Chains of insecurities: constructing Ukraine’s agency in times of war

ABSTRACT

This article maps how Ukraine’s international agency has been discursively constructed through juxtaposing and relating different insecurities triggered by the Russian full-scale invasion in 2022. How does Ukraine persuade its partners of the validity of its approach to these insecurities, what is the intentionality behind its strategy, and how do they contribute to the production of the Ukrainian agency? It argues that Ukraine’s agency is developed in the context of the battlefield, and therefore becomes a heavy loaded security concept with a strong normative background. By addressing numerous insecurities in energy supply, environmental and nuclear hazards, and disruption of food transportation, Ukraine builds the strategic narrative of the war as an intrinsic part of European security governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia’s war in Ukraine
• Ukraine
• (in)security
• discourse
• agency
• normative power
• security governance

Introduction

This article addresses the international agency of Ukraine, a pressing topic in academic debate actualized by Russia’s full-scale invasion. Before 2022, Ukraine was largely perceived as a victim of Russian encroachments, but not as a meaningful political subject capable of making existential decisions with substantial repercussions for the broader system of international relations. Since 2022, Ukraine’s once overlooked international agency has transformed to become a purposeful producer of meaning in the Euro-Atlantic policy space. Clearly, the pre-condition for this agency is the ability of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to resist the Russian military. However, being grounded in hard, material security, Ukraine’s agency now extends to other salient, existential areas of public debate.

In February 2022 Ukraine found itself in a new role as an outpost in a defensive fight of democratic Europe against Russian aggression. Ukraine is less solicitous and more assertively appealing to the arguments of justice, common security and responsibility: “There is no Ukraine separate from Europe” (Zelenskyy, Europe’s …) and now “it is absolutely obvious how unfair and unnatural Ukraine's alienation from Europe was” (Zelenskyy, We must remain … 2022).

The article addresses how Ukraine’s international agency is discursively constructed through juxtapositions of – and interconnections between – different insecurities triggered by the Russian invasion. How are these chains communicated, what is the intentionality behind them, and how do they contribute to the construction of a new Ukrainian agency?

Ukraine’s agency is built upon different types of power: productive, communicational, institutional – all constitutive for Ukraine’s existential and physical security (Kurnyshova 2023). In turn, these power types are contingent upon the ongoing construction of Ukraine's identity in response to Russian aggression. This explains why Ukraine’s agency is grounded in an indispensable security component which I am going to analyse through my central analytical category – chains of insecurities. I seek to find out what are the key messages Ukraine conveys to its international partners regarding insecurities caused by the war, and how chains of insecurities are used as persuasion tools in external communication. According to my argument, two chains of insecurities are central to Ukrainian agency-in-the-making.

The first one consists of hard/military, energy, food, environmental and human insecurities as its key material nodal points. Evidently, hard (in)security dominates this chain, and its other elements are considered secondary effects of Russian military intervention. The interconnections between the root cause of the problem and its multiple consequences were expressly articulated in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at the G20 summit in Bali in November 2022, which then laid the foundation of Ukraine’s Peace Formula. At the same time, it would be fair to argue that the prospective cessation of military activities won’t solve their malign effects, and multiple insecurities are to remain and be endured by both Ukraine and its allies.

The second type of chain is grounded in a different logic: the connections are constructed not between various insecurities of the global scale, but between Ukraine’s domestic insecurities and their international analogues. In his rhetoric, Volodymyr Zelenskyy frequently draws parallels between Ukrainian and European challenges. For instance, he put in one discursive frame two dimensions of energy insecurity – the destruction of Ukraine’s energy system by Russia, and growing energy prices in Europe. In a similar vein, Zelenskyy also connected the memories of Holodomor with the “Grain from Ukraine” programme, launched in partnership with the EU. He also referred to the experience of a nuclear disaster in Chernobyl to emphasize Ukraine’s concerns about the risks posed by hitting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. These discursive linkages are meant to construct parallels between Ukraine’s and Europe’s insecurities as two sides of the same security coin and while attempting to find a common language with his Western allies, Zelenskyy seeks to place Ukrainian agency at the centre of the discourse.

According to my hypothesis, these two chains are meant to avoid the marginalization of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine within global security agendas, and to streamline Ukraine’s integration into the Euro-Atlantic security architecture as a major component of Ukraine’s international agency. My methodological approach is a constructivist understanding of security as a discursive phenomenon constantly reproduced through engagements and strategic communication with various audiences. In line with critical security studies, I single out different logics, or rationalities of narratives of insecurities using the concepts of intentionality and persuasion that stand behind them. By the same token, I extend this constructivism-based frame to the security governance approach, which I understand as a type of power relations with its own logic, rationality, knowledge management, and “regimes of truth.”

To create my database, I have identified the most representative speech acts (understood as public utterances and pronouncements by political leaders) containing a language of security threats from 24 February 2022 to 24 February 24 2023. I interpret their specific communicative meanings and strategic intentions behind Ukraine’s international agency. Altogether, I cite 37 representative texts, 23 from Ukrainian officials, as well as 14 EU documents. The texts were originally published in either Ukrainian or English, or were translated into English by government agencies or media outlets.

