Thirty-Five Years of Independence: Ukraine’s Long Escape from the Soviet Empire

By Matthew Parish

Monday 24 August 2026

On 24 August 2026 Ukraine celebrates thirty-five years since the Verkhovna Rada proclaimed the country an independent democratic state. Yet to describe those thirty-five years merely as a period of independence is to miss their essential character. Ukraine has spent virtually the entire period fighting to make independence real. Sometimes that struggle has taken place in parliament, sometimes at the ballot box, sometimes on the streets and since 2014 increasingly upon the battlefield. The adversary has changed its name, its flag and its ideological vocabulary — but remarkably little of its imperial conception of Ukraine.

The Soviet Union formally disappeared in December 1991. The Soviet imperial idea did not.

That distinction explains much of modern Ukrainian history. Ukraine’s thirty-five years of independence may be understood as a prolonged struggle to answer a deceptively simple question: was the collapse of the USSR an administrative rearrangement amongst former Soviet republics, or was it the liberation of nations entitled to determine their own political, cultural and geopolitical futures? Ukraine has progressively insisted upon the latter interpretation. Moscow has increasingly insisted upon the former. The war that today consumes so much of Europe is, amongst other things, the violent collision between those two incompatible accounts of what happened in 1991.

Independence before 1991

Ukraine did not suddenly become a nation when a parliament in Kyiv adopted a declaration on 24 August 1991. Ukrainian political identity, language, culture and aspirations to statehood are centuries older. The Ukrainian People’s Republic declared independence in January 1918 amid the collapse of the Russian Empire, only to be overwhelmed during the wars that followed. Soviet Ukraine was subsequently incorporated into the USSR in 1922.

What followed was not simply political integration. Stalinist collectivisation and the Holodomor, the purges of Ukrainian intellectual and political elites, Russification and the suppression of independent Ukrainian institutions all formed part of the historical inheritance with which the country entered the final decades of Soviet rule. Ukrainian identity survived nevertheless — sometimes openly, sometimes through dissident movements, religious communities, literature, family memory and an enduring consciousness that Soviet citizenship and Ukrainian nationality were not the same thing.

By the late 1980s the contradictions of the Soviet system were becoming impossible to contain. Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika unintentionally created political spaces in which grievances long suppressed could be articulated. The catastrophe at Chornobyl in 1986 was particularly important in Ukraine. The Soviet state’s secrecy surrounding a nuclear disaster on Ukrainian soil demonstrated with terrible clarity the consequences of government from Moscow in which the welfare of Ukrainians could be subordinated to the preservation of Soviet authority.

The independence movement gathered momentum. On 16 July 1990 the Ukrainian parliament adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, asserting the supremacy and indivisibility of republican authority within Ukraine and independence and equality in her external relations. It was not yet independence, but the constitutional architecture of independence was appearing.

Then the Soviet system collapsed with extraordinary speed.

The August Revolution

The attempted coup in Moscow of 19–21 August 1991 transformed the political landscape. Communist hardliners attempted to reverse Gorbachev’s reforms and preserve the Soviet Union through authoritarian means. Their failure demonstrated simultaneously that the old Soviet state was dangerous and that it was no longer capable of guaranteeing its own survival.

Three days after the coup began, Ukraine acted.

On 24 August 1991 the Verkhovna Rada adopted the Act of Declaration of Independence. The text expressly referred to the “mortal danger” arising from the attempted Soviet coup and invoked Ukraine’s long tradition of state-building and the international legal principle of national self-determination. It proclaimed Ukraine independent and declared its territory indivisible and inviolable.

The parliamentary vote was overwhelming: 346 deputies supported the Act, with only one voting against. That fact matters because independence was not simply the project of western Ukrainian nationalists or a narrow dissident intelligentsia. By August 1991 the political centre of gravity had shifted decisively.

Yet the more important vote came three months later.

On 1 December 1991 Ukrainians were asked directly whether they supported the declaration. More than 90 per cent of those participating voted for independence. Support extended across every region of the country, including Crimea and the heavily Russian-speaking industrial east.

That referendum remains one of the foundational facts of contemporary Ukrainian history. The proposition, subsequently advanced with increasing aggression from Moscow, that Ukrainian independence was an artificial project imposed upon reluctant Russian-speaking populations is extremely difficult to reconcile with what Ukrainians themselves actually voted for when presented with the choice.

