Tetiana Derkach, religious journalist, Editor-in-Chief of “Religion in Ukraine”

Critical analysis of the Law of Ukraine No. 2834-IX of 13 December 2022 “On the Basic Principles of State Policy in the Sphere of Consolidating Ukrainian National and Civic Identity” (hereinafter – the Identity Law) and the Strategy for Consolidating Ukrainian National and Civic Identity for the Period until 2030, approved by Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 1322 of 15 December 2023 (hereinafter – the Strategy).

I came across both documents almost by accident. Evidently, their adoption was not accompanied by any particularly broad public discussion, so they largely remained outside the attention of scholars and journalists. But when one reads them together, an interesting question arises: what exactly does the state understand by identity, and what exactly does it intend to do with it? The Law establishes the normative framework, while the Strategy turns it into a system of state planning, education, and performance indicators. It is this construction that is the subject of this analysis.

What Underlies the Law

The Identity Law rests on a rather specific normative framework. The key normative act that defines its substantive framework is the Law “On the Legal Status and Honouring the Memory of Fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the Twentieth Century.” But if one turns to the explanatory note to the draft law, one can see that it refers not to one “content-defining” law but to three of the four laws of the so-called “decommunisation package,” which the Verkhovna Rada adopted on the same day, 9 April 2015, and which were signed on the same day, 15 May, by then-President Petro Poroshenko near the end of his term:

• “On the Legal Status and Honouring the Memory of Fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the Twentieth Century” (314-VIII);

• “On Perpetuating the Victory over Nazism in the Second World War of 1939–1945” (315-VIII);

• “On the Condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and the Prohibition of Propaganda of Their Symbols” (317-VIII).

And this is where the first inconsistencies begin. At the time of its adoption, the package already contained an unresolved contradiction that expert discussion immediately identified. The preamble to the Decommunisation Law (317-VIII) condemns the communist totalitarian regime of the USSR as a co-culprit in the war that committed “crimes against humanity… crimes of genocide,” while Article 1.1 of the Law on Perpetuating the Victory (315-VIII) states: “Respectful treatment of the memory of the victory over Nazism… of war veterans, participants in the Ukrainian liberation movement, and victims of Nazism is the sacred duty of the state and citizens of Ukraine.” In other words, the Law honours “war veterans” alongside “participants in the liberation movement,” without acknowledging that Red Army veterans served precisely in the armed instrument of the regime that has just been condemned. This peculiar, perhaps underdeveloped, construction holds together only because the phrase “war veterans” is detached from the word “Soviet” — that is, are they no longer Soviet veterans? — although institutionally it is one and the same subject.

To clarify the status of Soviet detachments, let us turn to Law No. 3551-XII “On the Status of War Veterans” — still in force, with the latest amendments made in 2025 — which in Article 6 directly grants combatant status to:

• servicemen who served in military units, formations, headquarters, and institutions that were part of the active army during the Civil War and the Second World War, as well as during other combat operations in defence of the Motherland, and to partisans and underground fighters of the Civil War and the Second World War;
• commanding officers and rank-and-file personnel of the NKVD and KGB of the USSR — that is, precisely those “Soviet state security bodies” that Law No. 317-VIII of 2015 explicitly condemns by name as instruments of the totalitarian regime;
• former members of “destruction battalions” — Soviet paramilitary formations whose documented primary function in Western Ukraine in the 1944–1950s was precisely the struggle against “illegal formations” of the UPA; the law literally uses the wording “liquidation… of illegal formations and groups on the territory of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

So, are the punitive detachments of the NKVD no longer Soviet servants of the totalitarian regime?

From this follows the logical continuation of the same contradiction in the Law on Perpetuating the Victory (315-VIII): the three categories listed in Article 1.1 — war veterans, without distinction between branches of service within the Red Army; participants in the liberation movement, meaning the OUN-UPA; and victims of Nazism — are presented as equally significant objects of respectful commemoration. Yet the actual trajectories of UPA and Red Army veterans in the 1941–1950s did not merely diverge; they often intersected in brutal armed confrontation. Moreover, part of the OUN at the beginning of the war expected cooperation with Germany, while after 1944 the UPA conducted military operations against the Red Army and the NKVD — that is, against the very forces that the same law identifies as combatants and veterans of the Second World War. This conflict-generating dimension between two types of struggle — against Nazism and for independence — is nowhere addressed in the Identity Law.

