Of Empires and Freedoms: Ukraine’s Place in the History of European Liberty

To understand Ukraine’s present struggle, one must situate her within the long, often brutal, history of European liberty. Ukraine is not a recent arrival to the stage of freedom; she is both a frontier and a crucible. For centuries, the great empires of Europe—Polish-Lithuanian, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian—have collided on her soil. She has endured their occupations, absorbed their cultures, resisted their control, and at times exploited their rivalries to secure moments of autonomy.

This historical position has given Ukraine a paradoxical heritage: she is shaped by imperial legacies yet animated by a deeply ingrained tradition of local self-government and resistance to centralised tyranny. In 2025, as she fights for survival against renewed Russian aggression, Ukraine’s role in the history of European liberty comes sharply into focus—not as an outlier, but as a custodian of values forged in centuries of struggle.

The Steppe Frontier and the Idea of Freedom

In the early modern period, Ukraine’s geography was both curse and blessing. Her vast, open plains offered no natural defensive barriers but gave rise to communities that valued mobility, autonomy, and martial skill. The Cossack Hetmanate, emerging in the 16th and 17th centuries, was perhaps the clearest expression of this frontier liberty. The Cossacks were not democrats in the modern sense, yet their rada—a council of warriors—embodied a form of collective decision-making unusual in an age of absolute monarchies.

The Hetmanate existed in a delicate balance between competing powers. It alternately allied with or resisted the Polish Crown, the Crimean Khanate, and Muscovy. This fluid diplomacy, born of necessity, cultivated a political instinct for leveraging imperial rivalries in pursuit of self-rule. Such instincts remain visible in Ukraine’s contemporary foreign policy: balancing alliances, extracting security guarantees, and seeking agency within larger geopolitical structures.

The Imperial Shadow

From the late 18th century, most of Ukraine fell under the control of the Russian Empire, while Galicia in the west became part of the Habsburg Monarchy. The imperial systems that governed these territories could not have been more different.

• Under the Tsars, Ukrainian culture was suppressed, the language marginalised, and political life subordinated to autocratic rule.

  
  

• Under the Habsburgs, though still imperial, local institutions in Galicia enjoyed limited autonomy, and Ukrainian-language publishing and political organisation were permitted to flourish.

These divergent experiences created a split historical memory. In the west, the idea of liberty was tied to legal rights, political organisation, and gradual national awakening. In the east, liberty was defined more sharply against an autocratic state—freedom as resistance, not reform. The tension between these traditions continues to shape Ukraine’s political culture.

Revolution and National Aspiration

The collapse of empires in the wake of the First World War offered Ukraine a fleeting opportunity for independence. Between 1917 and 1921, a series of governments—the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, the Directorate—struggled to define a Ukrainian state while fighting off Bolsheviks, White Russians, Poles and anarchists. The failure of this independence movement was not due to lack of will, but to the overwhelming weight of hostile neighbours and the absence of sustained Western support.

Nonetheless the idea of Ukraine as a sovereign European nation did not vanish. It persisted in the diaspora, in cultural movements, and in the collective memory of resistance to imperial control. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine’s independence was as much the recovery of a historical ideal as it was a political birth.

Ukraine in the European Liberty Tradition

Liberty in Europe has never been evenly distributed. The Netherlands in the 17th century, Britain after 1688, France after 1789, Central Europe after 1989—all have had their moments of liberation, followed by periods of reaction or compromise. Ukraine’s contribution to this tradition is distinctive in two ways:

1. She stands as a frontier between autocracy and democracy—geographically and ideologically. From the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s elective monarchy to the NATO alliance’s eastern flank, Ukraine has repeatedly been the edge at which systems of governance confront one another.

   
   

2. Her concept of liberty is inseparable from self defence. For Ukraine, freedom is not an abstract civic condition but a lived reality won and lost on the battlefield. It is measured in the survival of communities, the preservation of language, and the right to decide political allegiance.

In this sense, Ukraine has always been both a beneficiary of and a contributor to European liberty. Her survival strengthens the continent’s democratic fabric; her defeat would darken it.

The Present War as Historical Continuum

Russia’s 2022 invasion was not a departure from history but its latest chapter. The Kremlin’s claims—denying Ukraine’s sovereignty, appropriating her history, attempting to erase her language—echo Tsarist and Soviet policies. What is new is Ukraine’s capacity to resist and her integration into a European security and political system.

This resistance is itself part of the broader European story. Just as Polish uprisings in the 19th century inspired liberal movements elsewhere, Ukraine’s defiance today has reinforced NATO’s cohesion, revived debate on European rearmament, and reminded complacent democracies that liberty requires sacrifice.

The Future: Ukraine as a Pillar, Not a Periphery

Should Ukraine prevail, she will not return to the margins of European politics. The war has cemented her role as a pillar of continental security. Her experience in asymmetric warfare, mobilisation of civil society, and integration of digital governance under fire may well influence the next generation of European policy-making.

More profoundly, Ukraine’s survival would reaffirm a principle often forgotten in times of peace: that liberty is not a natural state of affairs but a hard-won achievement, vulnerable to erosion and conquest. In this sense, Ukraine’s war is not only for her territory but for the very idea of Europe as a space of free nations.

Custodians of the Frontier

Ukraine’s place in the history of European liberty is neither accidental nor peripheral. It is the result of centuries spent at the meeting point of empires, where freedom has always been provisional, conditional, and worth fighting for. Her current struggle continues that tradition, binding her fate to that of Europe’s democratic project.

If liberty has a frontier in the twenty-first century, it runs through the trenches of Donbas and the streets of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. And on that frontier, Ukraine stands—at once Europe’s sentinel and her reminder of what freedom demands.