Introduction: ‘Occupations and the occupied: agency, expertise, and patronage in wartime and postwar political cartographies'

The transnational study of the wartime and postwar history of Ukrainian maps and cartography poses quite a challenge. It is not the simple linear knowledge of one single national intelligentsia and its development into a modern nation-state, but the overall entangled history of all the regions, confessions and people which constitute the European and Eurasian cultures of sovereign Ukraine. Ukrainian independence did not start in 1991 with the end of the Soviet Union. Prominent modern advocates of Ukrainian sovereignty were the highly regarded founder of Ukrainian geography and cartography Stepan Rudnyts’kyi (1877–1937), who was born in Austria-Hungary and later migrated to Kharkiv/Kharkov in the 1920s, and the historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866– 1934), who in the 1890s-1900s elaborated a scheme for early Ukraine-Rus’ that contested both Rus-socentric dominance and Muscovite primordial hegemony. Both these map-minded men became victims of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. In fact, it is hard to find a moment in Ukrainian history when historical claiming and ethnic mapping did not serve as a main default for the study of Ukraine’s shifting and contested borders, or when the lives of multilingual Ukrainian academics were not endangered. I chose this idea of ‘occupations and the occupied’ as a major theme of the Vega 2024 symposium, to map out Ukraine’s past and present history during Russia’s brutal war since 2014 and full-scale invasion since 2022, across Central and Eastern Europe and in search of solidarities within the larger world. One may regard human geography as a profession and an avocation. It is also a matter of studying how patterns of colonial settlement are structured, and how peoples are framed and erased. For Ukraine, the ‘normal science’ is a talking-over and a superimposition, when modern maps of nationalities were drawn by imperial actors (Polish, Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman), or geopolitical outsiders looking in. Agency is hard to find and harder to achieve,