This case fits very well into Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (Multidirectional Memory, 2009). He showed that the memories of different groups concerning traumatic experience may either compete for recognition — “competitive memory,” in which recognition of some victims is perceived as diminishing recognition of others — or be recognised as interconnected without hierarchy. The Ukrainian legislative package of 2015 effectively avoided choosing between these two models: it did not declare the memories competitive, which would have required choosing or ranking them, but neither did it construct a genuinely interconnected framework, which would have required explaining how the UPA and the Red Army could simultaneously be heroes of the same state. It simply placed both memories in neighbouring laws adopted on the same day and left the question of their relationship unarticulated.

Nevertheless, a certain hierarchy of historical memory emerges not through direct proclamation but through the very structure of the normative documents. It is telling that the explanatory note to the Identity Law refers to both cases — the victory over Nazism and the fighters for independence — while in the text of the Law itself, in Article 3 “Legal Basis,” only the second remains: the Law “On Perpetuating the Victory over Nazism” is entirely absent from the list. This is precisely the point at which the informal prioritisation of two memories becomes formal. The 2023 Strategy mentions the law on the victory over Nazism once again — in the list of legal acts — but its entire substantive architecture, including education and indicators, is built according to the logic of the law on fighters for independence.

What Exactly Is Called Identity

The key concepts of the Law are Ukrainian civic identity and Ukrainian national identity. Civic identity is defined as a stable awareness of one’s political and legal connection with Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, and civil society. National identity is defined as an awareness of belonging to the Ukrainian nation as a distinctive community united by name, symbols, geographic and ethno-social origin, historical memory, spiritual and cultural values, the Ukrainian language, and traditions. Thus, the Law proposes two different foundations of belonging: civic identity through a political and legal connection, and national identity through culture, history, language, and origin.

However, the classical understanding of identity in psychology is much broader than these two definitions. Erik Erikson, who introduced the concept into scientific circulation in the mid-twentieth century, wrote that a person’s identity consists of a sense of self across several different, mutually unrelated spheres at once: who I am professionally, in relationships, in faith, in my worldview, in creativity, and in my own body. None of these spheres is the single dominant one; a person is themselves through their sum, not through one selected axis. Likewise, in social psychology, a person’s identity is always a “bundle” of different simultaneous affiliations: to family, city, profession, religious community, nation — which simply carry different weight depending on the situation rather than competing for a single place. In other words, when the Law speaks of identity, it actually means a very narrow part of it, tailored to the specific tasks of wartime rather than to this entire spectrum, and thereby turns it into an object of state policy, into that very consolidating axis. The consequence of this architecture is defence consciousness, already mentioned above: “the conscious perception and readiness of a citizen to defend the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine… and the socio-state (national) values of Ukraine.” This is, in fact, the final product for which the entire chain is constructed: not the multidimensional “Who am I?” as identity science understands it, but a verified readiness to act in a particular way in a situation of threat.

It is especially telling that in the operational part of the Law the two concepts are almost constantly merged into the formula “national and civic identity.” In other words, the legislator distinguished them in the definitions but hardly distinguishes them when moving to practical policy. Hans Kohn (The Idea of Nationalism, 1944) distinguished between a Western, “contractual” type of nation — a community of law and citizenship, in which whoever subscribes to the constitution belongs to the nation — and an Eastern, “organic” type — a community of blood, language, and culture, into which one is born rather than enters. When both components coincide in one person, everything is straightforward. But neither the Law nor the Strategy explains what to do when they conflict: for example, when a citizen is loyal to the state, pays taxes, and is prepared to defend it, but has poor command of Ukrainian or belongs to a confession that part of society considers “suspicious.” The document simply remains silent on how such a situation should be treated. Such a person meets the civic marker but not the ethno-cultural one. The Law does not explain which of the two identities should have priority in such a situation, at least from the standpoint of the state.

What Goal Does the Law Pursue?

