Ukraine is Europe. Not post-Soviet.

This time, this post won't be about technology. As I'd posted this with my social media username, I decided to repost it here, and not in another blog.

Ukraine is no longer post-Soviet, and it has ceased being that one or two generations ago.

Herein, I'll try to refer to Ukraine in terms of political geography, and not its geographical location. Geographically, Ukraine has always been a part of Europe in general, and Eastern Europe in particular.

For a time, Ukraine was post-Soviet, as were many other countries that gained or regained independence from the very collapsed USSR.

Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and others have always been Eastern Europe, both geographically and politically. But these were part of the Eastern Bloc, and not incorporated into the Soviet Union, whereas Ukraine and the Baltics were.

When all these countries joined the EU and NATO, Ukraine stayed outside, and so, it was not necessarily a part of the integrated Eastern Europe: there was the Eastern Europe within the European Union, and the wider, unintegrated Eastern Europe, some of which Russia erroneously regarded as within its "sphere of influence".

Can't say exactly what the correct cut-off date would be to declare the end of the post-Soviet period in Ukraine, because Ukraine's transition period has been longer than that of the Baltics, and Ukraine has had longer-term problems with regular and political corruption. (Massive political corruption ended in 2014.)

There's a group of formative events, each of which signal a step away from "post-Soviet". These are the Orange Revolution in 2003, then Euromaidan in 2013, which carried over into the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, when the very corrupt pro-Russian president Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Ukraine's slow progression could be attributed to its size; lack of a long-term non-communist independence period before the USSR, the legacy of its Soviet era and the politicians from thence; corruption; and being land-locked in the northern and western directions, sequestered away from Western Europe.

There were other factors, too:

• Ambivalence towards Russia, in the sense of a perception in Ukrainians of them supposedly being able "to deal with both sides amicably" (resp. the West and Russia), and going for neutrality, perhaps in a vain attempt at playing a Switzerland or an Austria (both rich countries, and as declaratively neutral as they can get). For a long time, Ukraine had been wobbling like that between the two;
• pro-Russian sentiment in the east of Ukraine, which was reflected in election results, with the (long-former) Party of the Regions seeing very favourable outcomes, which, during its run, had a view of tilting the political scales not exactly towards Europe, though not decidedly away in the fashion of Belarus. That was before 2013. And
• perhaps either the paucity of Ukrainian-origin culture compared to the massive cultural output from Russia, or the prevalence of Russian-language and Russian-origin culture in Ukraine, especially in its primarily Russian-speaking east. — This is something that Ukrainian comedian Valentyn Mikhienko touched on in a February, 2023 intreview to Serhiy Lyhovyda at the YouTube channel Розмова (in Ukrainian).