Abstract

The Ukrainian case is part of the broader debate on the role of the national factor and of ethnonationalism in the dissolution of the USSR. Its specificity is connected to the importance of this Republic for federal balances. The essay examines the role played by Ukraine in the negotiations promoted by Gorbachev to restore the USSR on a new basis, through a new treaty that would bind the republics that made up the Soviet Union in a federal relationship. “Without Ukraine, there will be no Unionµ: such was the opinion of both Yeltsin and Gorbachev, to which the latter would have added that “without the Union, there will be no Ukraine.µ The Ukrainian contribution to the failure of Gorbachev's project lay not so much in the independence referendum of 1 December 1991, but rather in the initially ambiguous and then adverse positions assumed by a part of the Ukrainian leadership in the negotiations, a behaviour that exhausted the negotiation process.