The remainder of the article is structured into three sections. The first one discusses literature and “narrative essentials” immediately prior to and during the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The second section provides examples of the plot structure in Ukraine’s security discourse to demonstrate how different insecurities triggered by the Russian invasion are discursively framed and connected, what is the intentionality behind them, and how they contribute to the construction of the Ukrainian agency. The final section conceptualizes how Ukrainian security narratives are perceived by its Western allies.

Agency and security governance

In this section I discuss how the concept of agency might be applied to Ukraine’s security policy since February 2022. A considerable amount of academic literature looks at international agency through the lens of interests of major powers. These major powers have the resources and geopolitical weight that allow them to choose and alter strategies, as well as impose their policies on other states. Much less is known about the agency of weaker powers, including victims of aggression. To fill this gap, I rely on the concept of security governance that sets the scene for my analysis. Having placed agency at the centre of my research, I explain its functioning through the interrelated notions of intentionality and persuasion, which are instrumental for unpacking the normative meanings behind the chains of insecurities and their political effects.

Conceptualizing the agency-security nexus

The structure – agency debate is one of the recurrent methodological and theoretical points of contention within the International Relations literature. Structuralist approaches are useful in situations of hegemonic stability when agents’ activities “usually reproduce existing conditions” (Joseph 2008, 116). However, when these conditions are radically contested by counter-hegemonic challengers, the role of “collective agency” as exemplified by states (Wendt 2005, 593) drastically increases. This is particularly so for the so-called “cusp states” – Ukraine included – that might be described as “pivots whose movement can alter the strategic landscape” (Robins 2014, 3).

In its most generalized form, “agency is the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general) to act in a world” (Adler-Nissen 2016, 93). Agreeing with this broad definition, I use constructivist approaches to international politics (Guzzini 2000) and security studies (Huysmans 2002). Constructivist approaches have dethroned national interests from their privileged position in the realism-dominated field of international relations, and substituted them with the centrality of identity as the core locus of (geo)politics. However, with its growing application in academic literature, identity became an overused concept, often reduced to a limited set of “essential” characteristics that frame foreign policy behaviour. This is why I opted for a more nuanced research vocabulary that fits in a constructivist paradigm, while helping explain the operationalization of agency through the lens of intentionality and persuasion.

Of course, international agency is a multifaceted phenomenon. Thus, Colin Wight identified three levels of agency in the international arena: agency as self-awareness (“sense of direction, purpose and volition”) (Wight 1999, 131), agency as identification with certain collectives and groups that serve as major reference points of an agent’s identity, and agency as a specific subject-position occupied by such actors as diplomats, ministers, military officers, etc. The case of Ukraine seems to be illustrative of interconnections between these levels in the sense that self-awareness and self-assertiveness are tied to normative and political association with the Euro-Atlantic international society and sustained by the aggregated voices of political elites and the media. Due to this consolidation, the first year of the invasion was characterized by a rather generalized discourse, and President Zelenskyy acted as its main mouthpiece (Rop 2023), both domestically and internationally: Zelenskyy’s systematic presence in Western media and political and public fora has been a major factor of influencing the political attitudes towards Ukraine in the United States and Europe (Barry 2023). Zelenskyy’s public presence confirms that charismatic and institutionally empowered leaders are key shapers of the nation’s security narratives (Krebs 2015, 4) which are internalized among the masses and elites as in the case of Ukraine (Ilko Kucheriv, January 2023).

Against this backdrop, my research does not support the radical qualification of agency as necessarily subversive and disruptive of the extant order. As I will show, Ukraine’s “democratic agency” (Ermann 2012) remains oriented toward sustaining and strengthening the basic normative principles of the Euro-Atlantic international society which are democracy, justice, and the rule of law. Arguably, the war in Ukraine may contribute to the liberal order’s cohesion as democratic states (so far) have shown resolve in their support of Ukraine (Flockhart and Korosteleva 2022), largely due to Ukraine’s ability to persuade the West of the validity of its security arguments.

However, my research does not support the idea that wars necessarily destroy, undermine or ruin agency. Vivienne Jabri, for example, posited that “the matrix of war, the matrix of internment, the matrix of detention, all seek the obliteration of the subject so targeted, so confined and interned, their disappearance from the matrix of power” (Jabri 2005, 74). Yet my argument is different: Russia’s military invasion became an accelerator for Ukrainian agency-in-the-making. This approach engages with the French critical theory that defines agency through the discursive struggle for recognition as equal and meaningful speaking subjects: political agency grows out of “a negative experience of denial of recognition of their abilities as moral agents. … The motive of struggle is central, not just as a dimension of politics, but in the very constitution of the political agents” (Deranty 2003).

More specifically, there are two concepts that are helpful for finding out how Ukraine’s international agency is constructed through the juxtapositions of different insecurities. One is intentionality as a capacity to formulate and make strategic choices (Lake and Powell 1999). To unpack intentionality, we need to find out what purposes Ukrainian security discourses serve, what is the ultimate strategy and through what messages this strategy is articulated. The other concept is persuasion as a precondition for admittance into the security order of states, to which Ukraine is eager to belong. The core question at this point is how Ukrainian leadership is determined to translate its intentionality into security policy actions and achieve practical results through generating acceptance and recognition from the target audience.

