The first Ukrainian state already has lasted five years. But it does not mean the end of long dreamed of statism, but the beginning of hard ways for building a nation.
The border of Ukraine has a peculiar character. Almost all border lines were drawn by dividing regions, each of which comprised historically one region. This condition also makes the task of building a nation difficult.
In the western part of Ukrainian border, such regions are Galitsia, Carpathian, Bukovina and Bessarabia. If you turn to the east, there are two divided regions, the Donbass and the Slobidska Ukraine.
The Ukrainian border was made by dividing regions that caused difficulties in building the Ukrainian nation-state. Because of the dividing the regions automatically made Ukrainian Diaspora or irredenta outside Ukraine. In Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova and Russia, Ukrainians have been living as a minority group. At the same time the opposite sides, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova and Russia, consider the regions which were incorporated with Ukraine their irredenta. Between Ukraine and Russia there is another but major border dispute on the Crimean Peninsula.
Ukraine herself is divided into two parts, Eastern and Western. The Western part of Ukraine, called Galicia, has some characteristics which are not seen in other parts of Ukraine.
On the contrary to the Galicia, eastern and southern parts of Ukraine have different characteristics. The Donbass and Crimea belong to these regions. These regions have strong tles with Russia although they belong to Ukraine. The Crimea, now an autonomous republic in Ukraine, belonged to Russia until 1954. A part of the Donbass was belonged to Russia before the 1917 revolution as the Don Army District.
The contrast between the West and the East in Ukraine can be seen on the map. There is an interesting piece of evidence to show the dichotomy between the West and the East. It shows the change of support for the first president Leonid Kravchuk and the second president Leonid Kuchma. In Ukraine we can hear a new Ukrainian proverb, saying, “Ukrainian Presidents born in the East will die in the West”. This proverb well explains the dichotomy between the East and the West in Ukraine.
For Nation-building in Ukraine there are some obstacles in terms of integration of people into one consolidated group. Ukraine is divided not only by geography but also by culture and identity.
Language problems may be the most visible problem in today's Ukraine. The second obstacle for the integration of the Ukrainian nation-state is religious splits among the people. Ukraine is, of course, a secularized state. But the history of the suppression of national churches such as the Uniate Church (Ukrainian Catholic Church) and Ukrainian Orthodox Church made these churches political factors.
Ukrainians have failed to form a nation-state. Russians have also failed to form their own nation-state. Russians have always been a subject of a big empire, first the Russian Empire and next the Soviet Union. Above all things they carried out their mission to build and maintain an empire. Ukrainians, in contrast, are eager to build their own nation-state, not an empire. This is an identity difference between two nationalities. And this difference reflects the dichotomy in Ukraine between the East and the West.
The geopolitical position of Ukraine in the International arena has been a factor of difficulties for the building a nation state. For Ukraine, located between the West and the East, between Germany and Russia, inevitably it has been geopolitically in either a buffer zone or a battleground. In the Northern War in 18th century, the Napoleonic War, Crimean War, World War I and World War II, Ukraine was one of the major battlefields. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union the region which includes the territory of Ukraine became a battlefield between Europe and Russia b

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The European Union elaborated its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in May 2004. The policy seeks to make the EU's new neighbours democratic, stable and prosperous, and to assure the security of the EU, but, at the same time, to avoid promising these new neighbours accession to the Union. To accomplish its objectives, the EU has concluded with these states an Action Plan which stipulates goals as benchmarks to be realised with regard to democratisation and market economic reform. Nevertheless, there has been concern whether the ENP will succeed or not, as it does not assure EU membership to the new neighbours, in contrast to the prior EU enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe. The success or failure of the ENP, in particular towards the Western New Independent States (WNIS)-Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus-will influence not only the stability of these states and the security of the EU, but also the future of European and Eurasian international geopolitics. Therefore, this article analyses the likelihood of success or failure of the ENP towards the WNIS, focusing on: 1) EU-WNIS relations, 2) WNIS-Russian relations, and 3) EU-Russia relations in relation to the WNIS. Finally, the impact of the later Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Orange Evolution in the Republic of Moldova on this analysis will be assessed.
The conclusion reached in this analysis is that, the only thing that the EU can do is to encourage Ukraine and Moldova to accomplish the benchmarks without assuring them of accession to the Union (which means a lack of stimulation for their political and economic reforms) and without obtaining Russian cooperation in stabilizing this region. In addition, prior to the Orange Revolution, both states were interested in accession to the EU, but they fluctuated between closer relations with the EU or with Russia, as they were situated between the two from political, economic, identity, and geopolitical points of view. Furthermore, Russia made efforts to keep the two states within its sphere of influence. Therefore, it was quite difficult to expect that the beneficial effects of conditionality for EU enlargement on Central and Eastern Europe would also occur in the case of the WNIS. With regard to the future relations between the EU and Belarus, there were no prospects for the normalisation of relations at the time.
However, in the light of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Orange Evolution in Moldova, the above conclusions have been re-evaluated. The Orange Revolution demonstrated that civil society has matured in Ukraine, and that it is a promoter of democracy and market economics-benchmarks in the Action Plan. The contrast between, on the one hand, the old-fashioned methods used by Russia to influence Ukraine and Moldova and, on the other, the methods used by U. S. -European international democratisation NGOs in their relations with the domestic NGOs which contributed to the Orange Revolution and Evolution in the two countries, has made it inevitable that both states are now approaching the EU and the U. S., while keeping a distance from Russia. The Orange Revolution and Evolution have also led to a more serious involvement of the EU in both states than the Action Plan stipulated. In any event, observers will have to wait until the final results are made clear in the EU Commission report concerning the implementation of the Action Plan to be published in two years.

