35 Years of Independence: Ukraine's Revolutions, Sacrifice, Global Recognition

When Ukraine declared independence in 1991, the world gained a new state. Thirty-five years later, it is clear that independent Ukraine was not just a byproduct of the Soviet collapse – it was forged out of a long fight over who was ultimately able to define the country: empire, elites, or its own citizens. And the fight is far from finished. Ukraine’s independence was approved by parliament on Aug. 24, 1991 after a failed Soviet coup, and confirmed by an overwhelming nationwide referendum on Dec. 1, 1991. The US recognized Ukraine’s independence on Dec. 25, 1991, as the Soviet Union dissolved.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. But independence did not immediately create a finished state. It opened a harder question that Ukrainians have answered again and again: what kind of country was independence supposed to build? Over the subsequent three and a half decades, Ukraine moved through economic collapse, oligarchic rule, democratic uprisings, Russian pressure, cultural revival, war, occupation, and full-scale invasion. It hasn’t moved in a straight line, more a cycle of civic awakenings, setbacks and renewal, with the country forced repeatedly to defend the same choice in different forms. As one analysis of Ukraine’s post-Soviet development argues, the country’s path has often resembled “two steps forward, one step back,” with civil society repeatedly returning to the unfinished democratic agenda of independence. Other Topics of Interest 10 Ukrainian Soldiers, Once Listed as Missing, Return Home via Belarus Ten Ukrainian service members previously listed as missing in action returned home through Belarus in a new stage of prisoner exchange. A rally in the square near the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Kyiv, Aug.24, 1991. The H.S. Pshenychny Central State Film, Photo, and Audio Archive of Ukraine. (Photo: Wikipedia) The struggle to build a state Ukraine began independence with the formal attributes of statehood but with many of the Soviet system’s habits still embedded in politics, administration and the economy. The new state inherited borders, institutions, an industrial economy and one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals. It also inherited corruption, centralized bureaucracy, powerful regional economic clans and a political class divided between democratic transformation and continuity with the Soviet past. Britannica notes that early independent Ukraine had to build parliamentary democracy, conduct diplomacy, address nuclear disarmament, manage relations with Russia, and define the status of Crimea while facing severe economic difficulties. The compromise that produced independence in 1991 joined national-democratic forces with the Ukrainian Soviet republic’s old elites. That arrangement helped make independence possible, but it also slowed reforms and allowed many Soviet-era power networks to survive inside the new state. Some of those networks never fully went away – a fact Ukrainians would keep running into, including decades later, in the middle of a full-scale war. For Ukrainians, state-building therefore became more than a matter of institutions. It became a recurring struggle over whether independence would mean sovereignty in name only or a genuine democratic break from empire. That struggle produced three revolutions, each affecting not only the government in power and Ukraine’s modern political identity, but changing Ukrainian society as a whole. These mass civic movements kept forcing the country back to the meaning of independence. Revolution on Granite (1990) The first of three modern revolutions was the Revolution on Granite in 1990. Student protesters launched a hunger strike in Kyiv in October Revolution Square (now Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square). The movement demanded political change and became one of the decisive civic actions before independence. The “Winning Freedom: Ukraine 1989-1991” archive describes the Revolution on Granite as a large and highly organized student protest wave, with tents erected in central Kyiv on Oct. 2, 1990. The Revolution on Granite student hunger strike, 1990 (Photo: Viktor Marushchenko/Wikipedia) The scale was small, but the effect expanded exponentially. A core group of roughly 200 students went on hunger strike in tents on the square, while thousands more joined strikes and marches in support across Kyiv and other cities. Their demands were openly defiant of the Soviet establishment: early parliamentary elections on a multiparty basis, nationalization of Communist Party property, military service for Ukrainian conscripts only on Ukrainian territory, and the resignation of Prime Minister Vitaliy Masol. The latter made this protest the first time in Soviet Ukraine that street pressure had removed a sitting head of