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Existential Nationalism: Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Eleanor Knott*
August 19, 2022
Abstract
“If Russia stops ghting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops ghting, there will be no Ukraine” is
the sentiment used by Ukrainian protesters mobilising against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Such
a sentiment signies the stakes of a war where Ukraine is a democratic nation-state ghting for
its right to exist against a Russian invasion. Meanwhile, Russia is ghting for a version of Ukraine
that is subservient to Russia’s idea of what Ukraine should be as a nation-state: under a Russian
hegemon geopolitically, where Ukraine’s national idea and interpretation of history can be vetted
and vetoed by the Russian state. While nationalism scholarship equips us to study Russia’s war
against Ukraine through the lens of Russian ethnic nationalism and Ukrainian civic nationalism, the
ethnic/civic dichotomy falls short of unpacking the more pernicious logics that pervade Russia’s
intentions and actions towards Ukraine (demilitarisation and de-Nazication). Instead, this article
explores the logics of Russia’s war and Ukraine’s resistance through the concept of existential
nationalism where existential nationalism is Russia’s motivation to pursue war, whatever the costs,
and Ukraine’s motivation to ght with everything it has.
Please cite as: Knott, E. (2022). Existential nationalism: Russia’s war against Ukraine. Nations and
Nationalism. DOI: 10.1111/nana.12878
*Department of Methodology, London School of Economics; correspondence: e.k.knott@lse.ac.uk
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I would also like to address the military personnel of the Ukrainian
Armed Forces. Comrade ocers, Your fathers, grandfathers and
great-grandfathers did not ght the Nazi occupiers and did not
defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to
seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the
Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary
which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia (2022a)
1 Introduction
“If Russia stops ghting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops ghting, there will be no Ukraine” is
the sentiment used by Ukrainian protesters mobilising against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Such a
sentiment signies the existential stakes of a war where Ukraine – a democratic nation-state – is
ghting for its right to exist against a Russian invasion. Ukrainians are ghting and mobilising as
citizens for the right of their democratic nation-state to exist, just as Ukrainians protested in 2004
during the Orange Revolution for free and fair elections, and in 2013-2014 at Euromaidan for dignity
and against corruption. Meanwhile, Russia is ghting for a version of Ukraine that is subservient to
Russia’s idea of what Ukraine should be as a nation-state: under a Russian hegemon geopolitically,
where Ukraine’s national idea and interpretation of history can be vetted and vetoed by the Russian
state. In Russia, even calling its war against Ukraine a war faces harsh consequences, including arrest
and imprisonment; for Russia, it is launching a “special military operation” to save Ukraine as a state
supposedly over-run by Nazis that needs to be demilitarised and de-Nazied. But, such a claim makes
neither political, factual, nor discursive sense when Ukraine is currently headed by the democratically
elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, lost family in the Holocaust, and is a Russian
speaker (Onuch and Hale 2022).
Just as with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its covert eorts to occupy and stoke conict in
Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts since 2014, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is further proof of its non-
consensual approach to Ukraine. Regardless of Ukraine’s sovereignty and whether Ukraine and
Ukrainian citizens agree, Russia treats Ukraine as a state permanently tethered to Russia’s idea of
what it should be, as if it is a state incapable of governing itself, interpreting its own history, forming
its own foreign policy, deciding if it is over-run by “Nazis”, or determining who “Nazis” are in the rst
place. As Putin hauntingly claimed in 2021, preceding launching war and invasion against Ukraine,
“true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia” (President of Russia 2021).
The terms that nationalism studies most readily equip us to study Russia’s war are those of ethnic
and civic nationalism. While ethnic nationalism is a primordial, exclusivist and cultural ideology of
blood and soil, civic nationalism is an inclusivist ideology built around political ideas of citizenship.