Agency and intentionality

Intentionality is discussed in foreign and security policy literature as an inherent part of agency resulting from purposive behaviour (Touval 2003), and addressing the question of how agents are constituted through their narratives. The general presumption among scholars is that an agent’s international behaviour is goal-oriented, based on a reason and a “purposively calculated human choice” (Stein 2006, 198), and motivated by determination and resoluteness to achieve effects or responses at home and abroad. Nevertheless, identification and explanation of the effects of narratives remains an analytical conundrum (O’Loughlin, Miskimmon and Roselle 2017).

From a constructivist perspective, intentionality is contingent and contextual, since it operates differently in different spheres of security politics. I am mostly interested in the operation of intentionality in situations of multiple threats, where the main question is why does the agent behave in one way and reject other options? In tackling this question, I assent that “understanding the meaning of the text is equivalent to understanding the intentions of the author” (Kurowska and Mireanu 2013).

In the case of Ukraine, its intentionality is articulated by President Zelenskyy as the restoration of territorial integrity is an ultimate goal of Ukraine. In addition, as defined by the Chief of Ukrainian Armed Forces, victory means not only de-occupation of all territories but creating conditions that will ward off any future Russian aggression (Zaluzhnyy 2023), which is possible under the conditions of Ukraine’s further integration with the Euro-Atlantic security order. To achieve this strategic goal, Ukraine’s security agenda needs to include different insecurities produced by the Russian invasion, and relate them to each other.

Agency and persuasion

One of the ways to decode the intentions of speaking subjects is to closely look at their statements that might give the analyst some clues on what the speech act is supposed to prove, and how the speaking subject seeks to induce certain reactions from its target audience. It is at this juncture that the concept of persuasion comes into operation. Persuasion as an element of communicative power (Steffek 2005) implies that “the process by which an agent’s action becomes social structure, ideas become norms, and the subjective becomes the intersubjective” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 914).

The concept of persuasion addresses the how-question: namely, how – through what tools and means – the speaking agent delivers their messages and makes them effective. Each persuasive display of intentions is aimed at a certain reception from the audience (including a sense of understanding, solidarity, or blurring cultural boundaries and political distances) and might be seen as a performative event (Braun, Schindler, and Wille 2019). Its structure envisages a speaker, an audience, a media entourage, and a possibility for multiple reiterations and proliferation of the conveyed meanings. Some authors relate this type of performative agency (Aradau 2017, 72) with theatricality (Reinelt 2002) in the sense that in order to convince the audience, an agent needs a script, a scenario, and a set of techniques to address the key audience. This notion, which in the case of Ukraine is endorsed by Zelenskyy’s legacy as a professional comedian, seems to be close to a ritual approach to international security as discussed by Maria Mälksoo, who argues that rituals possess a strong symbolic resource for enhancing the credibility of agents and strengthening solidarity among allies. Through “aesthetically compelling theatrical forms” ritual chains create “emotional entanglement” and therefore contribute to “the performative constitution of agency” (Mälksoo 2021, 59). Importantly, a ritual can create a sense of unity in the absence of social and political consensus about its meaning or specific policy implications.

Performative persuasion is by no means static, and embraces a “spectrum of persuasion”, from its “very thin” to “very thick” modalities (O’Loughlin, Miskimmon, and Roselle 2017, 23–55). In thin forms of communication persuasion plays only a secondary role, since actors stick to their pre-existing preferences and act through either information sharing or rhetorical coercion. It is at the “reflexive” stage that communication becomes thicker due to interactive involvement of emotional and aesthetic components, and makes possible a search for compromises and mutual adjustments. The thicker phase presupposes the high probability of altering discursive positions of agent’s interlocutors through persuasion as a key component of securitization practices.

Indeed, the ability to securitize specific policy domains is an indispensable characteristic of an agent’s behaviour. Employing what is dubbed by scholars as is the idea of “collective securitisation” (Sperling and Webber 2019, 236), Ukraine is addressing the Euro-Atlantic security audience not only as a country critically dependent on Western military and political support, but also as a potential ally in tackling new insecurities. In this sense, the Ukrainian agency is inherently norm-based, which is a direct result of structural factors, namely years-long strategic normative investments by the EU and international donors through multiple projects conducive to creating a “thick” nexus of Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic security order, including the Association Agreement, DCFTA, visa-free arrangement and the perspective of long-term negotiations on EU membership for Ukraine. All these institutional and diplomatic investments reached far beyond technical, administrative, and managerial agreements, and created a profoundly normative effect on the Ukrainian agency-in-the-making. This illustrates the transformation of “norm diffusion to agency” (Bucher 2014, 752) and explains the solid normative foundation of Ukraine’s security discourse in addressing the Euro-Atlantic West, with consistent requests not only for arms, but also for preserving the normative core of the liberal international society which Ukraine is eager to belong to and to protect.

