Who are the national minorities in Ukraine?

The request was submitted to obtain official information on who is considered a national minority in Ukraine, what documents confirm belonging to such a minority, which authorities are authorized to issue such documents, and whether there is an approved standard form of confirmation.

In the response from the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, there are no direct answers to these questions. Instead, general legislative provisions are cited, from which fundamental conclusions can be drawn about the essence of Ukraine’s legal framework.

First, the Ministry officially confirms that the state of Ukraine does not record or foresee any mechanism for fixing citizens’ ethnic affiliation. Nationality is not confirmed in the legal field either by documentation or institutional procedures. Belonging to a national minority is effectively based solely on self-identification, without a verification procedure, without a defined format, and without legal certification. This means that the Ukrainian state has abandoned any legal model of ethnic identification.

Second, the Ministry cites Article 1 of Law No. 2827-IX, which defines national minorities as groups of Ukrainian citizens who are not ethnic Ukrainians. At the same time, Ukrainian legislation lacks a legal definition of who is an “ethnic Ukrainian.” This makes it impossible to draw a clear line between the majority and minorities, but still creates a model in which an exception is fixed: the titular nation (ethnic Ukrainians) cannot be classified as either indigenous peoples or national minorities, and therefore is excluded from the system of collective rights.

Third, it is important to distinguish legal statuses based on the level of subjectivity:

1. National minorities, according to Law No. 2827-IX, possess a recognized ethnic identity, but their collective rights are limited solely to the cultural sphere. They are not granted political or territorial subjectivity. Their rights are exercised exclusively through the individual institution of citizenship — that is, not as a people, but as a collection of separate individuals united by self-identification. They do not have an established status of a people, nor the right to self-determination, territorial claims, or international representation.

2. Indigenous peoples, according to Law No. 1616-IX, are recognized as collective subjects with full ethnic and political subjectivity. Only they have been granted the status of “people” in Ukrainian law, with rights to self-determination, to establish representative bodies, to protect their traditional territories, to cultural autonomy, and to international protection.

3. Ethnic Ukrainians are completely excluded from both categories. They are not recognized as indigenous peoples or as national minorities, and therefore possess no collective subjectivity — neither cultural, nor political, nor ethnic.

Thus, the entire structure of Ukrainian legislation is built on legal segregation based on ethnicity, in which:

• political and ethnic subjectivity is granted only to narrowly defined groups (indigenous peoples),

• limited cultural subjectivity is permitted only for those who legally dissociate themselves from Ukrainian identity (national minorities),

• the titular nation (ethnic Ukrainians) is deprived of any form of collective recognition and can exist only as a collection of individual citizens without unity, continuity, or legal subjectivity.

Therefore, to obtain even cultural subjectivity within Ukrainian legislation, a citizen must renounce Ukrainian identity and self-identify as a member of a national minority. And to claim full collective rights, one must belong to officially recognized indigenous peoples.

This deprives Ukrainians even of the right to cultural expression of their identity, reducing citizenship to a tool of administrative loyalty rather than a form of national sovereignty.