“Political action always presupposes the distinction between friend and enemy.” — Carl Schmitt
Some Ukrainians, scarred by the trauma of war, say: “We will never again have anything to do with Russians.” But many also recall the experience of the 1920s–30s, when Poles carried out a cultural genocide against Ukrainians in Galicia.
This later led to a response — a real and bloody genocide committed by Ukrainians in the 1940s, known as the Volhynia Massacre or Volhynian Tragedy. Yet since 1991, every Ukrainian president has visited Western Ukraine or Poland to offer apologies, calling the events a “tragedy.”
In turn, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland received nearly a million Ukrainian refugees.
I want to highlight that the preconditions for such bloody or any other kind of conflict disappeared the moment both sides replaced their grand ideological goals with more grounded objectives. For Western Ukrainians, this meant continuing the struggle against the USSR; for Poland, it meant building its own state and resisting socialist influence.
I call this outcome a positivist resolution of conflict.
In this essay, normativism for me is a model of identity built on an ideological imperative: to be Ukrainian means to meet a certain established moral standard. Such identity demands loyalty, obedience and excludes inner complexity.
In contrast, the positivist model — in a broad philosophical sense — is a way of viewing culture through facts and lived experience. A positive identity emerges when a nation relies not on propaganda, but on historical reality and its own moral achievements (such as reconciliation with Poland). It is grounded in what already exists and calls not for erasure, but for reflection.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
Since 2022, all of Ukraine has entered a new phase of deep conflict with Russia. Missiles have reached even the most western regions. Active warfare in the east has pushed millions of refugees into the west. As a result, there is no region in Ukraine untouched by Russian attacks or lacking in displaced people from the eastern oblasts. Informationally and emotionally, Ukrainians across the country have been equally subjected to the fear and danger coming from Russia.
Out of this trauma emerged a belief: “We will never again have a good relationship with Russia.” A new kind of identity has formed: “Everything Russian is evil — the opposite of us.”
And yet it’s quite likely that, over time, today’s conflict could follow the Polish scenario of reconciliation. But how will the restoration of economic and cultural relations with Russia — after the war — be perceived through the lens of Ukrainian identity? One that has already absorbed the narrative that all things Russian are the enemy? Will this truly help unite Ukrainians within a positivist model — one that acknowledges that Ukrainians are millions of people with diverse histories and origins?
Can millions of people say something good about their childhoods, if those childhoods took place in Soviet schools and in the Russian language? Or is that right reserved only for the few who stood out from the system and spoke Ukrainian at the time? Can millions of citizens be proud of their grandparents who served in the Red Army during World War II? Or is pride reserved only for those whose grandfathers fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the USSR?
Can Identity Be Built on the Trauma of War?
The trauma of war offers only the normativist model, where a person must break themselves to match the broken standard of the collective. Otherwise, they risk becoming a “white crow” — an outcast — perceived as a traitor in wartime. This plays out most personally in the rejection of one’s native Russian language, or the church where one was baptized, simply because that church belongs to the largest religious institution in Ukraine — one that historically has links to Russia.
In the end, what we have is not identity, but an anxious shell — a set of expectations that suppress the true “I” for the sake of conformity. This state of being makes society appear unified from the outside, but internally fragmented. People lose the ability to speak honestly about themselves. They fear being themselves. They fear the memory of the culture that shaped them. Creativity disappears — potential dies out.
This is not the unification of a nation — it is its mummification in fear.
How Can We Reinterpret the Past and Enter a Positivist Identity?
The positivist model, by contrast, starts with the principle: “Do not be a hostage of trauma,” with ideas like: “Don’t build a nation on fear” and “Don’o’t break yourself because of the image of an enemy.”
In the end, what we have is not identity, but an anxious shell — a set of expectations that suppress the true ‘I’ for the sake of conformity.
Ukrainians must cast the enemy out of themselves — so that fighting the enemy is no longer the foundation of identity. They must examine which values are most emotionally tied to the struggle against all things Russian. Only then can we develop a mindset of creation — one that will prove more effective even in war, including against Russian aggression.
And Ukrainian civil society must, having adopted the positivist model, remain tolerant of the fact that we are all different. Every region of Ukraine has its own history and its own culture — including linguistic and ethnic. And if Ukraine truly wants to be a European society, it must remember the core principle of Europe: “Unity in diversity.”
