The Russian annexation of Crimea and armed conflict over Donbas have brought these regions into the limelight. At the same time, there is a lack of sufficiently complex analysis of Ukrainians’ attitudes toward Donbas and Crimea and their understanding of what is happening there. Traditional analyses of Ukrainian attitudes divide the country into large macro-regions, resulting in a misleading grouping of diverse oblasts (Ukraine’s administrative regions).
The new “Donbas and Crimea in Focus” module in MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine changes that optic, presenting data by oblast and aiming at a more nuanced analysis of attitudes and understanding throughout Ukraine. The module considers Donbas and Crimea neither as parts of a big macro-region, nor as “outstanding” or “exotic” cases, but as parts of Ukrainian society that are interconnected with other regions. MAPA’s oblast-by-oblast visualizations of attitudes toward Crimea and Donbas or internally displaced persons (IDPs) from those regions, as well as Ukrainians’ opinions about the conflict and preferred strategies to resolve the problem helps to explore regional divisions as well as the country’s future political stability and security.
This discussion intends to open an interdisciplinary space where scholars whose work focuses on an array of inquiries related to Ukrainian regionalism, Donbas, and Crimea will discuss the module in relation to their own research and to current social and political contexts.
- Viktoriya Sereda, Senior Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology, Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University;
- Kateryna Ivashchenko-Stadnik, Senior Researcher, Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Kyiv-based consultant, Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development (SeeD);
- Irina Kuznetsova, Fellow and Lecturer, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom;
- Austin Charron, Research Affiliate, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