Agency and security governance

As mentioned above, Ukraine builds its agency as part of a broader structure of security relations within the Euro-Atlantic international society, which may be approached through the lens of security governance. This approach is instrumental for critical security studies (Ehrhart, Hegemann, and Kahl 2014) since it points out that insecurities are seen not only as sources of securitization with its potential dangers, but also as objects of governance. In the academic literature, this concept refers to a system of rules aiming at coordinating, managing, and regulating collective security in response to threats, and implies adherence to norms, practices, and institutions that sustain international and transnational security activity (Adler and Greve 2009, 64). Security governance presupposes connections between different authorities and actors, as well as “formal and informal arrangements and common objectives to regulate and/or solve conflicts” (Kirchner and Dominguez 2011, 11). The concept thus offers an analytical framework to study the coordinated management “of European security arrangements by multiple authorities” (Averre 2016, 702) that might be disjointed and fragmented (Krahmann 2003, 20).

Yet the concept of security governance should not be understood in a narrow or purely technical sense as covering a set of mechanisms indispensable for managing risks, threats and dangers. It also points to governance as an object of perpetrations and encroachments, and therefore as a key element of security. Speaking about “a war of governance”, Mark Galeotti argued that modern war is increasingly determined by “how one can exploit the weaknesses of the other side’s governability” (Galeotti 2015).

At the same time, security governance comprises “relations between actors that are ideational in character” (Webber et al. 2004, 8) and therefore requires mental construction and imagination of security and insecurity (Wood and Shearing 2013, 7). It includes discourses through which “actors define threats or, once defined, how threats translate into policy responses” (Sperling and Webber 2019, 236), as well as “how security is understood and perceived by the actors involved in the governance system” (Ceccorulli, Frappi, and Lucarelli 2017, 62). In this sense, security governance intersects with the concept of securitization (Balzacq 2011) that deploys insecurities in a constantly transforming discursive environment where meanings are constructed, challenged and transformed. This connection so far was not duly explored in the literature; as I see it, what lies at the intersection of security governance and securitization is the understanding of a variety of logics driving foreign policies in situations of crises, including interconnections between different insecurities.

Introducing chains of insecurities

Russia’s war against Ukraine is a structural event as it provoked a set of crises affecting the international community far beyond the immediate area of the invasion. We observe a conflation of several crises intertwined with each other in an unprecedented cluster of emergencies (Hjort 2014). Even though the military security component clearly dominates, other insecurities (food, energy, nuclear, environmental, human) co-exist as equals, each one with its own functionality and logic.

Table 1 below synthesizes the framing instruments used by Ukraine to reach its strategic goals.

Table 1. Ukraine's framings of insecurities.

	Intentionality	Persuasion
Military/hard	Recovery of all the occupied territories Justice in accordance with international law	Ukraine as a contributor to European security deserves membership in the Euro-Atlantic security order (geopolitical and ethical)
Energy	Integration with European energy networks	Ukraine’s exportation of electricity is a direct contribution to European energy security, particularly due to energy shortfall after Russia cut gas supply
Nuclear	De-occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant	Russia threatens nuclear disaster and contamination for Europe comparable with the Chernobyl catastrophe.
Environmental	Securing funding for ecological recovery	Plans to develop a green post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, addressing energy needs of the country while securing a sustainable energy future in line with EU policies
Food	Securing alternative routes for Ukrainian grain to world markets	Ukraine keeps exporting its agricultural products to alleviate food crisis in the global South (ethical and geoeconomic)
Human	Safety of Ukrainian war refugees	Human capital of displaced persons will be an important resource for post-war reconstruction

As we can see from this table, Ukraine’s intentionality presupposes a combination of two logics and rationalities embedded in Ukraine’s security posture. One is aimed at the liberation of the regions annexed by Russia and the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity. Another strategic intention is to make Ukraine part of the Euro-Atlantic security order as the most effective deterrent for a possible reiteration of aggression. At the pre-accession stage this logic explains the importance for Ukraine to integrate into European energy networks and develop its grain transportation policy in accordance with EU directives.

As for persuasion, it refers to the plethora of arguments that Ukrainian leadership uses in communication with their Western allies. One group of these arguments is grounded in geopolitical and geoeconomic reasoning, and appeals to practicalities: Ukraine promotes itself as a crucial element of Europe’s security landscape and market infrastructure. Another rhetorical cluster focuses on ethical and moral arguments. According to this interpretative framework, Ukraine is not only a victim, but first of all a willing co-producer of European security who deserves to be accepted as an equal in the Euro-Atlantic international society.

Evidently, these insecurities are interconnected beyond Ukraine’s discourses. Escalation of the military threats from Russia impacts on all the other insecurities: outflow of war refugees, growing risks of nuclear disruptions, and further shrinking of food export. Beyond the hard security framework, food and energy are closely interrelated: the rising energy prices boost the costs of fertilizers as a key component of the Ukrainian agricultural sector and its global export potential. This reinforces inflationary effects and drive-up prices for food and other commodities (Tollefson 2022).

The food – environment nexus is equally apparent. On the EU side, the EU Commission postponed two high-profiled Green Deal legislative proposals concerning the sustainable use of pesticides, and nature restoration targets in the EU. In the same vein, member states received a possibility to derogate from certain green policy obligations to bring additional agricultural land into production. On Ukraine's side, its food exports are negatively affected by environmental threats resulting from the Russian aggression.

