A very brief history of Ukraine
Trying to consolidate 1,200 years of history into a few minutes’ read inevitably leads a lot of stuff out. But I think this is a fairly objective primer.
In the 7th-9th centuries AD, the Vikings explored extensively along the rivers of what are now Russia and Ukraine, seeking trade routes from Scandinavia to Constantinople, plus any useful wealth that might be purchased or plundered en route. Around 900 AD the Varangians (a Viking tribe) took control of Kyiv and made it the capital of “Rus”, their already-vast kingdom extending from Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. How a handful of Vikings so quickly gained and then retained ownership of such a vast Slavic territory is a matter of dispute, but it almost certainly involved more trade and strategic marriages than straightforward conquest.
In 988 AD, Rus’ Prince Volodymyr adopted Christianity, with the seat of Rus’ new Orthodox Church in Kyiv. The kingdom reached the peak of its power under Yaroslav the Wise in the mid-11th century, as shown in Map #1 (Kyiv is circled in blue). Rus was the “root” kingdom and nationality of what are now three distinct ethnicities: Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian.
Map #1 above: Kyivan Rus at its height in the 11th Century AD, Kyiv circled in blue (Source: World History Encyclopedia)
In 1169, Kyiv was sacked by rival princes from Suzdal, Vladimir and a new village called Moscow up in the kingdom’s northeast. Kyiv lost its imperial capital status, but remained Rus’ cultural and religious capital until being sacked by the Mongols in 1240. Around 1300, the northern princes (then under Mongol domination) moved the seat of the Orthodox Church from Kyiv to their area, where it remains today.
It was during the enforced fragmentation of the Mongol occupation that the “root” nationality of Rus split into Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian. In 1362, the Lithuanians defeated the Mongols in battle and took the Principality of Kyiv. In 1569, Poland and Lithuania formed a commonwealth which was then one of the most powerful countries in Europe, including most of modern-day Ukraine but almost none of modern-day Russia. This period significantly influenced the region’s linguistic and cultural development. The word “Ukraina” (the “borderland”) initially referred to a Cossack area south of Kyiv between the Polish, Russian and Muslim (first Tatar, then Ottoman) empires. The Cossacks were semi-nomadic people (mostly Slavic but also some Turkic and others) who enjoyed privileges under Polish rule in exchange for military service.
Meanwhile, after Ivan the Terrible of Moscow defeated the Mongols in 1472, Moscow had set about subjugating other Russian city-states and building the modern Russian empire. Initially what is now Ukraine (being part of the Polish empire) was spared. But in 1648 the Cossacks rebelled against Polish rule, forming a small state of Ukraina (the yellow area in Map #2). In 1654 the Cossacks allied with Russia, ostensibly to protect their own autonomy but this ultimately had the opposite effect. In 1667 Poland was forced to cede Kyiv and all land east of it (see Map #2 below) to Russia. By this time a colloquial Ukrainian language was widely spoken that was (and still is) a mix of Russian and Polish.
Map #2: The growth of Ukraine. Obviously this is a simplification — borders shifted constantly all over Europe for centuries, but it’s a good basis for a summary understanding. The five regions marked with a red “X” are now entirely or mostly occupied by the Russian army.
As you can see in the map below of eastern Europe in 1700 (Map #3), Kyiv and everything to the east of it was ruled by Russia at that time, but Lviv (then known by its Polish name Lwow) and the rest of western Ukraine were still part of Poland. Most of what is now southern Ukraine including Crimea were under the Ottoman Empire.
Map #3: Central-Eastern Europe in 1700 (Odessa didn’t exist until 1794, but I’ve added it for comparison / continuity purposes vis-a-vis the other maps)
In 1783 Russia took what is now southern Ukraine (including Crimea) from the Turks, and incorporated it into the Russian Empire. Previously this area had been lightly populated because of constant conflict with Ottoman Muslims, but now Russia’s Imperial subjects moved in in large numbers, founding the port of Odessa in 1794. The Russians called it Novorossiya (“New Russia”), with an ethnically mixed population of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and many others.
12 years later in 1795, Poland got wiped off the map entirely, carved up by its neighbours. Much of modern-day Ukraine (the remainder of the green area in Map #2 above) went to Russia, but pivotally, Lviv and the surrounding areas of western Ukraine (the brown area on map #2) went into the Austrian Empire (shown in Map #3 as the Hapsburg Monarchy). in Russia, Ukrainians were told they are “Little Russians” living in “New Russia”, and their language and culture were suppressed; throughout the 1800s, Tsarist restrictions on writing, publishing or teaching in Ukrainian got steadily stronger and the penalties for disobedience got stricter. But off to the West, the Austrians allowed all their numerous nationalities to speak, write and publish as they wished, so long as they remained politically loyal. This was to prove critical to the development of the Ukrainian nation.