These concepts are oen framed as a binary, as a dichotomy of good and liberal civic nationalism
and bad ethnic and illiberal nationalism (Brown 1999). Using these concepts, we might view Rus-
sia as an aggressive ethno-nationalist state, and we might view Ukraine – and Ukrainian citizens –
as demonstrating the mobilizational capacity and plural inclusiveness of civic nationalism. Indeed,
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while scholars used the concepts of ethnic and civic to explore national identication in Ukraine (Shul-
man 2004), many scholars had also (wrongly) expressed doubt that Ukraine was a state capable
of civic nationalism or mobilising citizens for the ends of civic nationalism (Onuch and Hale 2022).
What the ethnic/civic dichotomy falls short of unpacking in Russia’s war against Ukraine is the more
pernicious logics that pervade Russia’s intentions and actions towards Ukraine (demilitarisation and
de-Nazication).
Instead, the concept of existential nationalism demonstrates both sides of the coin: Ukraine is
ghting for the right to exist and maintain its right to determine what that existence should look like
(democratic, multi-cultural, tolerant, and multi-ethnic). Russia is ghting for a version of Ukrainian
existence that is non-consensual and hierarchical, where Ukraine is subservient to Kremlin hegemony
and ideology, where Russia decides what is good and evil, and right and wrong, and where Russia
has the right to occupy whatever territory of Ukraine it chooses. Existential nationalism is Russia’s
motivation to pursue war, whatever the costs, and Ukraine’s motivation to ght with everything it
has. Of course the stakes are dierent: Russia is not being invaded by Ukraine. But Russia’s war is
existential for both Ukraine and Russia, as I argue in this piece.
Conceptually, existential nationalism concerns a dyad: state A (in this case Ukraine), or polity A,
ghting for its existence, and state B (here Russia), or polity B, ghting against A’s right to exist. While
the terms of the conict, war, and/or invasion, are wholly existential for A, they are also existential for
B. B’s motivation for conict, war and/or invasion are existential – originating in non-consensual claims
over A. B’s claims include both cultural and national claims over A’s right to have a national imaginary
separate from B. But, B’s claims also extend into the political and territorial realm, concerning A’s rights
to self-govern and self-determine both its territory and right to construct political norms and a political
syste, that B might view – however irrationally – as conictual for its own (for example, if A is a
democracy while B is an autocracy). But, in launching conict, war, and/or invasion that is likely
intractable because of the inability for A and B to reach any trust or compromise, B is also setting
existential terms for its own end result. For example, B’s existential motivations could end up resulting
in an existential reconguration of its own national imaginary, for example by being required to
imagine itself as separate politically and culturally from A, and required to recongure what were
previously existential claims to A into non-existential and more consensual norms.
2 Russia and Existential Nationalism
Specically, the concept of existential nationalism helps draw attention to, and unpack, the discursive
roots of Putin’s claims to Ukraine. The claims pertain, rst, to Ukraine’s own national imaginary and
right to its own national imaginary. Second, Russia is mobilising existential nationalism to set the
brutal and barbaric terms of war and invasion, that aims for existential demoralising of Ukraine via
the deliberate targeting of Ukrainian civilians – both ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, and Russia
and Ukrainian speakers – and decimation of Ukrainian culture.
First, Russia views Ukraine’s national imaginary as both “articial” and a threat to Russia. For Putin,
Ukraine is an “articial” intelligentsia project where Ukraine’s independence is justied “through the
denial of its past”, a mythologised and re-written history that edits out Russia and Ukraine’s common
history and frames the Soviet and Tsarist rule of Ukraine as “as an occupation” (President of Russia
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2021). Days before Putin’s order to invade Ukraine, with troops amassed on the border, Putin made the
spurious (and historically inaccurate) claim that Lenin was the architect of “modern Ukraine” (President
of Russia 2022b, see also President of Russia 2021). Putin claimed that the creation of the Soviet state
and its principle of national self-determination, in turn, created Ukraine (in 1922), which was itself
an articial intelligentsia project. To create such a state, Putin claimed Lenin separated and severed
“historically Russian land” without asking “the millions of people living there what they thought”, as
if Ukraine was a national idea created out of Russia. Putin believes he is correcting Lenin’s mistaken
approach to self-determination, which created (what Putin imagines and claims) a Ukrainian state out
of a Russian nation that, today, one hundred years later, yearns to be reunited.