Energy and environment insecurities form another strong tandem. The gas leaks from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines affect environmental security in the Baltic Sea region. A shutdown of the power units at the Zaporizhzhia plant or any harm to its functioning will cause a major environmental hazard, which obviously also applies to the scenario of a Russian tactical nuclear strike.

However, discourses matter since these interconnections between insecurities may be constructed in different ways, which depend on the intentionality of the involved agents. For example, the growth of food prices, combined with growing energy bills and the costs for hosting Ukrainian refugees, might create preconditions for weakening European unity to resist Russia and subsequently decreasing support to Ukraine. Alternatively, as argued by Ukraine, the proliferation of insecurities makes Russian aggression against Ukraine a global security breach, as opposed to reducing it to a “regional affair”. Ukraine likewise argues that the destruction of Ukrainian energy infrastructure is a human and environmental threat for the entire Europe, and not limited to a merely national-level problem. The various ways of framing these insecurities are crucial to shape the crux of Ukraine’s relations with its main international partners and cement the basis for material and political support in EU and NATO member states.

Connecting insecurities: the logic of Ukraine’s discourse

In this section I explain how the insecurities introduced above are interconnected in Ukrainian discourses, and how these interconnections are used for constructing Ukraine’s international agency. Drawing on Ukraine’s security rhetoric as an empirical anchor, I discuss how insecurities are framed, and how the politics of persuasion come to the fore, with the consequent emphasis on who is persuading whom. This part of my research focuses on understanding the logics behind each of the chains and their broader geopolitical effects.

The first chain of insecurities: food, energy, environment and beyond

From the Ukrainian standpoint, the insecurities produced by Russia’s aggression should be addressed as a single chain that attests to the global repercussions of the war and requires coordinated security governance. This logic was expressed in President Zelenskyy’s address to the G20 summit in Bali in November 2022 (Zelenskyy, Ukraine … 2022), and later transformed into the Ukrainian Peace Formula in which he connected the hard security dimensions of Russia’s intervention and its broader reverberations for energy and food security.

The audience for this programmatic speech has been intentionally chosen to address the most powerful club of world economies, which predefined the sequence of insecurities listed in accordance with Ukraine’s vision of their acceptance by the global elite. The three most prominent articulations were nuclear, food and energy insecurities, with the intention to address concerns of a bigger part of the world population. After that, Zelenskyy switched his persuasion strategy to the aims of releasing all prisoners and deportees from Russia, securing the territorial integrity of Ukraine and the ensuing withdrawal of Russian occupying forces as a precondition for cessation of hostilities. Apparently, the last three points are key for Ukraine, but tactically Zelenskyy lowered their status to persuade non-Western countries (food supplies) and Western governments (i.e. potential nuclear incidents, and the weaponization of energy which damage the EU’s environmental and climate change policies). By bringing ecocide as another element of security governance, Zelenskyy appealed to international organizations dealing with environmental issues.

This particular ordering of insecurities is significant for at least two practical reasons. The first is the intention to keep a balance while communicating with the global North and the global South, particularly given the fact that many countries of the latter regard the Russia-Ukraine war as a distant calamity. The accent on food insecurity challenges such views. The second is that all the insecurities are interconnectedly rooted in the Russian invasion; therefore, addressing each insecurity separately will not ease the situation. This explains Zelenskyy’s repeated emphasis on the importance of terminating the Russian aggression as the precondition for global security (Zelenskyy, For peace … 2022). Thus, Ukraine focused on situating the insecurities for Europe in a larger narrative of Russian aggression, arguing that much more is at stake than the future of Ukraine.

One more specific reason of framing the insecurities narrative is Ukraine’s intention to stimulate joint efforts by Western states to further isolate Putin’s regime, and help Ukraine to militarily restore the status quo ante: “Russia is using economic terror, price crisis pressure and poverty to weaken Europe just when its full force is needed to defend against terror in the war that Russia has been waging” (Zelenskyy, Energy … 2022).

Since before February 2022, Russia has developed different levels of interdependence with individual EU member states, which ensures that curtailing their relationship with Russia carries a certain price. To secure uniform approaches to security, Ukraine seeks a general formula to resonate with a broad range of policy areas including trade, energy, food, and environment policies. That is why the list of interconnected risks has been broadened to appeal to the widest possible audience. One year after the invasion, the scope of Russia's subversive activities already included “aggression, deliberate mockery of nations or artificially provoked crises … air strikes and disinformation attacks” (Zelenskyy, We must guarantee … 2023).

Another challenge faced by the Ukrainian vision of security governance is to minimize the impact of Putin sympathizers in Europe and their “pro-peace” stances, like ones expressed by the former Italian prime-minister Silvio Berlusconi (Berlusconi 2023), a group of German intellectuals in the open letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Jedicke 2022) or the French president Emmanuel Macron about “security guarantees” for Russia. Those voices persist, because “they got used to the fact that sooner or later relations of all the states with Russia would come back to ‘business as usual’” (Zelenskyy, War on Ukraine 2022). Ukraine’s intentionality in this respect boils down to preventing such a return, given the drastic repercussions for international security that the Russian aggression has caused.

