After several working meetings with scholars from Eastern Europe and the field of East European Studies, the Berlin–Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative was founded in 2015 at the Forum Transregionale Studien. It was led by the historian Andrii Portnov, who was appointed as a long-term fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. The initiative aimed to contribute to a better understanding of the situation in Ukraine and its neighbouring states after the Euro-Maidan. The idea was to take Ukraine as a prism of Europe and as a complex cultural and political project, to offer alternative readings to the language of nationalism, the rhetoric of “ethnic zones” and “historical rights” surrounding current developments in that country and beyond. The project aimed to re-assess existing interpretative schemes and terminology and to search for a conceptual language that could better describe the dynamics of both the post-Soviet transitional hybridity and the ongoing transformation of Europe, going beyond simplifying schemes of East and West.

The Initiative invited scholars, journalists, and civil society activists from Ukraine and Eastern Europe to spend several months in Berlin as Visiting Fellows. They were encouraged to participate in and organize workshops, podium discussions, and public and university lectures. The Initiative was  supported by scholars of Eastern Europe at universities and research institutes in the Berlin–Brandenburg area, has  been funded with seed Money by the Marga und Kurt Möllgaard-Stiftung, and transformed into the research program Prisma Ukraïna – Research Network Eastern Europe.