Reactive Nationalism? Governance Through Identities in an Eastern Ukrainian City

The widespread resistance to the Russian invasion in 2022 seems to support the idea that the Ukrainian nationalist project became convincing to former ‘pro-Russian’ voters. This essay takes an ethnographically informed look at the way the identitarian cleavage works in an industrial city in eastern Ukraine. I argue that, prior to the invasion, it helped consolidate the power of the local elite but was of no great importance to the working class. Their electoral support for ‘pro-Russian’ politicians was driven, rather, by a mistrust of ‘politics’. The invasion has in turn sharply reduced the distance between politics and everyday life, producing a brief moment of national unity. However, this moment failed to take root and produce a stable hegemonic configuration.