Moreover, Zelenskyy casts Ukraine as a responsible actor that honours its commitments, as opposed to irresponsible and interventionist Russia: “today, a non-NATO country, albeit with your support, has been holding back a state that you all officially identify as your main threat … . We are deterring Russia from destroying us and from destroying you” (Zelenskyy, You have … 2022). By containing the Russian army, Ukraine can be viewed as an agent co-producing European security governance, which is particularly acknowledged by European countries bordering on Russia. In the view of the Ukrainian leadership, “the fate of the whole Eastern and Central Europe and the Black Sea region is being decided on the territory of Ukraine. Therefore, to protect the freedom of Ukraine … is to guarantee the security of Europe” (Zelenskyy, Speech in the Romanian … 2022). The logic applies to food (in)security: by continuing grain export Ukraine intends to help stabilize global markets shaken by Russia’s sea routes blockade (Zelenskyy, Russia is … 2022). A deficit of Ukrainian wheat, corn, vegetable oil and other commodities may result not only in physical food shortages in the global South, but also in political instability and possibly a new migration crisis: “with the blockade of Ukrainian ports, with the famine that Russia is provoking, what is the real target? You! Hunger is a tool, a means. And it’s real goal is to put pressure on you, and it’s chaos, it’s new waves of migration to Europe” (Zelenskyy, You have … 2022). Therefore, by fulfilling its obligations within the grain export initiative, Ukraine persuades its partners of its ability to alleviate the food crisis and prevent a new migration crisis.

The discursive construction of chains of insecurities is country – and region-specific. In the case of the USA, Ukraine emphasizes the antagonistic position of Russia, intensification of its cooperation with China and Iran, and its continual destruction of civilian infrastructure by in Ukraine by using missiles (Zelenskyy, We stand … 2022). For small and medium size countries, the Ukrainian persuasion toolkit includes a reference to their vulnerability at the face of bigger states: “They wanted to destroy our statehood and tear our country apart. To divide Ukraine into parts. They wanted to take as much as they could … simply does not take most countries in the world seriously” (Zelenskyy, Speech in the House … 2022). In appeals to Western Europe, hard security is complemented with the sensitive issue of Russian energy supplies:

Russia has provoked rising energy prices in Europe and more broadly in the democratic world. With sufficient export potential, they have constantly held back gas, in particular, to create painful price conditions for European consumers. So that people put pressure on their governments in the middle of the state for the sake of Russia's political interests. (Zelenskyy, Address … 2022).

By the same token, referring to the Ukrainian system of gas storage facilities near the border of the EU, as well as the existing deposits of natural gas and potential for exporting electricity, Zelenskyy pointed out that Ukraine can become one of the guarantors of the energy component of security governance: “Together with Ukraine, you will be able to prevent such price crises ever again” (Zelenskyy, Energy … 2022).

The second chain: connecting European and Ukrainian insecurities

The second chain of insecurities draws on parallels between the security breaches faced by European countries and Ukraine’s own traumatic experiences. All the insecurities that spill over into the international agenda (energy and food crises, migration, etc.) resonate strongly within a Ukraine that faces major attacks against its energy infrastructure, growing consumer prices and millions of IDPs.

A good illustration would be different modalities of referring to Holodomor for making an analogy with food insecurity. Ukrainian officials repeatedly state that “never again should hunger be used as a weapon”, however, more than a century after the Holodomor, Russia again provokes artificial famine (Shmyhal 2022). Ukraine symbolically timed the date of the International Food Security Summit to the Holodomor Memorial Day; this is exactly how Holodomor features as a constitutive reference point for launching a programme named “Grain from Ukraine” and aimed at teaming up with the EU for alleviating food insecurities in the global South. “If it weren't for Ukrainian food, if it weren't for our joint leadership with our partners, social stability in such regions as North Africa or the Middle East would not have been maintained” (Zelenskyy, Never again … 2022) said president Zelenskyy, emphasizing efforts to continue the supplies in dire circumstances. But current food insecurity is not only about remote Asian and African markets: Ukraine's ability to keep producing food is crucial to ensuring its own citizens’ provision, which potentially creates a risk of a new refugee wave to the EU.

Zelenskyy’s references to Chernobyl is another pertinent example of making parallels. Addressing Western fears of nuclear threat, Zelenskyy recalled the 1986 explosion in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the subsequent radiation emission, as well as the human and environmental devastation that had followed the explosion.

We all see that for the first time since 1986, when the Chernobyl tragedy occurred, we have to consider as seriously as possible the scenarios for countering the radiation disaster that Russia is bringing closer with its terror at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. (Zelenskyy, Energy … 2022).

When the power transmission lines of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant were damaged in August 2022 because of Russian shelling, Ukrainian nuclear engineers managed to prevent accidents potentially “worse than Chernobyl” (Zelenskyy, We will … 2022).

Ukraine’s analogies to energy insecurity in Europe imply parallels with the demolished energy infrastructure in Ukraine. Praising the fact that “Europe finally carries out energy disarmament of Russia”, Zelenskyy also connected the restoration of the energy sphere in Ukraine to the rebuilding of the European energy market (Zelenskyy, Europe’s … 2022) as a major element of security governance.

