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The thinking that „world peasants are against land grabbing‟ is dominant among many rural social movements and empathetic with them scholars and NGOs.„In all our countries, peasants and family farmers organize themselves under different forms to defend their right to land and to their means of subsistence‟–was declared at the „Stop the land grab‟ 1 International Conference in 2011 in Mali. The peasant question in response to the land grabbing phenomenon has caused a new wave of debates among different scholars. The peasant society has been viewed either from a moral economy perspective as a homogeneous group with the „them-and-us‟ mentality and everyday forms of resistance to land grabs (Schneider 2011, Hall et al. 2011, Adnan 2011), or explored as a subject of class conflict (Harvey 2003, Bernstein 2010).

In the meantime, the assertion that resistance is an indispensable rural response to land grabbing suffers from simplification. Land grabs affect different rural groups in different ways, which creates a variety of reactions to it: from opposition to appreciation. In this paper I rethink the contemporary assumptions about rural resistance to large-scale land acquisitions. Analysing the context of Ukraine, I argue that (i) the politics of dispossessed groups depend on terms of inclusion in land deals;(ii) adaptive livelihood strategies dominate above resistant responses; and (iii) peasants are more concerned with personal gains in response to land grabs than with benefits for the whole community, which often causes loyalty to land acquisitions.