THE CONDITION AND CHARACTERISTICS OF DEFENSIVE CONSCIOUSNESS IN UKRAINIAN SOCIETY PRIOR TO RUSSIA'S INVASION OF UKRAINE

The aim of this article is to assess the condition and determine the specific features of the functioning of defensive consciousness in Ukrainian society on the eve of Russia’s war against Ukraine. To achieve the research objectives, a systemic-situational approach and the axiomatic method were employed. It has been established that Ukrainian military-philosophical and military-political discourses contain: 1) the axiom of state-building, which confirms the political justification for maintaining security and defense institutions in a modern democratic society; 2) the axiom of dismantling the military sphere and eliminating the military power of a target state as the beginning of the destruction of its statehood and its subsequent elimination as an independent actor in international relations; 3) the axiom that with the loss of one of the state’s key existential leitmotifs – namely, the use of military force to protect the population and territorial integrity – it becomes impossible to form defensive consciousness within society, and the state’s ability to ensure social unity is significantly reduced. It is shown that Russia, in its geopolitical confrontation with Ukraine, has consistently applied the above-mentioned axioms as tools of preventive weakening of the Ukrainian state. This strategy enabled Russia to achieve the following outcomes: 1) the so-called “ideological insufficiency of the Ukrainian nation” (as defined by Russian strategists), that is, the absence of an officially adopted state and military ideology in Ukraine created the conditions for a broader ideological crisis in state-building. This led to a practical lack of a patriotic administrative elite, patriotic national intelligentsia, and patriotic military leadership; a military-ideological crisis; a crisis in civil-military relations in the defense sector; a crisis of national military governance; a crisis in the state’s military security system; a breakdown in motivation for armed defense of Ukraine; and a crisis of the infrastructure (mechanisms) for developing and implementing national security and military policy; 2) Ukraine’s unpreparedness for war with the Russian Federation and its resulting status as a passive object of aggression. This situation can be explained by the underdeveloped state of defensive consciousness in Ukrainian society, the absence of a strong ideological foundation among the administrative elite, the near-complete lack of patriotic military elite, and the helplessness and disorientation of the intelligentsia.