Abstract:

The Ukrainian Diaspora is one of the largest dispersed communities in the world. This paper describes how the Ukrainian Diaspora has formed over the past century and how its members maintain strong links with the home country. With crisis happening in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Diaspora has connected using social media to bring about real outcomes for Ukraine.

The Ukrainian diaspora has connected and united using social media and modern technology. Utilising online platforms, this community has brought an awareness and added political pressure regarding issues and crisis occurring in the ‘home’ country to bring about real outcomes for citizens in Ukraine.

New types of connectivity have been made available to diasporic communities around the world through the emergence of social media. The Ukrainian diaspora is one of the largest dispersed communities to have used the affordances of social media to enact transnational activism to support people in the homeland as well as disseminate information about events and crisis happening in Ukraine to a broader worldwide audience. This paper examines the mechanisms and events that have led to one of the largest diasporic communities in the world and how this transnational group utilises social media to assist the Ukrainian people in times of crisis both politically and humanitarianly. I will discuss specific examples of this action during the events of the Euromaidan movements of 2013 and 2014 which saw the Ukrainian government disbanded, leading to a more democratic modern-day Ukraine. While this article does not discuss the modern-day crisis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 in detail, it attempts to serve as a historical introduction. I will account for how the Ukrainian diaspora has formed over the past century and methods by which this community mediates communication with a goal of assisting compatriots in the homeland (Hepp, 2009).

Historically Ukraine has one of the largest diasporic communities in the world with the global community comprising of approximately twenty million people prior to the current refugee crisis (Krasynska, 2015). This community has been migrating over many decades as discussed in the following.

Throughout the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, there has been many waves of emigration from the region and country we now know as we know as Ukraine. Researchers of Ukrainian migration use the term “fourth-wave migration” (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016) to describe the historical periods in which large numbers of Ukrainian people emigrated from the country. The first wave consisted of the movement of rural people due to the economic and political circumstances that the population were under during Russian and Austro-Hungarian rule (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). This wave started in the late 19^th century and lasted until the beginning of World War 1 (1914). It found large numbers of migrants immigrating to Siberia and the Altai from eastern Ukraine. While from western Ukraine migrants moved to western Europe and the Americas (mostly USA, Canada, Argentina and Brazil) (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). The second wave is seen to have happened during the inter-war period between the beginning of World War 1 (1914) and the end of World War 2 (1945) due to the turmoil and oppression that these conflicts invoked. Similar patterns to the first wave of migration occurred during this period. The third wave occurred post World War 2 and during the “Socialist mobilization projects of the 1950s and 1960s” (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016) that were occurring in the Soviet Union. The fourth wave came post the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when Ukraine gained independence. This wave was predominately due to socioeconomical and employment reasons with many Ukrainians in search for more opportunities and a better life abroad after a huge restructuring of labour and economy markets occurring at the time (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). It is likely that there is a fifth wave of Ukrainian migration underway, as a result of the February 2022 invasion of Russia into Ukraine and ensuing war. Thus far, 3.6million refugees have fled the country with the bulk making their way west with Poland receiving the highest proportion of fleeing residents (Operational Data Portal, n.d.).

Due to this tumultuous history of political persecution, economic pressure, and the search for a better life, Ukrainian migrants often maintain “cultural and economic linkages with the homeland” (Krasynska, 2015; Lokot & Boichak, 2022). In this way it is appropriate to discuss this population as a diaspora. Diasporas are communities of migrants which maintain engaged with the history and the future of their country of origin with a high degree of political engagement (Lokot & Boichak, 2022). Not only do diasporic Ukrainians maintain political engagement with Ukraine but they also support their countrymen financially. In recent years the Ukrainian diaspora has leveraged the tools made available by social media to fund issues in the homeland. In April 2022, the social media platform Global Citizen had a pledging event known as “Stand Up for Ukraine” which recently announced $10.1 billion (USD) in cash grants and loans to support refugees in Ukraine (Global Citizen, 2022).  This form of social capital indicates that significant outcomes can be made through diasporic communities coming together through social media. Private remittances to Ukraine in 2020 according to the National Bank of Ukraine was USD $12 billion (IOM, 2021). These private remittances are an important revenue for the country’s currency earnings accounting for 7.7 per cent of the Ukraine’s gross domestic product (IOM, 2021). With this commitment diasporic Ukrainians are likely to mobilise when the country encounters hardship.

During 2013 and 2014, the country of Ukraine underwent political changes brought about a movement known as Euromaidan or the Orange Revolution. The Euromaidan movement was an organised protest which motivations were to see the Ukraine’s politics and governance align more with western European countries and move away from Russian influence from the East. The protests were seen as a “Hashtag revolution”, due to the influence that social media had on the movement, especially between the Ukrainian diaspora throughout the world (Onuch, 2015). It started in November 2013, with the Ukrainian government’s refusal to sign Free Trade and Associate Agreements with the European Union (EU) (Onuch, 2015). This was seen by the Ukrainian people to be a pro-Russian move with many Ukrainians feeling that the government representing them was becoming increasingly authoritarian, with pressure from Putin and the Kremlin for Ukraine to severe ties with western Europe and become more aligned with the East. The Euromaidan movement climaxed in numbers in December 2013 after a group of students and journalists were brutally beaten by police in Kyiv on November 30 (Onuch, 2015). This shifted the focus of the movement from a politically motivated uprising to a human and civil rights protest, at its peak seeing an estimated 800, 000 protesters on the streets of the capital Kyiv with many other sizable protests in other cities around Ukraine and indeed throughout the world (Onuch, 2015). Euromaidan had its bloodiest period in February 2014, with Ukrainian police firing on a crowd, killing around 100 and wounding many more (Pifer, 2020). This movement ended in late February 2014 with the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych and appointment of an interim government to be replaced with new elections. Viktor Yanukovych fled the country to Russia following his removal.  The digitally mediated nature of these protests made participation universally accessible to the diasporic Ukrainian community (Lokot & Boichak, 2022).

