Away from the East: Ukraine’s Politics of Belonging During the War

This chapter explores how the concept of belonging helps understand Ukraine’s spatial positioning in Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and how it might be integrated into scholarship on liminality, moral geography, and English school regionalism. I argue Ukraine’s politics of European belonging requires doing away its liminal position through a two-track strategy: a) joining the Euro-Atlantic space normatively and b) integrating into the regional spaces at the eastern flank of the EU and NATO, such as the Three Seas Initiative, the Danube Strategy, and the Budapest 9 formats. These regional belonging spaces serve as complementary “entrance doors” to Europe, supporting the broader membership strategy in the EU and NATO.