In light of what we have already analysed, this is an entirely logical question. Article 4 defines the goal of state policy as “achieving unity” in Ukrainian society by overcoming socio-cultural, linguistic, and regional contradictions, while simultaneously declaring human rights and the distinctiveness of national minorities. Here a fundamental question arises: should the differences themselves be overcome, or the conflicts between them? The Law simultaneously provides for the formation of a common Ukrainian identity, patriotism, respect for the state language and national values, and the safeguarding of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious distinctiveness of different communities. Thus, two potential models of unity are present here: an integrative model, in which different groups preserve their distinctiveness while belonging to one political community, and a consolidating model, in which unity is achieved through a common system of national values and identity. Yet the Law does not explain how exactly these models are supposed to relate to one another.

The problem becomes clearer if we look at what exactly the Law proposes to form. Civic position, patriotism, defence consciousness, and respect for state symbols are to be cultivated among citizens in general, while national identity is to be formed primarily among those who already recognise their belonging to the Ukrainian nation. Article 5 names national-patriotic education, military-patriotic education, and civic education as the principal instruments. Moreover, this entire chain ultimately leads to readiness to defend the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Far less attention is given to other functions of civic identity — trust, mutual recognition, dialogue, the ability to reach agreement and work together for the common good — that is, the living cables that hold Ukrainian society together.

Article 6 reinforces this logic even further. Unity, distinctiveness, freedom, and dignity are defined as “consolidating factors” of identity, and their content is largely framed through Ukrainian history, culture, the struggle for independence, and statehood values. Values themselves function here not only as principles of social life but as an instrument for the formation of identity. Identity therefore gradually changes from a description of who people consider themselves to be into a means of forming a certain type of citizen — patriotic, loyal to the state, and ready to defend it.

Education as a Means of Forming Identity

Articles 8–9 of the Law show that by the formation of Ukrainian national and civic identity the Law primarily means organised national-patriotic education. A broad range of institutions are involved in this process — public authorities, educational institutions, civil society organisations, and other bodies. Identity appears not only as a person’s awareness of their own belonging but as the result of deliberate educational influence. Moreover, this influence has specific content: patriotism, national values, historical memory, defence consciousness, and readiness to defend the state.

Here the very emphasis of the concept of “identity” changes. The state is not so much creating conditions for its free development as determining the desired content and reproducing it through a system of education. Civic education is closely linked here with patriotic and military-patriotic education. As a result, civic identity can easily be reduced to loyalty, patriotism, and readiness to fulfil one’s duty to the state.

The construction of the concept of “defence consciousness” is particularly revealing. In the Law, this means a citizen’s conscious perception and readiness to defend Ukraine’s independence, territorial integrity, and socio-state values. The word “identity” in the definitions of the types of education effectively appears only where it is connected with the formation of defence consciousness or the ability to preserve identity under external influence. Thus, once again, the document’s underlying idea is the need to form the human person as a mobilisation resource.

The Law creates an extensive system of institutions through which the state can deliberately shape identity, values, civic attitudes, and behavioural orientations among citizens. In other words, this is no longer merely about protecting Ukrainian identity but about constructing a particular model of social consciousness that various institutions are expected to reproduce. It is precisely this tendency toward the unification of social consciousness that is most problematic, because the Ukrainian political and cultural tradition has historically been characterised more by a plurality of identities, local communities, and forms of self-organisation, than by a single centrally defined system of values. At the same time, such a model is much closer to the imperial tradition, in which the state seeks not simply to unite society but to create for it a single normative image of the “correct” consciousness.

Between Formation and Consolidation

As already noted above, the document treats identity as a set of fixed content that people lack and that the state must transmit to them through education, information, and “consolidation.” The word “consolidate” is clearly a favourite of the authors, because it is repeated hundreds of times throughout the text and carries a very specific connotation: not coordination, not dialogue, but the establishment of ready-made content as a fact. This is closer to essentialism — the idea that a nation has an unchanging, predetermined core. But, paradoxically, from a rhetorical point of view the document constantly demonstrates the opposite, constructivist approach, frequently using the word “formation.” The authors of the text do not see any contradiction between “to consolidate” and “to form,” which is strange. These are two different approaches: “to form” means that the content has not yet been determined and emerges in the process itself, while “to consolidate” means that it already exists and merely awaits official confirmation. Thus, in practice, the mechanics of the process are as follows: on the one hand, the implementers are ambitiously prepared to stick a label on a result that does not yet exist; on the other hand, they honestly admit that the content of identity will be assembled as the play proceeds from whatever happens to be at hand for the implementer, according to budgetary possibilities and the tasks of the reporting quarter.