At this point, Ukraine establishes its international agency in a twofold fashion: first, it logically connects Europe's and Ukraine's energy insecurities as two effects of Russia's aggression. The trope of “energy terror” is particularly illuminating for this purpose: “The more forms of terror Russia will use in this war, the more funds the world will eventually direct to weapons and to defence against a potential repetition of such attacks as we are experiencing” (Zelenskyy, The more … 2022). Again, Ukraine sees that it is crucial to substantiate its role in security governance by connecting its domestic challenges to continental ones:

The reliable protection of the Ukrainian energy sector from Russian missiles and Iranian drones will be the protection of the whole of Europe, because with these strikes Russia provokes a humanitarian and migration catastrophe not only for Ukraine, but for the whole EU. (Zelenskyy, I propose … 2022).

Secondly, Zelenskyy widely utilizes numerous historical narratives to create a feeling of a security community with international partners in jointly addressing the war. This persuasion technique appeals to emotions that underpin security narrative over time.

The Russian regime not only hates everything, any sociality and any diversity, but also deliberately invests in xenophobia and tries to make all the inhuman things that happened in the 1930s and 1940s part of the norm on our continent. (Zelenskyy, Russia is trying to destroy … 2023).

He has drawn parallels between “aviation and missile terror strikes by the Russian Federation” and the Nazi bombing of Britain and London (Zelenskyy, There must … 2022), claiming that of all the missiles launched by the Russian army since February 24, 2022 62% were targeted against civilian objects.

This example of Zelenskyy’s framing of Russia’s war is significant not just because of the centrality of Russia as an existential threat to Ukraine, but through its reference to the European narrative embodied in the EU Resolution “On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe” (Joint Motion 2019). The document states that Europe is united, if the EU members manage to create a unified view of their history to condemn the crimes committed by both Nazism and communism. Zelenskyy rhetorically linked what needs to be done (policy change) with why it is done (because we are “European” or because this is “a heroic justice”) and why security governance is needed.

Holodomor and Chernobyl are featured in Ukrainian discourse as intentional references to the biggest catastrophes in Ukrainian history and as connection points with today’s insecurities. Through constructing similar reference points in Ukrainian discourses that resonate within the Euro-Atlantic community, Ukraine builds a legitimate frame for security assistance and institutional partnership with its Western allies.

Receptivity and its boundaries

The audience’s crucial role for the success of persuasion is well illustrated by the acceptance of some of the above-mentioned chains of security by Ukraine’s major international partners. On many occasions, it is possible to identify the linkage between a given frame and changes in agents’ practices or in normative structures (Payne, 45). The changes in the external reception of the Ukrainian agency can be attributed to the following components of security governance: (a) opening of institutional perspectives for the EU membership; (b) military and financial assistance to Ukraine, (c) isolating and sanctioning Russia. Below are some specific examples to support this claim.

The head of the EU Commission has directly referred to Holodomor as a historical event topical for today’s security: “90 years ago hunger was used as a weapon by the Soviet Union against the Ukrainian people. Today, Russia is again using food as a weapon” (Statement by President … 2022). By the same token, Russia has been blamed by the EU for weaponization of gas supplies (EU Energy Chief … 2022). In highlighting the record speed with which Ukraine and EU connected their power grids, the EU also confirmed that both are in one energy community already (Statement by President … 2023). The European Council and European Commission, along with Britain and France endorsed the 10-points Ukrainian Peace Formula and confirmed that “the European Union is Ukraine. Ukraine is the European Union” (The EU will stand … 2023).

Ukraine’s willingness to present insecurities in one bundle rooted in the Russian military aggression also borne fruit: according to the EU Strategic Compass for Security and Défense, the aggression against Ukraine revealed Russia’s readiness to use the highest level of military force, regardless of legal or humanitarian considerations, combined with hybrid tactics, cyberattacks and foreign information manipulation and interference, economic and energy coercion and an aggressive nuclear rhetoric (A Strategic Compass 2022). The European Council reiterated that Russia bears the sole responsibility for the current energy and economic crises and by weaponizing grain transportation through the Black Sea is solely responsible for the global food security crisis (European Council 2022).

In 2022 a basic commonality of collective purpose within the EU and NATO emerged, with all member states contributing to helping Ukraine to defend itself. This consensus was striking because of the different negative consequences each of the allies might face as a result, which is particularly evident in the domain of sanctions packages (Maurer, Richard, and Nicholas 2023, 230). Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, characterized the EU’s response as a “geopolitical awakening” (Borrell 2022) and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared it to be a Zeitenwende or a “paradigm shift” (Scholz 2022).

Alongside all these symbolic but important changes, the EU resorted to such unprecedented practical steps as providing the Ukrainian Armed Forces with lethal military equipment, one of the biggest EU’s taboos. In the same vein, for the first time ever, the EU enacted the Temporary Protection Directive which has provided practical measures of support to Ukrainian refugees. According to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU has devised against Russia “the largest sanctions package in our Union’s history” (Ukraine: EU agrees … 2022).

