The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict can be analyzed as a result of the unfinished disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the same time, one of the most visible consequences of the tragic events in Ukraine since 2013-14 is a change in Ukrainian national identity. People's identities and attitudes towards identity issues, language, and political preferences changed in the course of the conflict and as a direct result of it. This presentation attempts to capture the dynamics of identity change after the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine and the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Based on the analysis of opinion polls, it shows how traumatic and nostalgic memory function in the Ukrainian public imagination and how these phenomena affect identity issues.
Dr. Oleksii Polegkyi is a Bayduza Post-doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and a member of the Political Communication Research Unit at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He was previously a research fellow at the Graduate Institute of Russian Studies, National Chengchi University (Taiwan), and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK, Hungary). Oleksii earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Wrocław (Poland) and the University of Antwerp.