According to Putin, Ukraine’s contemporary national imaginary threatens the existence and longevity
of the contemporary Russian national imaginary. As Bogomolov and Lytvyneko wrote in 2012, be-
fore Russia annexed Crimea, “[F]or Russia, maintaining inuence over Ukraine is more than a foreign
policy priority; it is an existential imperative” where Russian powerholders view Ukraine as “part of
their country’s own identity” (Bogomolov and Lytvynenko 2012). These ideas fuse Russian ethnona-
tionalism with an imperial overtone as if Ukraine – politically and as a nation – would not exist but for
Russia and the Soviet Union (Plokhy 2017). Indeed, scholars disagree whether Russia’s actions since
2014 demonstrate ideologies of imperialism or ethnic nationalism (see Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2016).
But the focus on ethnonationalism or imperialism is also insucient to capture the deep-seated
existential contestation that Russia, and the Putin regime more specically, have pursued discursively
and politically via conict since 2014, and war against Ukraine since 2022.
For example, in 2016, Putin reinvigorated claims that the Russian nation emerged from Kyivan Rus’
via Prince Volodymyr, a Prince who Putin described as the “gatherer and protector of Russian lands and
a prescient statesman” (cited by Plokhy 2017, vii). Despite being a “relatively young state”, emerging
in the 1470s under Ivan III, Putin imagines Russia as the “legitimate political, cultural, and religious
successor to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus”’ (ix). Such articulations present a subservient Ukraine
as pivotal and existential to Russia’s national imaginary. Russia’s paranoid idea of itself and history
are “all hinged on a view of Ukraine as a distinct but integral part of Russia” where the “possibility of
Ukraine leaving the Russian sphere of inuence as an attack on Russia itself” (348). Only Russia can
be the home and champion of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers and the hegemon who decides
who belongs to the Russian nation and who does not. Aer all, Putin has claimed repeatedly (e.g. in
2013 and 2021) that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians are “one people” (President of Russia 2013,
2021).
Ethnic nationalism and imperialism are both at play in Russia’s war against Ukraine. But these
concepts are insucient to explicate the magnitude of what is better understood as a conict-turned-
war fuelled by existential nationalism. Just like in Aleppo, Syria (2016), and Grozny, Chechnya (1999-
2000), Russia’s “programmatic” targeting of civilian and military targets alike is meant to demoralise
as much as defeat (Troianovski 2022). Without understanding the existential terms and motivations
of Russia’s war, we cannot understand Russia’s willingness to pursue such indiscriminate killing and
commit war crimes and genocide in Ukraine (Finkel 2022).
As another example, under Putin, Russia has claimed ethnic Russians and Russian speakers as
its so-called Compatriots. In turn, Putin has articulated Russia’s claims to have legitimate interests
over how Ukraine was governed through the size of those Russia claimed as Compatriots in Ukraine
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(2008 NATO summit, Unian 2008). In 2014, without any supporting evidence, Russia claimed Russia’s
Compatriots faced a grave threat in Ukraine (President of Russia 2014b). Putin legitimised annexing
Crimea by claiming Russia was acting to prevent a potential massacre at the hands of (what Putin
claimed was) a discriminatory Ukrainian government (President of Russia 2014a). Indeed, even in
2022, Russia renewed its non-evidenced claims that Ukraine was planning to target ethnic Russians
and “bring war” to Crimea just as “Hitler’s accomplices did during the Great Patriotic War” (President
of Russia 2022a).
