Interregional cultural and historical connections and external socio-cultural orientations of Ukraine’ regions: a retrospective analysis

In the scientific literature, there are many options for cultural-historical zoning of Ukraine. But to what extent do regional communities themselves remain committed to their historical and cultural roots, what are their dominant interregional and external orientations? The results of a series of population surveys conducted in 2018 by the Rating sociological group in all regions of Ukraine allow to study these problematic aspects. A comprehensive analysis recorded the dominance of external cultural and historical orientations over internal ones – three-quarters of the regions primarily felt their cultural and historical affinity with neighboring states, of which Belarus, Poland, and Russia stood out. Depending on the force of attraction to them, many zones and subzones of external cultural orientation were recorded within Ukraine. The internal space of Ukraine was characterized by weak interregional cultural and historical connections, which were concentrated within a number of areas-macro-regions. The interconnections of regional communities from different areas almost always represented the mutual orientation of leading socio-cultural regions. But in general, the regions of the west and center have distanced themselves culturally and historically from the Russian-speaking southeast to a much greater extent than it has distanced itself from them. The metropolitan region did not evoke a sense of cultural closeness among most regional communities of the west and south-east and therefore did not fully cope with the function of socio-cultural consolidation of the country. More significant was the role of the Lviv region, which was targeted by the most Ukrainian-centric groups of the population throughout Ukraine.