Ukraine

Ukraine made significant progress on Representative Government and Checks on Government in the years after the 2004 Orange Revolution, but progress has varied throughout subsequent political turmoil. The last five years have seen progress on these measures, but a decline in Impartial Administration and the Judicial Independence since 2019, reflecting controversial handling of reforms of judicial, electoral, and anti-corruption institutions by presidents Poroshenko and Zelenskyy. Broad-based efforts to improve the everyday functioning of government and fight corruption have been hampered by the often-countervailing force of strong patrimonial structures centred around powerful oligarchs or local power brokers, visible in the divergent trajectories of the Absence of Corruption and Predictable Enforcement scores.

Ukraine is commonly characterized as having a “pro-Russian” versus “pro-Western” cleavage, but in practice these terms are reductive. Although ethnicity, language, social class, and geography are strong drivers of the country’s political cleavages, they have not cleanly or consistently divided Ukraine into a Russophone, Slavicizing east and a Ukrainian-speaking, Europhile west. Together, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians make up over 90 percent of the population, with Belarusians, Moldovans, and Crimean Tatars making up the largest remaining minorities.

In practice, ethnic and linguistic boundaries in Ukraine are blurred, bilingualism is near-universal, and large swathes of rural and suburban Ukraine rely on a Ukrainian-Russian creole known as surzhyk. Arguments over the relative status of the Russian and Ukrainian languages has been a frequent rallying point in national politics, but this discourse is just as often a proxy for other concerns about unemployment, inequality, the distribution of national resources, and corruption. The 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and subsequent Russian invasion triggered an ongoing renegotiation of Ukraine’s sense of national identity, the outcome of which remains uncertain.

On February 24, 2022, just short of seven years after it annexed the Crimean peninsula and fostered a paramilitary war in the country’s eastern Donbas region, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time of writing in March 2022, roughly one-quarter of the population had left the country as refugees or were internally displaced. The indiscriminate violence and civilian toll of the 2022 Russian invasion has only accelerated the formation of a new Ukrainian identity development and previous frameworks for understanding the country may be in the process of becoming obsolete.

Should the east-west divide cease to remain the main national cleavage, consolidated local patrimonial structures will remain a dominant political force. These structures are likely to prove quite durable, as their presence does not necessarily correlate with dissatisfaction in the provision of public goods or decreased trust in local authorities, and in some cases is indicative of the opposite.

Freedom of expression has declined in recent years, a consequence of both the government’s efforts to combat disinformation and pro-Russian propaganda, and issues with bringing those responsible for even the high-profile murders of activists and investigative journalists to justice. Political pluralism has declined from its Orange Revolution highs, and could be further impacted by the suspension of eleven political parties by President Zelenskyy on the grounds of possible “diversion or collusion” with the Russian state in March 2022.

With the noted exception of access to justice, these efforts represent wartime calculations by a democratically elected government, and may or may not be indicative of the country’s future post-war development. The short- and long-term democratic trajectory of Ukraine will be heavily influenced by the outcome of the ongoing war and the nature of the final settlement.