Legal protection of the national identity of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation: history and modernity
Authors: Andrusyshyn B. І. 
Published: January 2025

The article analyzes the historical patterns of formation and development of the territories of the Russian Federation historically inhabited by Ukrainians. The process of formation of the ethnic territory of the Ukrainian people, the history of the establishment of the state border of Ukraine with Russia during the time of the Cossack state of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, during the stormy times of the national liberation struggles of 1917–1921 (the Ukrainian People’s Republic under the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State under P. Skoropadskyi, the Ukrainian People’s Republic under Directories), Russian occupation of Ukrainian ethnic lands for centuries, actions aimed at erasing national identity, oppressing Ukrainians. Emphasis is placed on its own territory, inhabited by a national collective with fixed borders, as one of the main attributes of statehood. The historical, ethnic, and territorial- geographical aspects of the substantiation of the objective status of the foundations of Ukrainian statehood by Ukrainian scientists are evaluated. The pseudo-scientific statements of Russian historians and politicians about the artificiality of the creation of the Ukrainian state are refuted, and numerous statistical data are given about the «minimum» Ukrainian ethnic territory in 1914 with an area of 905,000 km2, inhabited by 51.3 million inhabitants, including 38,7 million Ukrainians (71,3%) and «maximum», where 1.06 km2 million inhabited by 53.9 million inhabitants, including 38,7 million Ukrainians (71,7%). The Ukrainian ethnic territories, defined by the III Universal of the Ukrainian Central Rada, where 10 constituencies for the Constituent Assembly of the People’s Republic of Ukraine were formed, which covered not only purely Ukrainian provinces, but also the adjacent border counties of the Kursk and Voronezh provinces, the borders established as a result of the signing of the «Peace Treaty» between the Ukrainian People’s Republic with the states of the Quadruple Union and Soviet Russia; the difficult diplomatic struggle for the establishment of the borders of the Ukrainian State during the days of the Hetmanate of P. Skoropadskyi is highlighted; the little-known document of the time of the Directory of the Ukrainian National People’s Republic «Ukraine in numbers» by G. Hasenko, first published in 1919 in Romania, is analyzed. The problems that arise in the process of the practical application of the Presidential Decree of January 22, 2024 «On the territories of the Russian Federation historically inhabited by Ukrainians» in connection with the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory and the termination of a number of bilateral and multilateral treaties are also analyzed. The implementation of the Presidential Decree sets the goal of ultimately functioning in the ethnic Ukrainian territories of the international legal standard for ensuring human rights, and the most pressing problems of Ukrainians in Russia should become the object of interdisciplinary legal research by legal scholars, and the subject of activities of Ukrainian jurisdictional bodies and politicians. It is concluded that the problem of the national identity of ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Federation, the history of the formation of the borders of our country from the level of rule-making, the circle of the academic community is moving into the rank of state-legal regulation.