Where in the World Is Ukraine? Confronting Russian and European Representations of Ukraine

This article aims to compare the position of Ukraine on world cognitive maps of European and Russian students obtained from a survey made in 2009–10 with strategic narratives of the European Union and Russia from the same period, allowing for the confrontation of high and low geopolitics. In the context of the Ukrainian crisis, where officials from the two sides consider Ukraine either as a close partner of the European Union or as part of Russia, it seeks to determine in which world region Ukraine is situated by students. It finds that students from both regions firmly believe that Ukraine is part of the European space, a finding that calls into question the effectiveness of Russian strategic narratives.