Studying of international students in Ukraine: Cross-cultural challenges and geopolitical facets

The article attempts to comprehend the state of the art and challenges inherent in the system of international students studying in Ukraine. A non-traditional approach is applied in the research, namely the influence of geopolitics on the construction of the educational landscape and cross-cultural adaptation possibilities for international students, and, accordingly, the competitiveness of educational institutions in the global arena. Dialectical and structural-functional methods were applied for the research. Content analysis was utilized as the main tool. The principle of historical and logical relationships between politics, economics, culture, and education lies at the basis of the study. The latency and simultaneously harmful nature of geopolitical influence in higher education is demonstrated. The study revealed the core drawbacks of Ukrainian higher education institutions and regulators' vision of the necessity of interweaving geopolitical concerns into the higher education fabric. The study outlines implications and challenges of international student mobility within a complicating geopolitical landscape and provides some vectors for possible strategies to cope with them.