Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, opens this second lecture in his Ukraine course by asking what it means for a nation to exist. He argues Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity before February 2022, since Ukrainians collectively resisted the Russian invasion the next day, and uses that fact to interrogate theories of nationhood as structure, action, or both. Snyder traces how Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding are bound up with experiences in Ukraine, and asks why and how modern nations emerge in some places and not others. He addresses Ukraine's position as the territory most devastated by both Soviet and Nazi terror, and closes by weighing whether its post-colonial, multilingual national identity is a relic or a model. The lecture is part of Snyder's full Yale course, with a public syllabus and reading list available online.