The authors of the Law failed to take into account that in the scholarly literature the nation has long ceased to be treated as a substance that can simply be “consolidated.” Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983), in particular, described an alternative: the nation is an imagined community, a construct that is continuously renegotiated in the minds of millions of people who will never meet personally, through shared narratives and media — rather than a substance that can be “consolidated” once and for all by decree, poured over with epoxy resin for added durability.

Closer to the rhetoric of the document is Anthony Smith’s ethno-symbolism (The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986; National Identity, 1991): the nation rests on a symbolic core — myths of origin, heroes, sacred territories, and language. The Law indeed builds its content around such a core: state symbols, the history of the struggle for independence, and language as an “attribute.” The problem is that Smith described this core as historically inherited and slowly changing, not as something that can be “formed” through planned measures within a specified period. The methodological gap between the chosen theory of the nation — essentially essentialist — and the chosen instrument — a managerial programme with key performance indicators — is a structural defect running throughout both the Law and the Strategy.

How the State Measures the Result

Article 12 ultimately reveals what exactly is considered a result. The effectiveness of the policy is associated with increased pride in Ukrainian origin and citizenship, command of the Ukrainian language, consumption of national-patriotic cultural products, participation in relevant projects, and readiness to defend Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity with arms. The indicators even include migration decisions — fewer people should leave Ukraine permanently and more should return. By contrast, trust between citizens, the ability of different groups to reach agreement, a sense of justice, or participation in developing shared decisions are not treated as central criteria. One can therefore conclude that the authors of the Law have little understanding of what the distinctive features of Ukrainian identity actually consist in, particularly the specific cultural imprint that lies at its foundation.

This is why the Law establishes a consolidating model with a very narrow unifying framework: the state defines a system of values, forms the corresponding civic consciousness through education, and evaluates its success through changes in citizens’ behaviour and loyalty. The integrative component — human rights, the distinctiveness of minorities, and civic belonging — is formally present but is far less developed as a practical mechanism of unity.

Thus, the evaluation system itself confirms the previous conclusion: the success of the policy is measured primarily by the extent to which society becomes more nationally identified, patriotic, and ready to defend the state, rather than by the extent to which it becomes capable of living together in its diversity.

The Identity Consolidation Strategy until 2030

In 2023, in implementation of the Law, the Cabinet of Ministers approved the Strategy for the period until 2030. It is intended to transform the legislative framework into a concrete system: it defines a vision, a goal, four areas of work, success indicators, and an operational action plan. Unlike the Law, the Strategy no longer merely speaks about identity but creates an infrastructure for its formation — personnel, coordination councils, structural units, and a network of implementers.

What the Person of the Future Should Be Like

The vision of the Strategy describes the future Ukraine as a state inhabited by socially active and responsible citizens with consolidated Ukrainian national and civic identity based on socio-state values. They live in a state integrated into the European and Euro-Atlantic space, where rights and freedoms are guaranteed and socio-cultural, linguistic, and regional “contradictions have been overcome.”

The goal is formulated even more directly: the “formation and consolidation” of national and civic identity through national-patriotic education, military-patriotic education, and civic education based on four values — distinctiveness, freedom, unity, and dignity. Thus, the Strategy continues the logic of the Law almost word for word.

The document establishes four areas of work:

1. education and culture themselves — events, cultural products, media literacy;
2. cooperation between the authorities and civil society organisations — more on the scale of this cooperation below;
3. personnel training — specialists and “educators”;
4. infrastructure — coordination councils, structural units, and local centres.

The Three Stages of Implementing the Strategy

The document divides seven years into three periods, but in practice there is no difference in substantive content — only in the scale of coverage. In other words, the phases are not qualitatively different; the only difference is how many people or activities are involved. This is how the authors envisage these stages, the first of which has already passed:

2023–2025 — “launch”: implement the first action plan and begin developing personnel and infrastructure.

