukraine’s east, only to add that it would “unfreeze” and expand as soon as Ukraine took another step toward the EU.) Danylo, a 23-year-old from Western Ukraine, used an agricultural metaphor to convey a similar mobile threat, stating that “Putin proceeds with the quiet hoe [tykhoiu sapoiu]. With that hoe, he chops and chops parts of Ukraine. He cuts roots further and further westward. He doesn’t do it fast, he does it slowly and stealthily. . . . As he diverts everyone’s attention toward Syria, and counts on the West being busy with ISIS, he continues Russian military maneuvers at the border with Ukraine, he continues his work.”

Some informants described Russia as a predator eager to get its “paws” on Ukraine, while others spoke of Russia’s “appetite.” Kolya, a 29-year old from southern Ukraine (Odessa) tells me, “The pro-Russian rebels originally wanted the whole Ukrainian southeast. You always want a taste of what looks delicious. It’s like when you see a big, shiny apple on a tree—it looks so good, but then you take a bite and it’s so sour you want to throw it away. . . . That’s what happened to Russia: they opened their mouth wide (he shows me, opening his mouth wide) to bite a big piece of Ukraine [the southeast], but it was so sour [because the separatists faced resistance from Ukrainian citizens in that region] that they got sore teeth and so they ended up biting only a small piece.” Here we have the idea of the mobile mouth: the mouth that can always open wider, but that faced with a sour taste, can also close. This metaphor of the mouth that opens vertically translates horizontally as a mobile boundary, such that taking a smaller bite stands for a boundary that recedes. He continues: “When you bite a sour apple, you have this conundrum, you know, ‘It’s bitter to the taste but it’s a pity to throw it away’ [hedko z’iisty, vashko kynuty]. Russia faced the same dilemma and they decided to keep fighting, at least in some areas.” Once again, we have the idea of a boundary that can move both westward and eastward for strategic reasons.

Ukraine was historically at the crossroads of various empires, and so border indeterminacy and vulnerability to plunder is a theme that is salient in Ukrainian historiography. The idea that Russia is after Ukrainian territory and resources is a common theme often taught and reproduced in schools, where I have witnessed students reply, in answer to why Ukrainian territory has been historically vulnerable to invasion from the East, “Because we have such a rich land and Russia always stole from us.” These existing themes circulate through a variety of everyday pedagogies and may have been, in a sense, “confirmed” by recent incursions into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine—a transgression no longer merely historical or theoretical; no longer reproduced as part of a national pedagogies, but rather felt as a “wound” (see my informant Katya from Donetsk). Different metaphorical realms are manifested in the above quotes: the amputated body (“give a hand they will take an arm”); the occupied or expropriated rooms in a private apartment; the land—eroded, sapped; the predator biting the prey and taking flight when the prey bites back. My informants’ metaphors appear grounded in (post)colonial sensibilities. “The fundamental violence of colonialism,” Belcourt argues, “ . . . is perhaps the inculcated sense, a sensation that bubbles up most acutely by way of the physiological, that your body is not yours to keep, that it is never solely yours to maintain sovereign control over.” ⁹⁷

Conclusion

For a majority of informants in my sample, it is not the “frozen zone” metaphor but rather the motility of the boundary that appears to ring true. While keeping in mind the size of the sample and its specificity with regards to age (i.e., it may not represent wider attitudes), we could ask ourselves whether it is possible that an imaginary of the mobile boundary is partially animating the conflict in Ukraine, from the Ukrainian side. Without this particular imaginary, would Ukraine still hold on as tightly to the Donbas? While some scholars have pointed to Ukrainians’ lack of commitment toward the Donbas in times of conflict ⁹⁸ we have yet to fully understand the reasons (they are no doubt multiple) for continued support of the war effort under these conditions. Many of my informants’ statements directly or implicitly refer to the past (whether Russian imperial or Soviet) to make sense of a present that they view as actually or potentially expansionist. At the same time, the mobile boundary suggests not mere expansionism (movement westward) but the possibility of a strategically receding boundary as well. This sense of an even greater indeterminacy fuels insecurity about the eventual location of the boundary between Ukraine and Russia.

