Ukrainian national identity is a complex notion, containing relationships with Russia, ethnicity and civic duty, according to Carnegie junior fellow Matthew Kupfer ’12, who returned to Brandeis on Tuesday night to share his research findings on what it means to be Ukrainian in the modern era.

“Is bigotry ever acceptable? … What about if bigotry is against a group of people you believe oppresses you? … What if it is against a diaspora in your country whose homeland oppresses you?” Kupfer began, introducing a series of questions and asking the audience to raise their hands if they agreed with the statement. Almost none volunteered their support. The point of these questions, Kupfer shared, was to pose uncomfortable questions that would highlight the fact that these issues in Ukraine are not straightforward, black-and-white scenarios.

Kupfer’s current research studies national identity in Ukraine, especially among volunteers in the eastern part of the country in the cities of Kharkiv and Odessa, the sites of explosions and clashes in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. He presented his findings and conclusions at the event titled “Ukraine 2015 – National Identity and Civilian Volunteers During War,” as part of the I Am Global Week series.

“I’m a nationalist, but I like it when a Jew or an Armenian supports our country,” Kupfer said, sharing a statement told to him by a wounded Ukrainian soldier recovering in a hospital in Odessa. He explained that this statement was noteworthy because “Ukrainian identity has often been thought of as an ethnic identity, and Ukrainian nationalism has often been thought of as ethnocentric,” but here was a Ukrainian man eager to receive the support of other groups of people.

This paradoxical expression of Ukrainian national identity laid the foundation for Kupfer’s presentation. He then shared his methodology of conducting one-on-one or one-on-two interviews with Ukrainian volunteers in the places where they work, as well as eight-person group interviews with “ordinary ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in both cities.”

Kupfer then explained the vital role of volunteers in the current conflict, where they have taken on tasks that would normally have been fulfilled by the state. The list of their duties and efforts includes gathering supplies, buying train tickets for the soldiers, advocating for them, helping them navigate government bureaucracy, aiding those with post-traumatic stress disorder, providing food and shelter, socializing with them at the train stations, and aiding internally displaced persons.

Quoting sociologist Viktoriya Sereda, Kupfer shared that 54 percent of Ukrainian citizens took part in civic activism in the last year. He added that there were 75,000 volunteers for civic causes, based on reports from the Ukrainian press. Kharkiv and Odessa, however, are considered to be more passive areas, with Sereda’s findings showing 20 to 40 percent of civic participation. Kupfer declared that there is a “clear political aspect to this volunteerism.”

Kupfer then discussed the present state of research on Ukrainian national identity. Many of these findings are pessimistic, he found, with political scientist Stephen Shulman stating, “Ukrainians perceive Ukrainians from different regions of their own country to be more different from each other than Ukrainians and Russians in Russia,” as well as social psychologist Karina Korostelina offering, “Ukraine has no national identity, an absence of any kind of thing that unites the country.”

“The reality doesn’t seem to bare out, at least what you see in Ukraine,” Kupfer countered, posing that his research with civic volunteers disputes some of these other findings on Ukrainian national identity.

He added that one volunteer told him on one occasion, “For me, being Ukrainian is ethnic — I love my country, but I hate the government. I think the Ukrainian people are good, but the government brings out the worst in us or destroys our positive qualities.”

The volunteer then explained her personal identification, stating, “By ancestry, I am Russian; my roots are extremely Russian, but I always thought of myself as Ukrainian. I am proud to be part of this nation, even if not by blood.”

Kupfer explained that he questioned the volunteer, wondering how Ukrainian identity for her could be ethnic if she was actually of Russian descent. The volunteer, he said, quickly responded, “Well, because I intentionally relate to the Ukrainian ethnicity, it means I am an ethnic Ukrainian.”

Other volunteers seemed to echo this sentiment. Another stated, “If we didn’t include non-ethnic Ukrainians, there would be no nation. It’s not possible.”

“My kids are half Chinese, but they’re also Ukrainian,” affirmed another volunteer, sharing her personal view that despite Ukrainian identity being an ethnic identity, non-ethnic Ukraine can essentially become Ukrainian.

Kupfer then moved on to his findings on the relationship between Russia and Ukrainian identity. One volunteer stated, “Russians and Ukrainian may be connected economically, linguistically and genetically, but they’re very different in terms of freedom of thought.” This was a common belief among the volunteers, Kupfer added. Another Ukrainian volunteer offered that he initially “didn’t see it [Russia] as a foreign country,” but after supporting Ukraine in the recent conflict, it had become hard to talk with his Russian citizen father, despite the fact that his father had lived in Ukraine for ten years.

Kupfer also discussed the differences he had found between the volunteers and the “ordinary” ethnic Ukrainians, whom he defined as “middle or lower class people who are not involved in volunteerism.”

The volunteers viewed Ukraine as the only acceptable national identity; they supported full linguistic Ukrainianization, were in favor of anti-communist laws, held a negative view of the Soviet Union, possessed a disgust with the current government and maintained a strong sense of duty to the country.

Although the ordinary ethnic Ukrainians were not uniformly pro-government, they contrastingly did not support anti-communist laws, were more supportive of bilingualism, displayed nostalgia for the stability of the Soviet ’70s and viewed Russia as more fundamentally similar to Ukraine than different. One individual expressed, “Russia and Ukraine should be the same thing with different names.”

Kupfer then concluded his presentation by posing one more thought for the audience’s consideration. “Maybe the biggest divide in Ukraine now is not between east and west, or between Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking, or between Russian and Ukrainian, but it’s between the active part of the population and the passive part of the population.”

The event was held by the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry and co-sponsored by the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature, and the Brandeis Russian Club.