The Soviet Union survived the Ukrainian referendum by only a few weeks.

The difficult freedom

Yet political independence did not immediately produce liberation from the Soviet inheritance. Ukraine inherited borders, industries, administrative institutions, security structures, political habits and economic relationships formed within the USSR. Much of the country’s governing class consisted inevitably of people who had made their careers inside the Soviet system.

The 1990s were consequently painful. Economic collapse devastated living standards. Privatisation created oligarchic fortunes. Corruption became systemic. State institutions were weak and political parties often represented networks of commercial influence rather than coherent programmes of government.

Russia retained immense leverage. Ukrainian factories depended upon Russian markets, Ukrainian energy consumption depended heavily upon Russian supplies and Russian media and cultural influence remained pervasive. Moscow could therefore hope that Ukraine might be formally sovereign yet remain within a Russian political and economic sphere.

For a time this seemed plausible.

But something important was happening beneath the disorder. Ukrainians were acquiring the habits of political independence. Governments could be criticised. Presidents could become unpopular. Elections mattered. Newspapers argued. Civil society developed. Competing centres of economic and political power prevented the consolidation of the sort of vertical authoritarian state that emerged under Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Ukraine’s apparent weakness contained an unexpected strength: nobody succeeded in owning the country.

The Orange Revolution

The contradiction became visible in 2004.

A presidential election between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych became a struggle over something larger than two politicians. After widespread allegations of electoral fraud in favour of Yanukovych, enormous crowds gathered in Kyiv and elsewhere demanding an honest result.

The Orange Revolution was important not because Yushchenko subsequently transformed Ukraine — he did not — but because Ukrainian society demonstrated that there were limits to what political elites could impose upon it.

This was increasingly the fundamental distinction between Ukraine and Putin’s Russia. Russia was constructing a system in which political authority flowed downwards from the Kremlin. Ukraine was developing a political culture in which legitimacy ultimately flowed upwards from society.

It was chaotic, corrupt and frequently exasperating. But it was pluralistic.

And pluralism was slowly carrying Ukraine away from the Soviet political tradition.

Maidan and the decisive break

The decisive confrontation arrived in 2013.

President Viktor Yanukovych suspended preparations for an Association Agreement with the European Union under intense Russian pressure. Ukrainians gathered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti. What began as a protest about European integration became, after police violence against demonstrators, a national revolt against arbitrary government.

The Revolution of Dignity of 2013–14 represented another stage in Ukraine’s struggle for independence because the question had become deeper than foreign policy. Europe represented a particular conception of the state — government constrained by law, political accountability, individual dignity and the possibility that rulers might be removed by citizens rather than citizens being disciplined by rulers.

The Soviet political tradition stood for almost precisely the opposite.

When Yanukovych fled Ukraine in February 2014, Moscow responded not by accepting Ukraine’s political choice but by attacking Ukrainian sovereignty. Russia occupied and purported to annex Crimea and Russia-backed armed formations seized territory in Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine had entered a war that would never truly end. The full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 was preceded by eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

From this point onwards, Ukraine’s struggle to escape the Soviet inheritance ceased to be principally political. It became military.

The war for the meaning of 1991

Russia’s assault upon Ukraine after 2014 exposed the extraordinary persistence of imperial assumptions in Moscow. The Kremlin increasingly denied not merely particular Ukrainian policies but the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationhood itself. Ukrainian sovereignty was treated as conditional — acceptable only insofar as Ukraine’s choices remained compatible with Russian interests.

This amounted to an attempt retrospectively to reverse 1991.

The full-scale invasion launched on 24 February 2022 therefore had objectives extending far beyond territory. Russian forces attacked from Russia, occupied Crimea and Belarus in what was plainly an attempt to destroy Ukraine’s capacity to function as an independent state. Kyiv was supposed to fall. The Ukrainian government was supposed to collapse. Ukraine was supposed to return, in one form or another, to Moscow’s political orbit.

She did not.

The failure of that initial assault may eventually be understood as one of the decisive moments in the long history of European decolonisation. Ukrainians who had often disagreed profoundly amongst themselves discovered that their political disagreements took place inside a common national framework that they were prepared to defend.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians fought Russian soldiers. Residents of cities historically portrayed by Moscow as naturally Russian resisted Russian occupation. Ukrainian national identity revealed itself not as a narrowly ethnic phenomenon but as a political allegiance — attachment to a sovereign country whose citizens intended to determine their own future.