The period from around 1820 to 1920 in Europe is often referred to as the Era of National Awakening, when millions across the continent were starting to define themselves by their language and nationhood rather than just their village and religion. Lviv and the rest of Austrian-ruled Ukraine was a “safe haven” where Ukrainians could do that. Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko (who spent his life in the Russian Empire) was exiled to a penal colony in Siberia for writing pro-Ukrainian poems in colloquial Ukrainian. But over the border in Lviv and surroundings, his works and those of his peers played as instrumental a role in defining and standardising a Ukrainian language as the King James Bible had played in defining and standardising English. In eastern Ukraine (which had a large ethnically Russian population), by contrast, the colloquial Ukrainian language was heavily suppressed, almost everyone adopting Russian as a first language. Kyiv became bi-lingual.
In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Ukraine (like nearly all Russian colonies) declared independence from Russia. Shortly thereafter in 1918-19, the German and Austrian empires were broken up under the Treaty of Versailles, which brought Poland back into existence as an independent country. Ukraine and Poland then went to war over Lviv and its surroundings (the area was ethnically mixed Polish-Ukrainian); Poland won. This proved a blessing for Ukraine, because in 1922 the Bolsheviks invaded and ruthlessly subjugated Ukraine. The fact that western Ukraine was under Poland, and therefore spared Soviet brutality, would once again prove pivotal.
While Kyiv and surroundings were an independent country from 1918-22, Lenin had created a rival Ukrainian Soviet Republic under Moscow-Bolshevik control in territory to the east and south, from Kharkiv to Odessa (the pink area in Map #2). In 1922 Lenin merged the two territories, thereby expanding Ukraine’s territory significantly, to include all the land in pink in map #2 above. This land was majority ethnic Ukrainian, but with a significant ethnic Russian minority. Lenin could argue that he was doing Ukraine a favour and also doing the right thing morally by enlarging Ukraine in this way, but putting so many ethnic Russians inside Ukraine’s borders also made it much harder for Ukraine to ever secede in future. People sometimes forget that – when you acquire new land, you don’t just get the land, you also get the people living on it, who may or may not prove to be supportive citizens.
The Holodomor (the “Great Hunger”) — Stalin’s mass murder of the Ukrainian peasantry:
Marx had said that Communism was only for advanced, urbanised, industrialised societies. But the countries that adopted Communism (Russia, China, etc) had all missed the First Industrial Revolution, and hoped Communism could help them leapfrog into modernity. So Lenin changed Marx’s teachings substantially. Instead of the state withering away as Marx predicted, the state would be an all-powerful totalitarian entity dragging the rural peasants kicking, screaming (and often dying) into the industrial age. After taking power, Lenin enacted War Communism under which the peasantry were deliberately worked to death. Farmers were given impossible targets, and when the targets weren’t met the government took their land, l,ivestock and seed corn. While the countryside starved, the Soviets exported massive quantities of grain for hard currency to buy weapons and machinery. Lenin and Trotsky saw this as toughening up inferior beings – the few peasants that survived would be fit for mechanised agriculture and Communism, the rest deserved to die. The idea of collectivising agriculture was not Marxist – Marx didn’t care about agriculture. Collectivisation had been the norm in far northern Russia for centuries, because the climate was so hostile and crop failures so frequent that pooling resources was essential for survival. Lenin and Trotsky took this locally-managed, kibbutz-style model, ruthlessly centralised it, and imposed it on more fertile, southerly regions that had no use for it. The famine went on until the global price for wheat collapsed and Russia could no longer earn hard currency this way. Lenin then enacted market reforms under the New Economic Policy (NEP), a significant Gorbachev-style for which he got a completely undeserved reputation as a moderate. He only made this reform because he had no choice.
