Abstract

This contribution, written by an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork both in Ukraine and Russia, urges readers to abandon the all too widespread notion of Ukraine as a «borderland». Since the fall of the USSR, the «borderland» trope and its synonyms have dominated Western storytelling about Ukraine, both within and without academia. Building on historiographic and anthropological reflections on the «invention of Eastern Europe» and the «denial of coevality», and in response to intellectual questions made very urgent by Russia’s war in Ukraine, these pages highlight the Westcentric, colonial, and (on Russia’s part) «imperist» prejudices inherent in such trope. Only superficially innocent, the «borderland» terminology perpetuates a hierarchic framing of European spaces – divided between subjects endowed with historical agency and not-quite-subjects bereft thereof – contributing to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the regional historical processes that culminated in the emergence of an independent Ukraine. This contribution does not downplay the constructedness of Ukrainian (or any other) borders, but invites its readers to take seriously the «imagined continuities» underpinning the country’s civic and administrative setup, the nuanced tapestry of stories overlapping across the Ukrainian geography, and the «value-making» dimension inherent in border-making in the context of a war of self-defense.