As Ukraine marks the 35th anniversary of its restored independence, its foundational documents affirm that modern Ukrainian statehood is not a Soviet residue or a post-Cold War accident, but the fulfillment of a long constitutional and political trajectory.
Nowhere is this continuity clearer than in a side-by-side reading of Ukraine’s two modern declarations of independence: the Fourth Universal of the Ukrainian Central Rada (Ukraine’s de facto parliament at the time) proclaimed on Jan. 22, 1918, and the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, adopted on Aug. 24, 1991, by the republic’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Separated by 73 years of Soviet suppression, forced famine, and totalitarian violence, these two texts read like sequential chapters of a single constitutional manifesto: crises engineered from Moscow, an unbroken lineage of Ukrainian state-building, a rejection of imperial rule in favor of uncompromised sovereignty, legitimacy grounded in the democratic will of the people.
But between them is silence that tells us as much about the fragility of independence as the declarations themselves do about its legitimacy.
Ukraine’s modern declarations of independence compared
Recall the atmosphere in Kyiv during the winter of 1917-18. The Russian Empire had collapsed into revolution, and the Ukrainian Central Rada led by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, had initially sought autonomy within a reformed, democratic Russian federation. But as Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime launched a military invasion against the fledgling Ukrainian state, federalist illusions evaporated.
The Fourth Universal opens not with abstract theory but with the plain language of emergency, describing four years of war, economic collapse, and encroaching famine, before naming the immediate catalyst: Russian troops advancing on Kyiv to crush Ukraine’s young democracy.
Independence in both cases was a matter of self-defense, not aggressive nationalism.
Then comes the constitutional turn: “From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes an independent, subjection-to-no-one, free, sovereign state of the Ukrainian people.”
Seventy-three years later, history repeated its cadence. On Aug. 24, 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the failed hardline coup in Moscow, Ukraine’s parliament convened in Kyiv.
Drafted by the democratic minority that included former political prisoners, the Act of Declaration of Independence was short, urgent, and historically decisive. Like its 1918 predecessor, it opens by invoking crisis: “In view of the mortal danger that hung over Ukraine in connection with the coup d’état in the USSR...”
It places the decision on three pillars – a thousand-year tradition of Ukrainian state development, the right to self-determination under the UN Charter, and the execution of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty. With those words, the Soviet empire was legally dissolved on Ukrainian soil.
Ukraine’s Act of Declaration of Independence
Set beside each other, the two documents reveal the enduring mechanics of Ukrainian statehood. Independence in both cases was a matter of self-defense, not aggressive nationalism – a bulwark against instability and imperial manipulation, not a quest for territory or glory.
Each marks the exact moment Ukrainian leaders recognized that coexistence within a Russian-dominated federation was impossible – in 1917 the Rada sought autonomy and got war; in 1991 Ukraine was being pressured into settling for a reformed union treaty but got a coup aiming to preserve Moscow-rule over the crumbling Soviet empire.
Sovereignty, in each text, belongs to the people themselves rather than to a monarch or a party elite: the 1918 Universal vests power exclusively in the people of Ukraine, the 1991 Act invokes universal democratic principles and international law.
The aspiration behind these declarations reaches further back than either 1918 or 1991. The 1991 Act’s reference to a “thousand-year tradition” gestures toward the medieval statehood of Kyivan Rus, the democratic customs of the Cossack Hetmanate, and Pylyp Orlyk’s 1710 Constitution – one of Europe’s earliest attempts to limit executive power by written law.
Early modern maps labeled the region Ukraine, terra Cossacorum – “Ukraine, land of the Cossack” – while Orlyk’s own defiant phrase, Ucraina, quae libera semper fuit, “Ukraine, which was always free,” captured a belief that self-governance was inherent, not granted by a tsar. The great Voltaire conveyed this sentiment when he wrote in 1731 “Ukraine has always aspired to be free.”
In the 19th century, the poet Taras Shevchenko carried that conviction through generations of imperial suppression, turning the memory of Cossack freedom into a modern political awakening. Long before 1918, in other words, Ukrainians had already insisted – in law, in cartography, in verse – that they governed, or sought to govern, themselves.
How and why Ukraine’s first modern declaration of independence has been ignored
And yet, for all it shares with its 1918 predecessor, the 1991 Act withheld something crucial: any mention of 1918 itself. It does not name the Fourth Universal, does not acknowledge that Ukraine had proclaimed – and briefly held and fought for – modern independence once before.
That silence is not a minor omission. It reveals how deeply Soviet historical consciousness had penetrated even the moment of its own undoing.
