This event is online only.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Studies Program at New York University for the first session of the series “Ukraine in Focus,” featuring Olga Onuch. Moderated by Anastasiia Vlasenko.
Ukraine in Focus is a public webinar series on war, society, and politics in contemporary Ukraine, co-sponsored by the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Twelve sessions across the 2026–2027 academic year pair an invited speaker with a faculty moderator, followed by open audience questions. Sessions are scheduled at midday Eastern, evening in Kyiv, so that speakers based in Ukraine can take part live. Moderated by Anastasiia Vlasenko, Visiting Assistant Professor in Ukrainian Studies at NYU. See the full schedule.
What holds a society together under sustained attack, and what wears it down? In the opening session of Ukraine in Focus, Olga Onuch joins us to examine Ukrainian society in the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion: how civic identity and a sense of democratic duty have shaped wartime endurance, where the strains of displacement, loss, and exhaustion are showing, and what large-scale survey evidence tells us that day-to-day coverage of the war cannot. Onuch’s research has consistently upended assumptions about Ukrainian political behaviour — first in her work on the Euromaidan and mass mobilisation, and more recently in The Zelensky Effect, which argues that Ukraine’s wartime leadership is best understood as a product of the civic nation that produced it rather than of one man’s charisma. Her MOBILISE project has tracked why people protest, migrate, and stay, giving her a rare longitudinal view of how Ukrainian society has changed since 2013. The conversation considers what resilience actually means as an empirical claim rather than a slogan, whether it can be sustained, and what Ukraine’s experience contributes to how political scientists understand identity, endurance, and democratic commitment under extreme pressure. An open audience question period follows.
Olga Onuch is Professor (Chair) in Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester. She became the first-ever holder of a full professorship in Ukrainian politics in the English-speaking world. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and previously held posts at Harvard, Toronto, and Oxford. She is the author of Mapping Mass Mobilization: Understanding Revolutionary Moments in Argentina and Ukraine and, with Henry E. Hale, of The Zelensky Effect, which analyzes the rise of civic identity and democratic duty in Ukraine and has been widely reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian. She is also editor of Revolutionary Moments. Onuch leads the MOBILISE project, a multi-country study of the micro-foundations of out-migration and mass protest funded through the Open Research Area scheme with support from research councils in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. She is principal investigator of Identity and Borders in Flux: The Case of Ukraine, funded by the British Academy, and in 2022 joined the #DataForUkraine project on civilian resistance and human rights alongside colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics, Duke, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Maryland. In 2024 she co-founded the British Association for the Study of Ukraine. Her research on democratic engagement, civic identity, and political behavior has led her to advise government agencies and policymakers in Canada, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and she is a frequent commentator in international media.
