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4 OUR LIFE • August 2026 What the World Gets Wrong About Ukrainian Nationalism Vita Golod , Branch 113, New York City In early September 2025, more than 300 people gathered in central Kyiv to commemorate a fallen soldier — 19-year-old Darya (Dasha) Lopatina. Peo- ple from different chapters of Dasha’s short life filled the main hall of St. Michael’s Gold- en-Domed Monastery and the surrounding courtyard. A large part of the crowd consisted of her comrades from the 12th Special Forces Brigade, Azov — a unit that had once been based in Mariupol, the city lat - er erased by russian bombs. Dasha was a student at the Kyiv School of Economics when she voluntarily joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces and deliberately chose Azov. This decision matters because Azov has long been the cen- terpiece of russian propagan- da, portrayed as a neo-Nazi formation and used to dis - credit Ukraine internationally. Fighting Russian Propaganda Moscow has invested enormous resources in promoting this image, de- liberately conflating nationalism with Nazism. The young men and women from Azov who came directly from the front line to bid farewell to Dasha were highly patriotic — and many of them used to be russian speakers from the east of Ukraine, as Dasha herself had been. She was born in Kyiv and grew up in a russian-speaking family. Until 2021, she rarely spoke Ukrainian. Her grandfather, Mykhailo Lopatin, of Belarusian origin, was a Colonel General and the first com- mander of the newly established Air Defense Forces of independent Ukraine in 1995. Dasha’s choice to fight for Ukraine was neither ethnic nor linguistic. It was political and patriotic. In her view, Azov represented the most disciplined and committed military formation — one animated by a strong sense of Ukrainian national purpose. Nationalism is not an anomaly — it exists in every country. But in an era defined by war, uncertainty, and geopolitical rupture, it has returned to the center of global politics with renewed force. From Xi Jinping’s “Chi - nese Dream” to Donald Trump’s “America First,” Vladimir Putin’s “Rus - sian World” ( Русский мир ), and India’s Hindutva-inflected assertiveness, leaders across political systems increasingly deploy nationalist language to mobilize societies and reshape the international order. Yet nationalism is not a single phenomenon. Ukrainian nationalism has emerged as civic and defensive — grounded in self-determination and resistance to for - eign invasion. Russian nationalism, by contrast, has long been imperial and expansionist, sustained by civilizational myths that have repeatedly been used to justify coercion and violence, both at home and across its neighborhood. By publicly denying the legitimacy of a distinct Ukrainian national iden - tity in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin struck at the dignity of a large, politically self-aware nation. Rather than weakening Ukraine, this gesture proved catalytic: it transformed a long-contested identity debate into a matter of collective pride and sur - vival, triggering a surge of Ukrainian nationalism as a natural defensive response to external negation. History repeats itself. Every time the russian empire has sought to erase Ukrainian identity through assimilation, repression, violence, and mass killing, there have been Ukrainian nationalists who found the strength to resist. That resistance did not begin in 2014 with Putin’s war. Its roots run deep. In the nineteenth century, Ukrainian intellectuals and cultur - al figures — such as the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood — mobilized to defend Ukrainian language and culture against tsarist bans. Leaders of the nationalist movement at the turn of the nineteenth and twenti- eth centuries increasingly viewed the survival of the Ukrainian nation as dependent on the creation of “one, indivisible, free, and independent Ukraine,” placing “Ukraine above all” at the center of political govern - ance. From their perspective, any alternative — particularly incorpora- Dasha Lopatina
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