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This paper focuses on the media strategies of Russia and Ukraine, both currently at war, and examines the future of violence and media studies in the 21st century. It also examines the strategic use of alternative media and its potential.

At the core of Putin’s diplomacy is Aleksandr Dugin’s "Neo-Eurasianism," Russia’s power bloc concept that resists globalism. This vision has been supported by "hybrid warfare," which combines a military approach with non-military approaches such as cyber-attacks and psychological warfare through disinformation. The non-military approach in "hybrid warfare" not only functions as a tool to turn a blind eye to Russia’s monopoly on violence. Deep fakes and bots have now become a "weapon" in political or military conflicts. What is particularly noteworthy is that these attacks exploit the weaknesses of the idea of liberal democracy in the West.

On the other hand, Zelensky’s media strategy brings a sense that media and reality are connected to the ground, because of his effective use of social media and a Ukrainian political satire comedy television series Servant of the People that a high school teacher acted by Zelensky is unexpectedly elected President of Ukraine. In this context, it seems that social media has become a "weapon" that functions as a place to raise questions about the war in a "social" way.

However, war is a struggle between nations, and the visual aspects of war are controlled in various ways. If we frame the war through the media in terms of a simple dichotomy of Russia versus Ukraine, we will make a huge mistake. Rather, what is important is to question the violence of the war itself. Therefore, this paper examines the media and the practice of nonviolence. In doing so, I argued that the future of media studies depends on how we respond to the truth, or so-called "Parresia," in a situation where everything is monitored, controlled, selected, and/or erased as noise.

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A striking tendency of the post-Cold War international community is its designation of a specific political system—namely democracy—as ideal domestic regimes as well as the rewards (and sanctions) that it hands out in response to democratization (and autocratization). As part of this, international election monitoring has become standardized as a representative method for promoting democratization. Existing theoretical research on international election monitoring has come to examine why election monitoring suddenly spread as an accepted practice. At the same time, despite limited case studies on the influence or effects of international monitoring, theoretical research has been scarce.

This paper examines the effects of election monitoring by taking the theoretical perspective of “three types of information.” I posit that the assessment resulting from election observation is transmitted as information respectively to 1) the international community, 2) the population of the country under observation, and 3) the government of the country under observation, and that this influences the subsequent behavior of those actors.

In the first instance, the election monitoring informs the international community about the level of democratization achieved by the country under observation. This information may at times lead to sanctions in the form of a withdrawal of aid. At the same time, election monitoring becomes an important way for a developing country that hopes to be rewarded for its democratization to demonstrate to the international community that it is now truly democratic.

In the second instance, it informs the people of the country under observation about whether or not the political process is democratic. Reports about electoral fraud may lead to popular protests, but for a government that is operating an actual democratic system, election observers play a deeply significant role as third-party witnesses who can attest to it before the people.

In the third instance, it serves to clarify the international standard for fair elections to the government of the country under observation. This paper takes particular note of the international dimension of the creation of electoral authoritarianism, which refers to how the acquisition of the aforementioned information has allowed some states to adapt to the international standard and become so-called “electoral authoritarian” states.

Furthermore, when we consider that a single report from an election monitoring mission imparts information to multiple recipients, this allows us to integrate and organize the arguments of previous studies into a single framework from the viewpoint of information. This opens up the possibility for an examination of the political consequences of election observation from a composite perspective.

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