The parliament that voted for independence in 1991 still held a Communist majority, inherited from the very system it was leaving. To acknowledge 1918 openly meant admitting that Ukrainian independence had a pre-Soviet history – that the Ukrainian SSR was not Ukraine’s original or natural form but the product of conquest and forced incorporation.
It meant recasting 1991 as restoration rather than creation: a renewal of sovereignty violently interrupted, not a first arrival at it. Whatever calculus individual deputies made, the effect was to let Ukraine’s newest independence appear unprecedented, experimental, uncertain – Soviet in origin even as it broke from Soviet rule.
The consequences were not merely symbolic. By declining to fasten itself to 1918, Ukraine’s new state missed a chance to root itself in a deeper constitutional memory – to insist that it was not a novice learning self-rule for the first time, but a nation reclaiming a sovereignty it had already, however briefly, exercised and lost.
Instead, the country inherited a subtler version of the narrative it was trying to escape: that Ukrainian statehood began with Soviet power and that anything before it was prelude, irrelevant, or illegitimate.
The perpetuation of a damaging myth
The importance of what had occurred on Jan. 22, 1918, was further obscured under President Leonid Kuchma in early 2001 by his focusing on what had happened exactly a year after the Fourth Universal.
On Jan. 22, 1919, the union of central and western Ukraine was proclaimed by the representatives of their respective independent republics even as they were fighting the Russians in the east and the Poles in the west. Of course, this too is an important historic date. But the seemingly calculated celebration on Jan. 22 only of the “Day of Unity” had the effect of removing the Ukraine’s first modern declaration of independence from national memory.
It is worth recalling that this occurred when the “patriotic” Viktor Yushchenko was already Kuchma’s prime minister. The same president went on to publish a book named “Ukraine is not Russia,” and when Yushchenko was himself elected president he did not set the record straight about the significance of Jan. 22, 1918.
This half-completed reckoning helps explain why decommunization proceeded so haltingly through the 1990s, why Soviet-era elites slid so easily into post-Soviet institutions, and why Ukraine struggled for years to articulate a national identity distinct from both Soviet and Russian frameworks.
Even in 2018, on the centenary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence, the then also “patriotic” president, Petro Poroshenko, observed Jan. 22 in the presence of foreign diplomats as simply the Day of Unity. President Zelensky also seems to be neglecting to emphasize that independence was declared in early 1918 and the attempt to unite western and central Ukraine in one sovereign state followed logically a year later.
Lessons for today
In 1991 the formal empire had fallen; the revolution in consciousness took much longer – and in some respects is still underway.
That unfinished work of memory is not an academic footnote to the present war – it is one of its stakes. Russia’s invasion is not a contemporary border dispute; it is the latest iteration of a centuries-old imperial campaign to deny that Ukraine has ever governed itself or ever had the right to.
Just as Lenin’s forces invaded Ukraine in 1918 under the language of “brotherly assistance,” Putin’s forces invaded in 2022 claiming to rescue a country from an identity it does not, in Moscow’s telling, own. The argument has not changed in a century. Only the weapons have.
The failure to hold the state won in 1918 offers a sober lesson that Ukrainians have not forgotten: internal fragmentation and insufficient outside support allowed the Bolsheviks to conquer a fledgling republic, and the price was seven decades of totalitarian rule, the engineered starvation of millions in the Holodomor, and the attempted erasure of a people’s memory of itself and their very identity.
It is time Ukraine’s current government finally acknowledge unambivalently that Aug. 24, 1991 was an affirmation of what had already occurred on Jan. 22, 1918
Ukraine’s 1991 declaration should have said, plainly, that it had happened before, had been crushed, and was now being restored. It did not say so.
But 35 years on, during a protracted war fought explicitly over the question of whether Ukraine has the right to exist as a sovereign state, Ukrainians are saying yes and still reclaiming a thousand years that no empire’s manipulation or internal foes can undo.
Ukraine was not created by bureaucratic fiat, and it was not created by the collapse of an empire it happened to be trapped inside of. It was built on an ancient inheritance of self-rule, reasserted at moments of mortal danger, and is now being defended by a generation that understands, with total clarity, what earlier generations sometimes could not yet say aloud: without a sovereign state, there is no liberty, no democracy, and no peace worth the name.
As Ukraine celebrates its 35th anniversary of modern independent statehood, it is time Ukraine’s current government set the record straight and finally acknowledge unambivalently that Aug. 24, 1991 was an affirmation of what had already occurred on Jan. 22, 1918, and what the patriots of the day were also fighting for.
There are no more excuses for forgetting or pretending that it was otherwise.
The author is completing a book examining Ukraine’s first 35 years of modern independent statehood, provisionally titled “Indomitable Ukraine 1991-2026: The Reemergence of a European Nation.”