Understanding a country's strategic culture helps assess how it will react to crisis, negotiation, and national security events. Strategic culture generally is static and when it evolves, it happens slowly, as history, events, and culture accumulate over generations. In 2021, the prevailing view of Ukraine’s strategic culture was that it was a country focused on securing its national identity and sovereignty apart from Russia and it was a country prone to rely on negotiations and diplomacy. The balance between these two themes was about even with Ukraine leaning toward diplomacy and multilaterism over sovereignty when pushed by the international community. Most students of strategic culture did not assess that Ukraine would react to a Russian invasion with the military force that it has. Now students of strategic culture see the theme of independence and sovereignty as the key aspect of Ukraine’s strategic culture with a growing theme of being modern day military experts. The rapid transformation of the assessment of Ukrainian strategic culture is astounding. Either strategic culture academics got Ukraine wrong, or the Russian invasion changed Ukraine cataclysmically. I suspect it is a bit of both.
Strategic Culture
Strategic culture refers to a nation's shared beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behaviors regarding the use of force and the pursuit of security objectives. Jack L. Snyder introduced the term in 1977, arguing that a state's behavior cannot be explained by material capabilities or geography alone, but by those factors combined with history, cultural norms, and shared societal beliefs. Strategic culture is generally resistant to change. While it is often invoked to explain Russia's decision to invade Ukraine — its relevance to Ukraine's response has been comparatively overlooked.
Ukraine's Early Strategic Culture
Ukraine's strategic culture has been shaped by centuries of foreign domination and by its Soviet legacy. Early studies of strategic culture in independent Ukraine identified securing a national identity separate from Russia as the paramount objective. Those same early studies concluded that Ukraine favored diplomatic engagement, multilateral cooperation, and alliance-building over military action — pointing to Ukraine's surrender of its nuclear arsenal after the Soviet collapse and its acquiescence to Russia's 2014 seizure of Crimea as evidence. But this reading likely mistook constraint for preference. Ukraine was a newly independent state with a fledgling security establishment and military; it lacked the structure and capacity to stand up to either the United States or Russia, both of which pressed it toward disarmament and restraint. And, while significant events, neither of those two events were an immediate threat to Ukrainian independence. What looked like a cultural preference for negotiation may have been the best available option available for a young, under-resourced state. This misreading of Ukrainian resolve and strategic culture set Russia up for a catastrophic miscalculation that has cost over a million lives and will take decades for both countries to recover from.
The first principle of Ukraine’s strategic culture — safeguarding a distinct national identity — endures today. But the second focus on diplomacy and multinationalism-- has changed. If successful, the Russian invasion would have meant that this first principle would have to be abrogated and Ukrainian identity would once again have been subsumed by Moscow. Ukraine could not tolerate that: fighting for independence and Ukrainian identity outweighs alliance-building and negotiations as the organizing goal of its strategic culture. Today, Kyiv increasingly foot stomps aspects of Ukrainian identity that were suppressed under Soviet rule, and its foreign policy has grown more assertive, favoring offensive posture over purely defensive behavior. What has emerged is a culture that balances patience for international negotiation with adaptability and a hardened determination not to be conquered again, at any cost.
Two Defining Characteristics
Two characteristics of Ukrainian strategic culture stand out as key to explaining Ukrainian resistance to Russia:
Ukraine's growing emphasis on its Cossack heritage appears designed to construct a new state myth and reshape national self-perception from one of victimhood to one of warrior. Invoking the Cossacks — a self-governing, democratic, and militarily capable community prone to raids and revolt — underscores both Ukraine's independence and its capacity for military action. Domestically, images of the great hetmans now appear more prominently on currency and in textbooks.
Ukrainian strategic culture rests on the primacy of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity — values Russia has threatened or dismissed both historically and in the present. Language has become a central tool of this identity claim: early post-independence legislation established the primacy of Ukrainian language to rebuild a cohesive national identity, and that legislative push accelerated around the outbreak of armed conflict in 2014, alongside a marked cooling toward proposals to formalize Russian as a second official language. For Ukrainians, language is intrinsic to national identity. I recall being tutored in Ukrainian by an émigré in the late 1980s; he was a tough teacher, and he would grow angry whenever I mistakenly lapsed into Russian even though it was our common language and at times the only language in which we could communicate.
Ukrainian Strategic Culture Today
Ukraine's strategic culture now manifests as an asymmetrical, creative approach to security — one that offsets comparatively limited military resources with international partnerships, novel approaches to warfare, and disciplined strategic messaging. It emphasizes flexibility, resilience, gray-zone tactics, and pragmatic decision-making. Increasingly, we are seeing Ukraine promoting its tactics and military resources internationally.
Ukraine's strategic norms are still evolving, but the trajectory since independence is clear: independence and ingenuity have become the paramount, defining components of Ukrainian strategic culture, expressed through firm state priorities. A lasting orientation toward the West, paired with renewed emphasis on Slavic and Cossack roots, matters too, if somewhat less centrally. Above all, a study of modern day Ukrainian strategic culture tells us that Ukraine will do what it must to preserve its hard-won independence — while still maintaining its position as a respected leader within the global community.
Recently, the new Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Yevhenii Khmara, said
”Ukraine has always seen tragedy. Its history is a long inventory of it. What separates this generation from all the ones before is that it has a real chance to defeat the enemy.”
This tells you a lot about the mindset of senior Ukrainian decision makers and how they are messaging their people and the international community.
Why it Matters
Understanding Ukrainian strategic culture helps us to determine what approach to take to help end the war in Ukraine. Paramount for the country is ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. For Ukraine, that is nonnegotiable. Any negotiating concepts that leave room for other nations to impose themselves on Ukrainian decision making is a nonstarter for Kyiv. Recognizing Ukraine’s sacrifices not only in the last four years but the tragic historical road they have been on with pre Soviet Russia and the Soviets will go far in any negotiations. Finally, acknowledging and highlighting how well Ukraine has out played Russia would also go a long way. Next, I will present Russian strategic culture and then discuss where the two clash.
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