On June 28, Ukraine marks Constitution Day — a day meant to remind us that words on paper can bind a nation together when nothing else seems to hold. Adopted in 1996, Ukraine’s Constitution was always more promise than reality — a declaration of intent, scribbled into existence by exhausted lawmakers in a country still shedding the skin of its Soviet past.
For decades, it sat on shelves and in courtrooms, cited and bent and sometimes ignored. Today, it lies in soldiers’ rucksacks and legal folders smudged with mud from the trenches. It flickers in courtrooms that still operate between missile strikes. Its words are tested daily by realities no article could fully predict: full-scale invasion, mass displacement, occupation, liberation — and all the horrors in between.
In peacetime, a constitution is a compass. In war, it becomes both shield and proof of identity. It promises dignity when enemies try to erase names from maps. It whispers stubbornly of rights and rule of law when drones buzz overhead and blackout shutters rattle.
No constitution can stop a missile. But it can keep alive the idea of the country the missile aims to destroy.
So today, as sirens wail and judges issue rulings by flashlight, Ukraine’s Constitution stands battered yet unbroken — much like the people it was written for.