Aggressors may deliberately deny an Indigenous people the right to independent political, legal, and historical existence. At the ideological level, this manifests in the dissemination of narratives about the colonized society's lack of agency, which serves the legitimization of domination. At the diplomatic and administrative level, the technique is implemented through the unilateral abolition of sovereignty, the annulment or rewriting of previously concluded international treaties, and the shift of relations from equal footing to a format of direct diktat, which ensures the institutional seizure of governance and the legal consolidation of the occupation.
The metropole deliberately ignored official complaints by the Indigenous population about the arbitrary conduct of the appointed rulers, depriving them of the right to protection: the compilers of academic document collections state that, as regards the petition submitted to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich, «the petition of the «Okochans» was not granted»[1].
The Tsardom of Muscovy physically and legally isolated the autonomy from participation in international politics, deciding the fate of the Cossack lands without regard for their national interests: "The plenipotentiary representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack state, headed by R. Haponenko, were not admitted to the negotiating table"[2]. The hetman's request to grant the envoys mandates as full participants was "let pass unheeded" by the tsar's government: the delegates "sat idle beside the commissioners, not admitted to the official sessions"[3].
In the legal partition of Ukrainian lands, the opinion of the people themselves or of their leaders was demonstratively ignored. The Hetmanate was treated exclusively as an object: "The interests of the hetmans and of Ukraine were, of course, not taken into account"[4].
The complete exclusion of the autonomy from participation in international negotiations on the status of its own territories. In the legal partition of Ukrainian lands the opinion of the people themselves was ignored – contemporary Ukrainian historiography assesses the Eternal Peace "as a national tragedy of Ukraine"[4].
"In this provision of the articles, the tsarist government's aspiration to turn Ukraine into a region incorporated into the Russian state on ordinary terms was openly declared for the first time"[4].
A course toward the complete absorption and destruction of the very name of the Cossack state. In the Bendery Constitution of 1710, Orlyk recorded Moscow's intention "to eradicate the Zaporozhian Host of the Lower Dnipro and to efface its name forever"[5]. Hrushevsky confirms the course was systemic: Mazepa's alliance with the Swedish king merely "gave the Muscovite government occasion… to take up more forcefully the abolition of Ukrainian autonomy. The Muscovite government had pursued this line from the very beginning"[6]. What was at stake was the enslavement of the entire people: the Muscovite state, per the preamble of Orlyk's constitution, managed to "violate and utterly destroy" the rights and liberties "and to cast a slave's yoke upon the free Cossack people, never conquered by it"[7].
The liquidation of the autonomy's statehood and international agency as a result of the defeat of the Swedish-Ukrainian forces. The rout at Poltava set off an irreversible process of dismantlement: "In the hundred years after the famous Pereiaslav Council, Ukraine traveled the path from the 'Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky'… to the de facto liquidation of the autonomy and the hetmanate, to the country's transformation into an ordinary province of the Russian Empire"[5].
Rejection of the treaty format: instead of a bilateral agreement – the tsar's "decisive" resolutions upon the hetman's requests, issued in the form of a decree. The autonomy ceased to be a party to a treaty and received its rules of existence from above.
The final elimination of the office of the autonomy's leader: after Rozumovsky's forced abdication, Catherine II's decree of November 10, 1764 handed power to the Little Russian Collegium, whose president was instructed to act "with a governor's authority, that is, as our special plenipotentiary"[10]. Catherine II's instruction to procurator-general Vyazemsky (1764) stated the goal openly: "and when there is no hetman in Little Russia, one must strive that the very age and name of hetmans vanish"[11].
The refusal of the White commanders to recognize Ukrainian statehood. General Denikin, as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia, signed the programmatic address "To the Population of Little Russia" (August 1919), which declared the struggle for a Ukrainian state to be treason. Symon Petliura (head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic and chief otaman of its army) and his associates, the address ran, "having begun the dismemberment of Russia, continue even now their evil work of creating an independent 'Ukrainian State' and of fighting against the rebirth of a United Russia"[12]. Denikin wrote in the first person: "declaring Russian the state language throughout the whole expanse of Russia, I consider entirely inadmissible and prohibit the persecution of the Little Russian folk language"[12]. The promised "prohibition of persecution" did not recognize the language but assigned it the place of a vernacular. What remained for Ukrainian under the address were everyday life, private schools, and the first years of primary school - Denikin explained: "to ease the pupils' assimilation of the first rudiments of knowledge"; the "treasonous movement" for statehood he required to be "completely distinguished" from the permitted "love for the native region… and its local folk language"[12]. Denikin allowed the people's existence and denied it political subjecthood: the striving for an independent Ukrainian state was declared treason, the language was left a vernacular. On the night of September 1, 1919, after four hours of negotiations, the Galician general Kravs and Denikin's general Bredov (according to the diary of the Supreme Command of the Ukrainian Galician Army - the commander of the Guards corps) agreed: the Galician units would withdraw from the city that same day "at least beyond the line of the Kyiv railway stations", then to the line Ihnativka - Vasylkiv - Hermanivka, while the Galician army guarantees that it "will make no moves against the army of the volunteers [Denikin's Volunteer Army]"[13]. In the fourth point the Galician command renounced political subjecthood: "The commander of the Kyiv group of the Galician army declares that the Galician army operates independently of Petliura's army under separate Galician command, without any political aims, and solely with the purpose of fighting the Bolsheviks"[13]. A day earlier, on August 30, at negotiations with the command of Denikin's 2nd brigade, its representatives demanded that the territory southeast and east of the Koziatyn - Fastiv - Kyiv railway be treated as "the operational zone of Denikin's troops", and that the strip between the line Fastiv - Volodarka - Saskiv - Buky and the line Bila Tserkva - Tarashcha - Lysivka - Zvenyhorodka be declared neutral; the diary records: "We did not agree to this demand"[13].
De facto liquidation of the Ukrainian army (the disbandment of the Ukrainian Front) and the transformation of the government of the Ukrainian SSR into a nominal appendage of the Russian administrative machine[14].
The union center deployed an international platform against Ukrainian sovereignty: Bush publicly called the striving for independence a "suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred"[15] – the speech went down in history as the "Chicken Kiev speech."
The official denial of the Ukrainian nation's right to independent statehood: the article by the head of the Russian state declares outright that "Ukraine's genuine sovereignty is possible precisely in partnership with Russia," while "the wall that has arisen in recent years between Russia and Ukraine" is declared a split of "between parts of what is essentially one historical and spiritual space"[16].