030603 KU Ukraine & International Law (2026W)

The Ukraine conflict, which has been festering at least since the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014 and escalated by Russia's war of aggression, raises numerous questions of international and constitutional law. Selective historical references, such as to the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654, the "donation" of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on its 300th anniversary in 1954 by Khrushchev or the drawing of analogies between Putin and Hitler often contribute more to confusion than to clarification.

The aim of the course is to gain clarity about the actors who have been active on the territory of today's Ukraine since the Middle Ages and their goals by critically examining selected examples of international treaty and constitutional law. How were the relations of the "Unequal Brothers" (Andreas Kappeler), the Ukrainians and the Russians, but also of the various other partly identical, politically, linguistically and religiously constituted actors on the territory of today's Ukraine, the Ruthenians, Cossacks, Crimean Tatars, Orthodox, Uniates and Muslims, played out in the mirror of treaty law?

In chronological terms, the course has three focal points, firstly the pre-modern period, in particular the 18th century. After a brief historical introduction, the focus will be primarily on the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars and their position in international law before the Russian annexation at the end of the 18th century. The second chronological focus is the decade before World War I and the interwar period. In addition to the short phase of Ukrainian sovereign statehood at the end of the First World War, the constitutional position of Ukrainians respectively Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states as well as in the Soviet Union will be of particular interest. The third chronological focus is the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present.

Thematically, the course uses the example of Ukraine to investigate the intersection between international and constitutional law, from the attempts to transform the pre-modern Polish-Lithuanian dual state into a trinational polity to the embedding of post-Soviet Ukraine in larger European and international contexts. Secondly, the course uses Ukraine as a case study to address shifts, imbalances and dislocations in the international legal order, from the establishment of the fully sovereign territorial nation-state as a standard subject of modern international law to the development of the concept of the civilised nation and the current crisis of the United Nations.