Yes, or something like it. It wasn't deliberate enough to suggest "branding" to me, per se, but it did mark a change in self-perception, and a change in how Ukrainians wanted to be perceived by the rest of the world.

Slavic languages lack articles, so in Russian and Ukrainian the linguistic phenomenon SerLava describes manifests only as a choice between using the preposition на versus в (which roughly correspond to the English prepostions in and on) to say "in [the] Ukraine". Using на was standard until after Ukrainian independence, but because на connotes being in an open space or in an indeterminate area (as on sometimes does in English , e.g., on Trafalgar square, on the border) whereas в is the usual preposition signifying being inside a definite space, including being inside a country's borders, Ukrainians reacted against the usage of на, feeling it emphasized the "on the borderlands" understanding of what [the] Ukraine was.

Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies. The distinction between using or not using the definite article in English and other languages followed. Interestingly, I always say Ukraine rather than the Ukraine in English, but I tend to use на in Russian.