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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has deeply transformed both the victim and the aggressor states and upended the international order with a return to wars of conquest. This special issue of Nationalities Papers features original research that offers new perspectives on how Russia’s war against Ukraine has reshaped political, cultural, and societal structures at multiple levels. The collected studies provide diverse findings and analytical lenses through which to understand how states, institutions, and communities interpret, respond to, and are transformed by the experience of war. This introduction provides an overview of the studies in this special issue, organized into four thematic areas.

The study explores the engagement of Russophone Ukrainians with educational policies that increase the status of the Ukrainian language, the standardized tests of Ukrainian, and the subject tests that could be passed in Ukrainian. It argues that this centralized unitary language policy has received support from Russophones. It does so by analyzing the language choices of Russophone students when taking standardized tests in various subjects, as well as admission policies and discussions of relevant policies in local media and social media of the Russophone city of Kharkiv. It shows that following the introduction of standardized tests, the value of Ukrainian has increased across various actors: students have been choosing Ukrainian more, universities have valued Ukrainian in the admission process, and local citizens have defended the status of Ukrainian, relying on decolonial rhetoric. It shows that the decolonial framing of the Ukrainization policies resonated with Russophones enough for them to support them, and not to result in a backlash.