SUMMARY:

Yaroslav Hrytsak places the Ukrainian Euromaidan in the context of the “revolutionary cluster” of the global 2010s. He shows how narratives about the Euromaidan have been framed by and reduced to nationalist tropes and imagery and he calls for the productive application of a global framework to Ukrainian history. He also considers Putin’s memory wars and explicates the futility of fighting them. While deconstructing the understanding of Ukraine by Russia’s political elites since the time of Gorbachev, Hrytsak argues that one should analyze divergence in political traditions rather than linguistic and ethnic identities as the key to Ukrainianness. The essay concludes with a discussion of how the “Ukrainian question” appears in global contexts, both historical and philosophical, and how this perspective defines the content of Ukrainian history.