Putin claimed in 2021 that Russia was doing “everything to stop fratricide” (President of Russia
2021). In 2022, Russia is now killing civilians in Ukraine who are as likely ethnic Russians as they
are ethnic Ukrainians, and as likely Russian speakers as they are Ukrainian speakers. Bilocerkowycz
and Khromeychuk (2022) explain how: “Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol are all primarily Russophone
cities. Their inhabitants are being shelled, not ‘rescued’ by Putin”. Thus, without the concept of
existential nationalism, we cannot explicate the escalation of Russia’s claims and actions that have
had no factual basis throughout. Moreover, we cannot explain Russia’s willingness to claim ethnic
Russians and Russian speakers need protecting, on the one hand, and willingness to kill them in
Ukraine to pursue existential nationalism, on the other hand.
Second, Russia is mobilising existential nationalism with the aim of humiliating Ukraine via targeting
civilians and Ukrainian culture. While indiscriminately shelling and killing Ukrainian civilians, Russia
also deliberately targets sights of Ukrainian culture, history, and heritage, such as theatres, concert
halls, libraries, and museums. On the one hand, as Stepnisky (2022) argues, this targeting indicates
Putin’s “recognition of the unique and strong character of Ukrainian cultural identity”. On the other
hand, it demonstrates the unreasonable sense of threat that Russia perceives from Ukraine’s desire for
independence from a Russian cultural, political, and geopolitical yoke. Putin claims Ukrainian culture
is part of Russia’s own and sees denial of this as cutting into Russia’s existential core. As Putin claimed
in 2021, works by Ukrainian writers such as Taras Shevchenko and Nikolai Gogol are “our common
literary and cultural heritage” (President of Russia 2021), in part because these writers wrote in the
Russian language (due to Russian imperial hegemony). Russia perceives claiming these heroes as
Ukrainian as an existential threat by dividing what Russia views as indivisible. Meanwhile, on aspects
of culture and history Russia recognises as unique to Ukraine, Russia considers these “meaningless,
second-rate or blasphemous to a large number of Russians” even if it might “bring the majority of
Ukrainians together as a nation” (Bogomolov and Lytvynenko 2012).
Finally, existential nationalism as motivation and justication for invading Ukraine serves more
than a purely ideological function of positioning – and trying to coerce – Ukraine as subservient.
Putin’s strategy, and enactment of existential nationalism, is designed “not only to oppress Ukrainians,
but also to prevent his own people from imagining a future in which their lives are worth more than
serving as cannon fodder for his wars” (Bilocerkowycz and Khromeychuk 2022). By contrast, these
authors argue, “Ukrainians have a clear vision of the future for themselves and their country, and
they will do everything to protect it” (Bilocerkowycz and Khromeychuk 2022). In other words, Russia’s
existential motivation to invade Ukraine is not only to coerce Ukraine to be subservient, culturally
and politically, but also to coerce subservience from its own citizens towards Russia. In other words,
the terms of Russia’s war and invasion are existential for Ukraine but also existential for Russia. First,
via military coercion of both Russian and Ukrainian citizens; and second, by reproducing a non-
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compromising national Russia imaginary that views Ukraine as non-consensually tethered to Russia,
that makes war likely intractable, where any alternative is constructed as antagonistic to Russia’s own
continued existence.
3 Ukraine’s Mobilisation Against Russian Existential Nationalism
While we should be impressed by the mobilisation capacity of Ukrainian citizens, we should not be
surprised; we should never have doubted that it was possible. We now understand the mobilisation
capacity of Ukrainian society through images of civilians peacefully facing down tanks and chasing
them out of Ukraine’s towns, videos of mass protests gathering under reams of Ukrainian ags while
being shot at by Russian troops (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2022a), and Ukrainian farmers using
tractors to tow broken down Russian tanks (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2022b).1
But, for too long, Ukraine has been described as a weak and divided state and a state made weak
by its ethnic and linguistic diversity. Scholars have recently observed shiing forms of identication
in Ukraine and the growing prominence of civic nationalism (Kulyk 2018; Onuch and Hale 2018;
Barrington 2022). My research points to civic forms of identication and the importance of Ukrainian
citizenship in the most unexpected region of Ukraine – Crimea prior to Russian annexation, in particular
for younger Crimeans who grew up in a Ukrainian state disconnected from prior Soviet realities (Knott
2022).