That may be the most important achievement of thirty-five years.

Independence forged twice

There is an irony in Ukraine’s history. In 1991 independence arrived with comparatively little bloodshed. The Soviet state was collapsing and Ukraine walked through the opening created by its disintegration.

That ease perhaps concealed the magnitude of what had happened.

Ukraine inherited independence before she had completed the institutions, political culture or national consensus necessary to secure it permanently. The succeeding thirty-five years have therefore been a process of filling the word independencewith substance.

The Orange Revolution established that elections could not simply be falsified without resistance. The Revolution of Dignity established that presidents could not indefinitely subordinate the country’s strategic direction to Moscow against the wishes of a mobilised citizenry. The war after 2014 established that Ukrainians would fight for territorial sovereignty. The resistance after February 2022 established that they would fight for the existence of the state itself.

In this sense Ukraine has declared independence twice.

The first declaration was written on paper in 1991.

The second has been written in blood since 2014.

The Soviet Union’s last war

It is tempting to describe the current conflict simply as the Russo-Ukrainian war. That is correct, but historically incomplete. It may also be understood as the last great war arising from the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The USSR disappeared administratively in 1991 without resolving the imperial assumptions upon which much of it had rested. Russia inherited the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, much of its military apparatus and, eventually, a political elite increasingly nostalgic for the geopolitical authority Moscow had exercised over neighbouring peoples.

Ukraine inherited something different: the problem of turning a Soviet republic into a European nation-state.

Those two inheritances eventually collided.

This is why the war cannot satisfactorily be understood merely as a dispute about NATO, language rights, Crimea, Donbas or security arrangements, although all these questions have played their parts. Beneath them lies a more elementary dispute about sovereignty.

Ukraine says that 1991 was final.

The Kremlin has behaved as though it was provisional.

Thirty-five years later

On 24 August 2026 Ukraine marks her thirty-fifth Independence Day while still fighting the largest war in Europe since 1945. European leaders have gathered in Kyiv to mark the anniversary and reaffirm support while Russian attacks continue. The symbolism is difficult to miss.

Independence Day is therefore not yet an entirely historical commemoration in Ukraine. It is a statement about the present.

There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of independent Ukraine. Corruption has repeatedly disfigured public life. Oligarchic influence retarded institutional development. Governments have made serious mistakes. Democratic institutions remain imperfect and the strains of prolonged martial law are profound. Independence does not require romanticising the state that independence created.

Indeed the opposite is true. The right to criticise one’s government, replace one’s leaders and argue ferociously about the direction of one’s country is part of what independence is for.

The Soviet conception of politics demanded obedience. The Ukrainian conception that has painfully emerged since 1991 demands ownership.

That is why Ukraine’s struggle matters beyond Ukraine. The country sits upon one of the great historical fault lines of Europe — between an imperial tradition in which powerful states claim rights over smaller neighbours and a liberal conception of international order in which sovereignty belongs equally to large nations and small ones.

Thirty-five years ago the Verkhovna Rada declared that Ukraine’s territory was “indivisible and inviolable”. At the time those words might have seemed the conventional language of a newly independent state.

Today they read differently.

They have become the central proposition over which hundreds of thousands of people have fought and died.

Ukraine’s first thirty-five years have consequently been far harder than those celebrating in Kyiv in August 1991 could possibly have imagined. Independence brought neither immediate prosperity nor permanent peace. Instead Ukraine discovered something that history has taught many nations before her: declaring freedom and securing freedom are different things.

Yet there is also an achievement here that should not be obscured by the horror of war. The Soviet Union attempted for seventy years to create a political order in which an independent Ukraine would become inconceivable. Thirty-five years after the USSR disappeared, precisely the reverse has happened.

An independent Ukraine has become conceivable to Ukrainians to such a degree that millions have reorganised their lives around defending it and many have given their lives for it.

The ultimate Soviet project in Ukraine was to make independence impossible.

Thirty-five years later, Russia’s war has helped make the restoration of empire impossible without the conquest of a nation determined to remain free.

That is the paradox of Ukraine’s long escape from the Soviet Union. The harder Moscow has tried to reverse 1991, the deeper the meaning of 1991 has become.

The Soviet Union died thirty-five years ago.

Ukraine is still fighting to ensure that it stays dead.