Before and after 2014: Russo-Ukrainian conflict and its impact on European identity discourses in Ukraine

ABSTRACT While the war in Ukraine undoubtedly boosted Ukrainian national identification and prompted rapid alienation from Russia, another salient identity question prominent since Ukraine’s independence has been the country’s belonging to Europe, often challenged by the alternatives of Eurasian and Slavic supranational identities. This article explores different identity constructions in the Ukrainian national mass media and their interpretation of the war with Russia from the dawn of the conflict in 2014 to 2015. Respectively, the article maps immediate developments in the content and contestation of the European identity discourse as the crisis hits these identity constructions. This study found that the war has dramatically strengthened the influence of the identity construction that fully embraced Europeanness while increasingly muting its alternatives. In contrast, identity content was less prone to change; this significant decrease in contestation evidences the robust effect of ‘big-bang’ events in identity discourses.