government. Fewer than 11 months later, the same parliament that had negotiated with the students voted for independence. The Orange Revolution (2004) This second modern revolution came after a presidential election widely viewed as fraudulent. Mass protests erupted after Viktor Yanukovych, backed by Moscow, was declared the winner against Viktor Yushchenko. Ukraine’s Supreme Court ordered a repeat vote, which Yushchenko won. Britannica describes the 2004 election crisis as bringing Ukraine to the brink of disintegration and civil conflict before the rerun produced a peaceful outcome. The Orange Revolution did not solve Ukraine’s structural problems. Its leaders later split, reforms stalled, and disillusionment followed. But the revolution changed expectations. It showed that citizens would not passively accept falsified elections and that Ukrainian democracy could be defended by mass nonviolent pressure. The 2004 crisis was violent before it was electoral. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin during the campaign, an attempt on his life that left his face permanently disfigured and that he survived to keep campaigning. After the Nov. 21 runoff was declared for Yanukovych, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians occupied central Kyiv in freezing weather for weeks, sustained by strikes, sit-ins and a tent city that stretched down Khreshchatyk – Kyiv’s central drag. On Dec. 3, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled the election invalid and ordered a repeat runoff for Dec. 26, which Yushchenko won with about 52 percent. The precedent mattered more than the result: a court had overturned a stolen election under public pressure, without troops firing on crowds. The first day of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv, 2004. (Photo: Serhiy / Wikipedia) The Revolution of Dignity (2013-14) The third modern revolution was deeper and bloodier. It began after Yanukovych abandoned a planned association agreement with the EU under pressure from Moscow. Protests on Kyiv’s Maidan grew after police violently dispersed students. The movement evolved into a national uprising against authoritarianism, corruption and Russia’s attempt to pull Ukraine back into its orbit. Britannica notes that the protests became the largest since the Orange Revolution and that demonstrators occupied Kyiv’s city hall while calling on Yanukovych to resign. The Revolution of Dignity made one thing clear: Ukraine’s European choice wasn’t just geopolitical – it was civic and moral. “Dignity” meant the right to a state that did not beat its students, steal its elections or sell its future under foreign pressure. A scene from the Euromaidan in Kyiv. Petro Poroshenko's speech, Dec. 8, 2013 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe) What began as a small protest became a revolution because of state violence. The first crowd gathered on the Maidan on the night of Nov. 21, 2013, after journalist Mustafa Nayyem posted a call on Facebook asking who was ready to come out. Numbers were modest until riot police beat student demonstrators on Nov. 30, after which hundreds of thousands filled the square in protest at the beating itself. Parliament’s passage of sweeping anti-protest legislation in January 2014, known as the “dictatorship laws,” pushed the standoff into street fighting. From Feb. 18-20, snipers and security forces killed scores of protesters in central Kyiv; the dead are remembered in Ukraine as the Heavenly Hundred. Yanukovych fled the capital on Feb. 22 and later surfaced in Russia. Within days, Russian forces without insignia appeared in Crimea – making 2014 the year Ukraine’s internal democratic struggle turned into a war for its existence. Together, these three revolutions made independence something Ukrainians actually practiced, not just declared. Each one pushed the boundaries of who counted as a citizen, and each left society a little more experienced, a little more organized, and a lot less patient with rulers who answered to no one. Independence at war Russia’s war against Ukraine transformed the meaning of sovereignty. In 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity and Yanukovych’s flight, Russia invaded and occupied Crimea, then fueled war in eastern Ukraine. