УМОВИ ТА ФАКТОРИ ПОШИРЕННЯ СЕПАРАТИСТСЬКИХ НАСТРОЇВ В УКРАЇНІ: ЕТНОНАЦІОНАЛЬНИЙ АСПЕКТ

Abstract

Opposition to separatist tendencies in Ukraine is impossible without studying the ethnic composition and dynamics of ethnopolitical development of the country’s regions. Minimization of the conflict-related potential of interethnic relations in polyethnic Ukraine is an important part of the measures to ensure state sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state.After the collapse of the USSR, separatist tendencies in Ukraine were short-lived and marginal, activated during the political crisis, economic and social instability, leading to polarization of public opinion and intensification of the struggle for the distribution of power resources in the country.The new tendency of ethnopolitical processes in Ukraine is their transformation under the influence of external actors. Using destructive mechanisms of influence on them, they are trying to destabilize the domestic political situation in the country. Such centers of influence were the revisionist-minded Russian Federation and the radical political forces of Hungary and Romania, which, appealing to the past and the times of the territory of Ukraine in their composition, are trying to provide new separatism.Today, the regions of the South - Eastern region, Zakarpattya and Northern Bukovina, in which compact Russian, Hungarian and Romanian national minorities live, form a zone of ethnopolitical instability. Their territory can become a springboard for further radicalization and spread of separatist sentiment, which is one of the tools of the Russian hybrid war against Ukraine.Consequently, separatism has become a long-term ethnopolitical technology of blasting Ukrainian statehood. Therefore, actual and necessary in modern conditions is the development of mechanisms for preventing and combating separatism as part of ethno-national policy in order to ensure the territorial integrity of Ukraine.