2026–2028 — “deployment”: the same, but more systematically and with an initial assessment of what has worked.

2029–2030 — “summing up”: evaluate the results and write the next strategy.

Thus, these are not three different phases of the state of society — for example, “active war” → “ceasefire” → “reconstruction,” with different psychological and social needs in each phase — but three bureaucratic planning cycles identical in their internal logic, merely stretched over time. The document silently assumes that society will follow the same route and require the same instruments regardless of what is happening at the front. This is, one must say, a very bold approach to strategic planning.

The success indicators by which one can judge whether the Strategy has worked are purely quantitative:

• “each year at least 1.5 per cent of persons are covered by activities and projects”;
• “at least 25 coordination councils have been established”;
• “each year at least 0.5 per cent of the population is covered by projects… implemented by civil society institutions”;
• “each year approximately 120 persons take part in activities… through non-formal education.”

This measures the process — how many people formally passed through an activity — rather than the outcome — whether their consciousness actually changed.

This is the classic trap known as Goodhart’s Law — Charles Goodhart, 1975: when a measure becomes a target in itself, it ceases to be a reliable measure of what it was intended to measure. An agency required to report that “1.5 per cent have been reached” will be incentivised to conduct a formal mass event simply to tick the box — and this will be entirely sufficient to fulfil the plan, regardless of whether any of the participants actually reconsidered anything.

Another revealing point is that in the lists of bodies responsible for implementing each item, ministries always appear first, while research institutions and civil society organisations almost always appear last, accompanied by the note “subject to consent.”

This architecture directly communicates the following: the state is the subject that determines the content, while civil society is an invited partner expected to agree to join an already prepared plan rather than co-author its content.

Let us now examine the logic and coherence of individual cases.

Multiple Frontiers: Unification vs Integration

The analytical section of the document itself provides data on regional heterogeneity — and immediately interprets it as “contradictions that must be overcome.” This requires a methodological pause. Historically, Ukraine is not a monocentric territory with a single “correct” centre of identity, but a space of overlapping frontier zones: Galicia, with its Austro-Hungarian and Polish institutional heritage and Greek Catholicism; the Dnipro region, with its Russian imperial administrative heritage; Donbas, with its Soviet industrial identity; the South and Crimea, with Crimean Tatar and settler layers; Transcarpathia, with its Hungarian minority; and so on. Timothy Snyder (The Reconstruction of Nations, 2003) documents how, on this same territory, several distinct national projects coexisted and competed for centuries — and none of them was a “false” version of a single correct one.

The key scholarly distinction missing from the document is between unification — when a group abandons its own distinct identity in favour of the dominant one — and integration — when a group preserves its distinctiveness and simultaneously participates fully in the broader community. This is John Berry’s acculturation model (Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation, 1997). Empirically, integration consistently produces better indicators of psychological well-being and social cohesion than forced unification, which instead increases the risk of hidden resistance and separation.

Judging by the language of “overcoming contradictions” and the single set of indicators applied to the entire country, the Strategy tends precisely toward unification: one model to which regions are expected to “catch up,” without recognising that the path toward shared civic loyalty may be different in different regions. But there must still be some model — at least in the minds of the Strategy’s authors. The question then is: which “ideal” region are they planning to make everyone else resemble? This is particularly important for Ukrainian society, where a plurality of identities is not a deviation from the norm. The Ukrainian political community was formed precisely through the overlapping of different historical, linguistic, cultural, and religious experiences. The task of the state, therefore, might consist not in eliminating this plurality but in creating a framework in which it does not hinder shared civic belonging.

Language as a Stress Test for the Resilience of Identity

The language case clearly demonstrates the difference between formal compliance with requirements and the genuine internalisation of identity. The Strategy cites data from 2021–2022 — the increase in the use of Ukrainian at home from 64 per cent to 71 per cent and the decline in the use of Russian by almost 10 per cent — as evidence of an “effect of symbolic rejection, conscious self-identification of the population as Ukrainians through language.” More recent data present a more complex and less reassuring picture.