My sample points to a variety of perspectives on territoriality, however. It has become common knowledge that language and identity in Ukraine may or may not intersect, and the example of the female informant telling me, in Russian, “We Ukrainians have our own language [Ukrainian]” is an example of this. But the statements presented above reveal that territory and identity may also intersect or diverge in interesting ways. Some informants who support continued Ukrainian independence do speak of the congruence of territory and national/cultural substance. Other informants, in contrast, combine a concern with preserving Ukrainian territorial sovereignty with a supranational identification. For yet others, the preservation of territorial sovereignty is compatible with a belief that the boundaries of the “real Ukraine” exclude the Donbas. But whether culture exceeds or falls short of the (pre-conflict) territorial border, there is evidence of commitment to the existing eastern border. Pre-conflict factors that support this commitment include the naturalization of this border during the Soviet period, the post-Soviet nation-building project and attendant territorial representations (e.g., school maps), and discourses around boundedness and circulation deployed by the EU (and the attendant connection, for youth especially, or the EU with the “futurity” mentioned by Boyer ⁹⁹ ). Post-conflict factors that support commitment to the eastern border include perceptions of transgression (vs. a certain degree of trust, pre-conflict, about the eastern border’s inviolability) where transgression can make the border “real” in a new kind of way, the intensification of the sovereignty/territorial integrity nexus (“Ukraine, one and indivisible”), and the perceived threat of further encroachment (conflict that spreads from Crimea to Eastern Ukraine and, for many informants, potentially further into Ukrainian territory). My sample also illustrates the connection made between Ukraine as a young country wanting to safeguard its independence and sovereignty, and young people’s desire for independence and sovereignty over their own lives and destinies.

I proposed earlier that we understand Ukrainian and Russian views of territoriality as dialogical. In my sample, one can see how Ukrainian and Russian discourses articulate with one another, so that what I have called Russian “intensities” can be interpreted in various ways by Ukrainian citizens. Some of my respondents view the idea expressed by President Putin that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” as a mere Russian justification for a wholescale invasion of Ukraine. For them, the Russian “intensities” of Russian authorities’ statements are not (or no longer) taken for granted as the feature of a hybrid landscape but rather interpreted as a more direct threat to Ukraine’s territorial integrity. For other informants, in contrast, shared peoplehood, presumably because it implies a degree of trust and loyalty, is the kind of “fact” that should have prevented Russia from disrespecting Ukrainian territorial sovereignty.

Ukraine has recently seen new practices and claims around its borders. In June 2017, it became possible for Ukrainian citizens holding a biometric Ukrainian passport to travel visa-free to Europe for 90 days. The advent of the visa-free regime was signified by Ukrainian president Poroshenko opening a symbolic (plywood) “door” to Europe and meeting with the Slovak president at the Uzhgorod border checkpoint in the westernmost region of Ukraine. ¹⁰⁰ About a month later, rebel leader of the DNR Alexander Zakharchenko announced plans to conduct a referendum on the creation of a new state called “Little Russia” (Malorossiya, the historical name for the part of Ukraine’s current territory that was under the Russian empire), a state that would include not only rebel-held republics but the entire territory of Ukraine. ¹⁰¹ Zakharchenko claims that given Ukraine’s current status as a failed state, a Ukrainian successor state is necessary. ¹⁰² The state would have Donetsk as its capital while Kyiv would become a mere “historical and cultural center.” ¹⁰³ We see, here, a re-configuration of “intensities” where Kyiv, a traditional center, is overlooked in favor of Donetsk (the latter perhaps deemed more modern/future-oriented?) Those who have been called “separatists” now claim Ukraine in its entirety, wishing to “save” it by remaking it into a different state (with a different leadership), and this, within the same (pre-conflict) borders, except for Crimea. The project was immediately condemned by the Ukrainian government and governments in Western Europe, in part because it was viewed as hindering the peace process. Alexander Timofeyev, a spokesperson for the DNR, claimed that the Malorossiya project would not undermine the Minsk Accords given that it respects Ukrainian territorial integrity. ¹⁰⁴ Though these do not constitute the same kinds of discourses and practices, no doubt the opening of the border with Europe, as well as Russian and separatist discourses on Malorossiya, contribute to shaping, within Ukraine, citizens’ hopes and anxieties around sovereignty, territorial integrity, and borders. More work is needed on the ways in which these hopes and anxieties will in turn influence the course of the conflict.