However, it should also not take Russia launching a war against and an invasion of Ukraine for
wider public recognition that “‘Glory to Ukraine’ can be said in Russian with the same conviction as in
Ukrainian” (Bilocerkowycz and Khromeychuk 2022), that the capital of Ukraine is Kyiv and not Kiev, or
“why it is now a ‘Russian invasion’ and not a ‘crisis”’ (Mykhed 2022). It should not take an escalation
of existential nationalism in the form of Russia’s war for wider public recognition that Ukraine is simply
Ukraine, not the Ukraine – as if Ukraine is not a sovereign state but an existentially tethered vassal
of Russia. As Bilocerkowycz and Khromeychuk (2022) suggest: “It took thirty years of independence,
eight years of war in the east, and several days of heavy shelling this past month for the Western
media to stop saying ‘the Ukraine”’.
In sum, existential nationalism provides the tools to understand the stakes of the conict that
concepts like ethnic and civic nationalism, imperial nationalism, and ethno-imperialist nationalism, fall
short in capturing. Existential nationalism allows us to capture both sides of the dyad: the claims of
the invader, and their willingness to decimate whatever the costs, and the mobilizational capacity of
the state and citizens of the polity under invasion. More specically, Ukraine is ghting to be free from
a version of itself that Russia desires and existentially requires, a state that is politically and culturally
plural, and territorially free and integral.
1. Ukraine citizens place this mobilisational capacity as the second most important reason (59%), behind the armed
forces (65%), that Ukraine is likely to secure victory against Russia, ahead of western military support (58%) or sanctions
(50%, Gradus Research Company 2022). Meanwhile, in addition to 3% of Ukrainian citizens in the army, 39% have reported
they are volunteering in the army; these gures are even higher for those aged 18-35 (46% and 6% respectively, Reiting
2022).
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4 Nationalism Studies and the Study of Ukraine
To conclude, I want to shi attention to the importance of reversing the peripheral position of Ukraine
and Ukrainian scholars in nationalism studies, to demonstrate also how the existential nature of the
context prior to the war has eects on knowledge production. Not only has Ukraine been marginalised
in the broader study of nationalism,2so have the voices of Ukrainian scholars themselves. In its 27
year history, Nations and Nationalism has only published a handful of articles by Ukrainian scholars
(Szporluk 1998; Kulyk 2011; Mokrushyna 2013; Kozachenko 2021; Kulyk and Hale 2021). For example,
Kulyk (2011) exposed through Ukraine the importance of understanding what a linguistically diverse
society looks like as a new and important way to study political attitudes by disaggregating between
“language practice” (i.e. languages used in daily life) and “language identity”.
My point is not to chastise a journal which can only publish articles that are submitted and pass
peer review. But, as Rory Finnin argued – in the wake of the Euro 2012 football championship co-hosted
by Poland and Ukraine and two years before Russia annexed Crimea – Ukraine is Europe’s “terra
malegcognita” (Finnin 2012). For too long, we have side-lined the case of Ukraine within nationalism
studies and concurrently the perspectives of those who know about and understand this case most
profoundly.
Ukraine is a state of 40 million people. In area, Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe
aer Russia. Ukraine’s economy was the 40th largest in the world in 2021. Ukraine’s peripheralisation,
politically and intellectually, for the last 30 years makes no sense. Analysing Ukrainian nationalism
through the lens of Russia’s existential interpretation is also insucient. In other words, it is also time
to turn inwards and understand the scholarly eects of Russian existential nationalism, which play out
not only in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These dynamics also play a role in reproducing knowledge
hierarchies that privilege which sovereign states are studied over others, which voices matter, and
what kinds of knowledge are produced and privileged in the rst place. We can create a better and
more equal future.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this article to all Ukrainian campuses and libraries that were bombed by the Russian army,
to all Ukrainian students, scholars, and citizens who are displaced, and refugees.
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