According to a report by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology covering the dynamics from 1997 to 2026, the share of those who consider it necessary to use Ukrainian exclusively in all spheres of life rose from 18 per cent in 1997 to 66 per cent in 2024 — but in 2026 it slightly declined to 65 per cent. Language activist Taras Shamaida, one of the authors of the law on the state language, said directly in December 2025 that “there is more Russian language than there was in 2022,” while clarifying that this does not mean a return to the pre-war level of 2021, but rather a noticeable reversal compared with the peak of 2022–2023.

Even more revealing is a recent survey conducted by the Kyiv City Council among students in grades 8–12 in May 2026, with 6,712 participants. According to the results, 95 per cent of teachers speak predominantly or exclusively Ukrainian during lessons — the formal educational process is fully Ukrainian-speaking. But immediately after the bell, the situation changes: 32.3 per cent of students speak predominantly or exclusively Russian during breaks, and 33.3 per cent do so among friends outside school. The researchers themselves called this the “break-time effect”: Ukrainian has won the classroom but has not yet won the corridor — it is the language of the textbook, but not always yet the language of jokes and friendship. Among the barriers, students identified not ideological resistance but everyday inertia: habit, 62.6 per cent; a Russian-speaking family environment, 46.7 per cent; and the absence of a Ukrainian-speaking environment, 37 per cent.

Herbert Kelman’s model from 1958 is relevant here. It distinguishes three mechanisms of behavioural change under social influence:

• compliance — a person conforms in order to avoid disapproval and returns to previous behaviour once supervision disappears;
• identification — behaviour is sustained by the desire to belong to a group;
• internalisation — the new behaviour becomes part of one’s own convictions regardless of supervision.

The “break-time effect” is a textbook example of compliance: children speak Ukrainian under the teacher’s supervision and return to their habitual language as soon as that supervision disappears. This contradicts the Strategy’s own formulation about “conscious identification” — that is, internalisation. The Strategy described the process of 2022 in the language of stable conviction, while more recent data increasingly resemble situational conformity to social pressure, which by definition is less stable.

The same report by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology records an increase in the share of people who personally know of cases of pressure over the use of Russian in everyday life. Here it is important to distinguish two different things: the sociologically documented perception of pressure by respondents and the legally established fact of systematic persecution. The first is confirmed by the survey; the second is a separate and politically charged question.

A comparison with the 2019 language strategy, “A Strong Language – A Successful State,” reveals the same logic. The title itself establishes an instrumental framework: language is valuable not in itself but as a means to achieve a “successful state.” The formulation of the goal almost literally repeats that of the Identity Strategy: “consolidation… throughout the entire territory,” without regional differentiation. The contradiction with practice is revealing: Shamaida himself insists on the opposite, arguing that Odesa and the South require separate, intensified attention because propaganda is specifically directed there. The practitioner speaks the language of a differentiated approach; the Strategy is written in the language of uniform coverage.

The Religious Case: Not Silence, but Suspicion

What surprised me was that the word “religion” does not appear even once in the text of the document, although there is one reference to faith, and it is highly revealing. The analytical section states: “Within the ideological concept of the ‘Russian World,’ a narrative was promoted among the Ukrainian population about an ‘inseparable unity’ with the ‘brotherly people,’ a shared history, the Russian language, culture, and the Orthodox faith.”

Thus, the only place in the entire document where Orthodoxy is mentioned at all is in a list of instruments of hostile propaganda. The authors do not write that “religion is an important resource for the consolidation of society that must be protected from external manipulation”; for some reason, they place the Orthodox faith alongside the “brotherly people” and “shared history” as a component of a narrative manipulated by the aggressor. This is not a neutral absence of the topic but a specific, albeit unarticulated, framework: faith appears here as a vulnerability, a channel of influence, rather than as an asset on which society can rely.

As a consequence, the Strategy offers no separate mechanism for millions of believers whose religious identity cannot be reduced to an instrument of someone else’s influence. Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) documents that religious communities are among the most powerful generators of social capital, trust, and mutual assistance in any society. To ignore this resource — or, even more, to view it primarily as a threat — is to lose a ready-made institutional channel of consolidation. Compare this with international experience in reconciling divided communities — the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, where religious-confessional division was a structural rather than secondary factor in the conflict, and where mechanisms of reconciliation were therefore built around recognition of both identities simultaneously rather than the “consolidation” of one of them.