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24, 2022, brought the question into even sharper focus. Ukraine wasn’t just defending territory anymore. It was defending the principle that its independence didn’t require Russia’s consent. Russia’s war also shattered one of Moscow’s core assumptions: that Ukraine was divided, weak and culturally dependent enough to collapse under pressure. Instead, the invasion consolidated a modern Ukrainian political identity. The LSE Public Policy Review argues that Russian President Vladmir Putin’s full-scale invasion helped destroy what remained of the Soviet myth of “fraternal” relations between Ukrainians and Russians, and consolidated Ukrainian identity as politically and culturally separate from Russia. That consolidation hasn’t meant unity on everything – Ukrainians have argued, sometimes fiercely, over how the war should be fought, how long martial law should last, and how much wartime power any president should hold. The price has been enormous. Crimea remains occupied, parts of Donbas have been devastated, and the full-scale invasion has brought mass displacement, destroyed cities, energy blackouts, torture chambers, deportations and daily loss. Yet the war has also changed how Ukraine is seen. Before 2022, many abroad still viewed Ukraine through Russia, as a borderland or buffer. Since 2022, the world has had to see Ukraine differently: not a buffer zone, but a state with its own agency, its own resilience, its own culture – one that can’t be folded back into its former imperial ruler. The human cost of sovereignty Every Independence Day since 2022 has meant two things at once: a celebration of statehood, and a memorial for the people who have died defending it. That sacrifice shows up in concrete places: military cemeteries, destroyed apartment blocks, schools turned into shelters, families still waiting on prisoners of war, and towns near the front line where life goes on under constant threat. Ukraine’s sovereignty is defended by soldiers, but also by medics, railway workers, teachers, emergency crews, energy workers, volunteers, journalists, and families who choose to stay, rebuild or return. This human cost has reshaped Ukrainian national memory. Independence is no longer remembered only through the 1991 referendum or the raising of the blue-and-yellow flag. It is also remembered through Bucha, Mariupol, Bakhmut, Kherson, Izium, Irpin, Avdiivka, Kramatorsk, and hundreds of smaller places whose names have become part of the moral geography of the war. Culture has carried that memory outward. Ukrainian writers, filmmakers, musicians and documentarians have helped explain that Russia’s war is not only a military invasion, but an attack on language, memory and the right to exist as a separate people. Films such as Sergei Loznitsa’s “Maidan,” Valentyn Vasyanovych’s “Atlantis,” and Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol” brought different moments of Ukraine’s struggle to international audiences: civic uprising, postwar imagination and the destruction of a besieged city. “20 Days in Mariupol” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2024, making it one of the most globally recognized Ukrainian films about Russia’s full-scale invasion. Literature has done similar work. Writers such as Serhiy Zhadan, Oksana Zabuzhko, Andrey Kurkov, Victoria Amelina and Artem Chapeye have described Ukraine not as a news event, but as a society of memory, contradiction, humor, grief and resistance. Their work helped international readers understand that Ukraine’s struggle did not begin in 2022 and cannot be reduced to battlefield maps. The unfinished work of independence At 35, Ukraine’s independence is still unfinished. Not as a legal matter, but because statehood was never going to be a one-time achievement. It is, instead, a daily discipline. The country still faces corruption, institutional strain, wartime exhaustion, demographic loss, economic damage, and the challenge of rebuilding under threat. In 2025, that tension became public: mass protests broke out in Kyiv after the government moved to curb the independence of anti-corruption investigators, and the law was reversed within days. These more recent protests proved a reminder that the same civic reflex that drove the revolutions – refusing to let power go unchecked – is still very much alive, and still occasionally aimed at Kyiv itself, not just Moscow. Its democracy operates under martial law. Millions of citizens remain displaced. Occupied territories still wait for liberation. But Ukraine’s 35 years also show something rare: a society that repeatedly corrected the course of its state when elites failed. The Revolution on Granite showed that students could shake a dying empire. The Orange Revolution showed that a fraudulent election could be overturned without troops and tanks. Then the Revolution of Dignity made the deeper point: democracy and sovereignty aren’t separable. And Russia’s war has driven home the message that independence isn’t only defended at the border, but also in language, memory, institutions, and the plain refusal to disappear. In 1991, Ukraine’s independence was a declaration, and today it is a lived national fact – one that allies recognize, enemies fear, and the people defending it are still paying for. The 35th anniversary isn’t just a date on the calendar. It marks how far Ukraine has come – from a place treated as something between other countries, to a nation the world can no longer misname, overlook, or decide for.