October 7 & today · Ukraine · 2023–present
Ukraine’s inherited nationalist and Soviet antisemitism met a different response after October 7: solidarity amid its own struggle for survival.
Explore UkrainePublished by WTJPublication updated
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Ukraine’s inherited nationalist and Soviet antisemitism met a different response after October 7: solidarity amid its own struggle for survival.
Flags in a city already at war
After October 7, Israeli flags appeared on public billboards in Kyiv. Solidarity rallies and prayers followed. Ukraine was already living through Russia’s invasion, yet people made space to respond to the attack on Israel.
Researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev describes this moment as an outpouring of solidarity with Israel and Jews. The response differed from the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents recorded in several Western countries. The same international event entered a different local story, shaped by a society’s own experience of war.
An inheritance can be challenged rather than revived
Ukraine inherited pogroms, nationalist exclusion, Nazi destruction and Soviet suspicion of Zionists. Those histories left ways to portray Jews as foreign or disloyal. Islamist hostility also appeared in marginal online material identified by researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev. Yet these ingredients did not produce the same post-October 7 trajectory as in several Western countries.
A November 2023 statement by Ukrainian academics, artists and activists criticized Israel through anti-colonial arguments while condemning Hamas’s attacks and rejecting blame of Jews worldwide. It shows a meaningful boundary within the left: opposition to Israel need not embrace Islamists or reproduce an older Jewish conspiracy. Russia’s invasion had reorganized communal life around survival and aid, while solidarity with Israelis under attack became a visible response. The country’s political setting changed which inheritances were mobilized.
A community scattered by another war
Jewish community research describes deaths, damaged relationships, material losses and emigration during Russia’s full-scale invasion. Families and institutions were trying to preserve communal life while people were separated or forced to move.
These losses should not be retold as an exodus caused by October 7. Likhachev’s study instead reports a decline in recorded antisemitism over 2022–2024. Jewish insecurity was still profound, but its main setting was the war in Ukraine itself. Following that distinction keeps the people’s actual circumstances at the centre of the story.