The urgency of the problem mentioned in the title is due to the need to understand the peculiarities of the formation and development of the state in Ukraine as a systemic phenomenon, the essential and necessary features of which reflect the concepts: “state”, “statehood” and “state formation”. Understanding the latter is important both for understanding the historical and legal features of Ukraine’s past, and for assessing the logic of modern political and social processes in our country. Hence the purpose of the article, the methodological basis of which is a dialectical method of cognition of socio-political and legal phenomena and processes, is to draw attention to the problem of the state and, above all, statehood as scientific categories in the context of Ukrainian statehood; trace the main of the existing approaches in science to understand these concepts and express their attitude to them; to determine the semantic connection between the concepts of “state”, “statehood” and “state formation”; outline the essence of the phenomenon of the nation-state and Ukrainian (national) statehood. It is argued that the concepts of “state” and “statehood” as scientific categories – is the concept of different dimensions of state and legal reality. The understanding of statehood as a manifestation of the sociohistorical rootedness of the “state” in the existence of society is emphasized. The emphasis is on the nationalspiritual nature and national-cultural orientation of the statehood, on its comparability with the nationgenesis. The thesis is argued that the statehood of the people either ends with the emergence of a sovereign state, or / or indicates the incompleteness of the process of its development. The equivalence of the concepts of “statehood” and “state formation” is motivated. The thesis of inequality of the concepts “Ukrainian statehood” and “Ukrainian national statehood” is substantiated. It is emphasized that the process of nation-building and nation-building in the Ukrainian people for the first time falls on the last third of the XVI – first half of the XVII century, and is associated primarily with the Cossacks
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