Whose Fears Does This Reflect?

The anxiety underlying the document is not imaginary: 34 per cent of the population in the East and South in 2022 still identified themselves as citizens of the former USSR. This is a documented vulnerability actively exploited by the propaganda of the aggressor state. In this sense, the securitisation of identity — that is, the description of a social phenomenon in the language of existential threat rather than ordinary social policy, in the terms of the Copenhagen School, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, 1998 — is not a paranoid exaggeration here.

This is not my interpretation. It is literally the first sentence of the relevant law: it defines the principles of policy “as a component of ensuring the national security of Ukraine.” In other words, securitisation here is not an analytical framework imposed from outside but a direct legislative premise written into the preamble. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that the Strategy led to the adoption of only one subordinate regulatory act — the Concept of Military-Patriotic Education in the System of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, approved by Ministry of Defence Order No. 554 of 14 August 2024. Thus, the only practical, traceable consequence of the Strategy on “identity” is a departmental military document.

But there is also another, purely institutional dimension. The architecture of the document itself — coordination councils, structural units, positions for “identity consolidation specialists” — creates an apparatus that will have its own institutional interest in reproducing and “multiplying” itself regardless of actual effectiveness. William Niskanen (Bureaucracy and Representative Government, 1971) described this as the tendency of bureaucracies to maximise budgets and staffing rather than outcomes: when the success indicator is the “number of activities” and the “number of councils established,” the apparatus is incentivised to report on the process rather than on the effect. It is also revealing that the very same template — “consolidation… throughout the entire territory… until 2030,” three stages identical in logic, and coordination councils under local authorities — is repeated almost word for word in both the 2019 language strategy and this one. This is more indicative of a replicated bureaucratic template of strategic planning, independently applied by different agencies to fundamentally different, living, and non-linear social processes, than of a solution individually designed for a specific problem.

And What About the “Predecessors”?

Incidentally, as follows from the Explanatory Note, the current policy did not arise from nothing. It had already been preceded by the 2019 Strategy of National-Patriotic Education, its Implementation Plan for 2020–2025, and the State Targeted Social Programme of National-Patriotic Education until 2025. At the same time, the 2019 Strategy had already identified national-patriotic education as one of the priority areas of state and public activity and rested on the same four values — distinctiveness, freedom, unity, and dignity. Thus, before adopting the new Law and the 2023 Strategy, the state had already gone through a four-year strategic and programme cycle intended to achieve very similar objectives. It is all the more revealing that the 2019 Strategy ceased to be in force only in September 2024, while the 2020–2025 Plan and the 2021–2025 Programme remained in force during the relevant periods and continued to be amended. Therefore, before proposing a new system for the “consolidation of identity” until 2030, it would be logical to ask a simple question: what were the results of the previous policy, which of its goals were achieved, which were not, and why? Is the new Strategy genuinely a new policy, or is it in fact a continuation of the previous model without a comprehensive evaluation of it?

But that is precisely the problem: no consolidated public report on the implementation of these documents exists. The result is a pattern typical of this entire body of documents: each new strategy begins not with an evaluation of the previous one, but with a blank slate.

Conclusion

The strongest parts of the Law and the Strategy are those where they rely on tested mechanisms: media literacy as a policy area has a solid empirical basis, as does investment in shared unifying institutions, which generally reduces intergroup favouritism statistically. The weakest parts are those that fail to account for the fact that the mobilisation logic of wartime does not work in the post-war period and can sometimes operate in the opposite, or even destructive, direction.

Both documents confuse the acute mobilisation needs of wartime with the long-term architecture of identity, measure process instead of outcomes, consistently choose unification over integration where regional and linguistic diversity are concerned, and treat the religious identity of millions of people as a vulnerability that can only be secured rather than as a resource on which society can rely. The language case of 2025–2026 is particularly revealing here. This is no longer a hypothetical risk but real-time data: what the Strategy described in 2023 as a completed and stable process is, in fact, still ongoing and, judging by the “break-time effect” and the partial reversal, may develop in a very different and less stable direction than its authors anticipated.