While EU support to Ukraine has never been stronger, it doesn’t mean that the EU shares all of Ukraine’s aspirations. Gestures of solidarity and acts of compassion were accompanied by clear indications that there is no fast-track procedure for membership, and the country has to keep making progress in the domain of institutional reforms. Many in Europe still deem that the cumulative outcome of immigration flows from Ukraine and the energy crisis, along with economic effects of sanctions against Russia for European markets, create frustration and fatigue regarding the growing living costs. Some political forces in EU member states imply that Ukraine might need to find a compromise with Putin, which looks unacceptable from the Ukrainian perspective. It is exactly this logic that Ukraine tries to rebut in its narratives.

Conclusion

My analysis was based on the presumption that Ukraine’s agency largely depends on its ability to produce and communicate the dominant meanings of insecurity and relate them to such diverse spheres as energy infrastructure, nuclear security, electricity market, grain transportation, and environment, and persuade multiple audiences in the validity of its security stance. As I demonstrated, a core element of security governance is the construction of connections between different insecurities, and their validation through communication with Ukraine’s partners.

Three points are important to underscore how my findings relate to the pivotal concepts of my analysis. First, the case of Ukraine shows how agency becomes a heavy loaded security concept constituted by the rituals of imploring Western military and financial help and the corresponding construction of Ukraine’s narratives about common and interrelated insecurities. In doing so, Ukraine appeals to its Euro-Atlantic audience by heavily utilizing normative components of persuasion. By referencing numerous insecurities in energy supply, environmental and nuclear hazards, and disruption of food transportation, Ukraine builds the perception of the war as an intrinsic part of European security. Zelenskyy’s rhetorical efforts focused on defining the war as a global (rather than Ukraine-specific) security challenge, requiring a unified (rather than national) response, and constructing the agency of Ukraine as a European power and a reliable partner.

Second, I have shown that intentionality as an indispensable attribute of agency can be understood through a spectrum of practices of persuasion. Ukraine’s strategic narrative is not a mere text communicated to an international readership; it is a series of “speech events” performed and visualized for different audiences with diverse levels of reciprocity and mutuality. Chains of insecurities are a specific instrument of persuasion that makes the Ukrainian strategic narrative operational. Due to a broad spectrum of insecurities, their aggregation in chains requires some frames that would prevent fragmentation into separate “islands” of insecurity. As I posited, discourses of insecurities are normatively established, and their elements are subordinated to a single logic of compliance with the rules of the Euro-Atlantic international order. Due to the intentional efforts of Ukraine’s leadership, it is much harder for Western governments to externalize or marginalize the war in Ukraine.

Third, the boundaries of acceptance of Ukraine’s security narrative are unfixed and blurred, which creates a fertile ground for counter-narratives aimed at using the interconnections between multiple insecurities – in the fields of energy, environment, food, etc. – as an argument for persuading Ukraine to start negotiations with Russia on Moscow’s conditions. In other words, the first model of chains of insecurities discussed in the article is a double-edged discursive tool and might be directed against Ukraine’s interests. Consequently, new avenues of research are available to expand on how Ukraine de-securitizes (i.e. detaches from the domain of security governance) certain elements of the constructed chain (Hansen 2012). For example, Ukrainian IDPs in Europe might be approached as a humanitarian issue, while the transportation of Ukrainian grain through the territory of some EU member states might be discussed from economic or financial perspectives. These detachments attest to a high degree of flexibility and adaptability of chains of insecurity to the transforming security environment.

These findings may be utilized beyond the specific case of Ukraine. Security governance as a concept offers a useful research frame for analysing security postures of countries having to invest their limited resources in managing multiple interconnected insecurities (chains) and may include, apart from environment, energy, and food, such other components as cyber security, maritime and transportation security, and other domains. Within this context, security governance implies not only pointing to and naming foreign incursions and encroachments as security threats, but also relating and linking one country’s vulnerabilities with broader institutional and normative structures of international society. Agency in this regard signifies a high level of acceptance of victims of foreign aggressions as indispensable components of the extant security order. This type of war-time agency may be materialized through finding a balance between more securitized and more governance-based pillars of security governance: the former aims to consolidate and expand chains of insecurities, while the latter dissociates certain policy domains from the purview of security and copes with them through normalized managerial, administrative, economic and diplomatic practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of the scientific project “Reacting to war – the impact of crisis on social groups and political discourses”.

Notes on contributors

Yuliia Kurnyshova

Yuliia Kurnyshova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Her current research project explores the political and security implications of the Russia's war against Ukraine. She graduated from Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, where she obtained Masters Diploma in History and Journalism. In 2004 she defended theoretical thesis on U.S. Foreign Policy during the Berlin Crisis 1958–1963. She has been working for National Institute for Strategic Studies (Kyiv) and Institute for Social and Economic Research as a foreign policy analyst. Her most recent affiliation was with Institute of International Relations (Kyiv). Apart from her academic work, she has been engaged in different international and Ukrainian activities directed at implementation of reforms in Ukraine. With the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, she had to flee Ukraine. Focus of her research: political discourses, foreign policy of Ukraine, international security.