Social media gave a platform from which activism could take place remotely from anywhere in the world. The online technology became a boundary object with which both local activists and diasporic activists could use as a conduit to disseminate information as well as facilitate deployment and coordination of protesters (Krasynska, 2015; Lokot & Boichak). This community of activists had become a third place for Ukrainians living in Ukraine and diasporic Ukrainians wanting to contribute to affairs int their homeland, while residing in various countries throughout the world. This brought about the social capital to influence action. One way in which the diasporic community used social media to contribute to the movement was through the process of translation and dissemination of information (Lokot & Boichak). By sharing public opinion and dispelling misinformation and disinformation in real time (Lokot & Boichak). This action would serve to inform Western audiences of events happening and reasons for the protests in Ukraine (Lokot & Boichak). The translation performed by the diasporic Ukrainian community on Ukraine news and issues was both literal in the process of translating them into English and other languages but also figuratively by making them understandable to a Western audience. This process served to stir up public opinion with the goal of putting pressure on Western governments and organisations to take action in what was seen as anti-democratic and authoritarian actions from a supposedly democratic government (Krasynska, 2015).

A case study in which the translation of Ukrainian news and events is that of DigitalMaidan, a Twitter hashtag (Krasynska, 2015). Andrea Chalupa, the creator of  DigitalMaidan , is a journalist based in New York with a Ukrainian heritage. Inspired by the film “Blackfish”, she initiated a social media movement which brought light on the unfortunate plight of dolphins off the coast of Taiji, Japan (Krasynska, 2015). When this exercise was successful, she thought: “If this could work so well for dolphins, then why don’t we use it for Ukraine?” (Krasynska, 2015). This gave way to DigitalMaidan, which leveraged the social media platform Twitter. The DigitalMaidan hashtag had an emphasis on twitterstorms which involves a sudden large uptick in tweets on Twitter about a particular topic in a short period of time. This served to draw attention and in turn awareness about the events happening in Ukraine during Euromaidan. The first twitterstorm was organised on January 27^th, 2014 through a Facebook event called “EuroMaidan: #DigitalMaidan Twitter Storm” (Krasynska, 2015). The group originally had ninety-nine invitees but by the third day of the groups creation and the scheduled date for the storm (January 27^th), the group had 30,000 invitees. The Twitterstorms main targets were politicians of Western countries such as the U.S.A, Canada and Germany, in order to pressure governments to impose sanctions on the government of Ukraine (Krasynska, 2015). DigitalMaidan had enormous success with the hashtag #digitalmaidan becoming the number one trending topic throughout the world on Twitter. It had many prominent individuals weighing in on the Ukrainian movement such as former U.S president Bill Clinton who wrote “Kudos to brave Ukrainians demanding real democracy. Urge dialogue & peaceful resolution to achieve a strong, united Ukraine. They can do it!.” ( Krasynska, 2015). Attracting that amount of international attention including tweets which describe the opinions of high profile individuals such as Bill Clinton outlines how the Ukrainian diaspora was succeeding in their objective to spread awareness and bring about change through the use of social media. This served as pressure on the Ukrainian government with now what was an international audience. In turn the pressure domestically and internationally became too great for the authoritarian government which disbanded in February 2014.

Since the Euromaidan movement, also known as the “Revolution of Dignity” (Pifer, 2020), there has been other unrest within Ukraine and incursion into the country. We have seen the annexation of Crimea by Russian forces and the creation of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics which all reside in the east of Ukraine (Knoblock, 2020). These have all been events that have contributed to adverse circumstances leading to more migration from these regions and indeed internationally from Ukraine. Now with the Russian invasion we are seeing unprecedented rates of emigration in this current period. While there is not much research into the Ukrainian diaspora’s response to these recent events, social media will remain a tool in which this community will continue to use to assist their countrymen in any way they can.

The Ukrainian diaspora as a community largely maintains its social,  indicates that while a person who emigrated from might be a citizen of another country, they still consider themselves Ukrainian (Knoblock, 2020). This gives way to a sense of belonging which triggers the formation of new groups and communities through many means, but particularly through social media. This online Ukrainian community, of which has dispersed from Ukraine, or the region known as The Ukraine prior to 1991, has moved due to many geopolitical and adverse circumstances. These circumstances serve to empower diasporic Ukrainians to use social media to take part both politically as well as fiscally through donations which serve as a large proportion of gross domestic product for Ukraine. With the current circumstances of Russia invading Ukraine in February 2022, it is likely that this commitment will continue.

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References

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