Majority-Minority Relations in the Ukraine

Majority–minority relations in Ukraine, as in any other country, are a complex phenomenon. What differentiates the Ukrainian case from many old polities and from some recently established ones is that the identities of both majority and minority groups probably have been settled to a much lesser degree than is usually the case in Europe. The process of defining what it means to be a majority or a minority group in Ukraine goes along with all the other identity-related processes that a newly independent country has to face. The fact that the identity of both majority and minority is still ‗in the making ‘ has numerous implications for how the Ukrainian state positions itself with regard to various international standards and mechanisms of minority protection and how international bodies—both intergovernmental and nongovernmental—approach the issue of Ukraine‘s adherence to these standards and mechanisms. This article begins with a short discussion on efforts to define ‗majority ‘ and the effect that these efforts have on the position of a group that hesitantly came to occupy the status of the country‘s largest minority group, namely, ethnic Russians. It then structures the subsequent presentation by identifyin