The making of independent Ukraine

The political and social developments in Ukraine during the last years of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) can be seen as an unfinished revolution. The proclamation of independence in 1991 marked a compromise between national-democratic forces and the republic’s old Soviet elites, which slowed down democratic transformations and kept the Red directors in power. The emergence of a mass opposition movement during the early 2000s represented a return to the unfinished agenda of the revolution. The Orange Revolution (2004–2005) and the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014) re-established the connection between the civil society’s struggle for democracy and the rights of the Ukrainian language and culture, which had first developed in the late 1980s. The emergence of a new Ukrainian political nation provoked an aggressive response from Putin’s Russia, but its all-out invasion of 2022 only served to consolidate a modern Ukrainian identity as separate from Russia both politically and culturally.