Most of Ukraine had avoided the War Communism famine from 1918-22 because it was an independent country. And by the time the Soviets conquered Ukraine in 1922, the NEP reforms were already gearing up. But Ukraine’s turn was to come. In 1930, Stalin (now supreme dictator) decided another round of famine was needed, particularly targeting kulaks (relatively well-off, industrious private farmers who had done well under the NEP). Many of them lived in the fertile Black Earth region of Ukraine and southern Russia. Again, farmers were given unachievable targets. When they didn’t deliver, their land, livestock and seed corn were taken. To survive, they sold family heirlooms. The Communists set up trading shops called “Torgsin” where Ukrainians could bring their family treasures to be pawned for whatever scraps the State chose to offer them. These heirlooms were then sold abroad for hard currency. 3-10 million people died.
Picture of a Torgsin with starving Ukrainians queueing to exchange heirlooms for bread. From the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv
Russians and Ukrainians argue vigorously over whether the Holodomor was a genocide. Ukrainians point to the staggering death toll, the deliberate mass murder, by any standard a holocaust. Russians say “yeah, but Russians were getting slaughtered, too – it’s not like farmers with Russian IDs were exempt.” The Russians have a point that “genocide” denotes a race war, while Stalin’s target was an economic class – wealthy peasants of any ethnicity. The reason it disproportionately exterminated Ukrainians was that (1) millions of Russian peasants had been slaughtered already by Lenin and Trotsky during the first famine in 1918-22, so they didn’t need to be slaughtered again and (2) the lands where farmers most resisted collectivisation were the richest and most fertile lands, which are also the most southern lands. That includes only a portion of Russia but nearly all of Ukraine.
Starvation victims lying in the street in Ukraine during the Holodomor. Exhibit from the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv.
My question to the Russians is “OK, if I accept your argument that it wasn’t a genocide and that you were slaughtered, too, then explain to me why you increasingly worship Stalin. What is it with Russians, that you worship people who slaughter you? Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin…. anyone who treats you like meat, you love them. Anyone who actually tries to improve your life, you hold them in contempt. If you admit it was a mass murder (which you do), why do you worship the man who perpetrated it?” The usual responses I get are “oh that wasn’t Stalin, it was the bad men under him” (Russians have an eternal need to believe in the “good czar”) or “oh, you foreigners just don’t understand”.
But I digress.
This 1,000+ page register lists the starvation victims in just ONE of Ukraine’s 24 provinces. At the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv
Just 6 years after the Holodomor ended, Hitler and Stalin made the Nazi-Soviet pact and carved up Poland between them. Under that agreement, Russia took control of Lviv and western Ukraine for the first time in history. 2 years later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had taken care to kill any general with the slightest competence lest they challenge his leadership, and of course Stalin was useless as a military strategist, so the Wehrmacht advanced eastward with lightning speed, reaching Kyiv in just 3 months. Many Ukrainians initially welcomed the Nazis, hoping Hitler would liberate them from Stalinist tyranny. Some Ukrainians enthusiastically bought into the anti-Semitic hatred so widespread at that time. Some Ukrainians unquestionably collaborated in the Jewish Holocaust. But the majority quickly realised that Hitler was just as bad, and throughout the war Ukrainian nationalists fought both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The strongest Ukrainian nationalist resistance was in the West which had been Polish territory until 1939. These people hadn’t been starved to death, and so were more fit to fight. In fact in western Ukraine, nationalist resistance against the Soviets continued into the 1960s.
In 1945 Stalin insisted that Poland permanently cede to the USSR the land that he had taken under the Nazi-Soviet pact. Poland would be compensated with land from Germany. And so, the nation of Poland was shifted sharply westward, and Ukraine was finally united under Soviet domination, including Lviv and surroundings. Fortunately the extreme brutality of the Holodomor was not repeated. Although higher education was all in Russian, western Ukraine remained primarily Ukrainian-speaking. Kyiv was (and is) a bi-lingual city. Further east, many ethnic Ukrainians spoke no Ukrainian at all until recently.
In 1954 (the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s initial absorption into the Russian Empire), Khrushchev transferred the Crimean Peninsula from Russia to Ukraine. Although adjacent to Ukraine, Crimea had never been part of Ukraine previously. Russia had annexed what was then the Crimean Khanate in 1783. In 1945 Stalin falsely accused the indigenous Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, murdered most of them and exiled the rest. That left the peninsula largely unpopulated, and a mix of Soviet peoples filled the gap. Like the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine, Crimea remained primarily Russian speaking after 1954. By 2013 Crimea was roughly 65% ethnic Russian (heavily concentrated in the city of Sevastopol, home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet), 15% Ukrainian, and 12% Tatar plus some Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Belarussians and others.
When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the impoverished and preoccupied Russian government made no provisions at all to help millions of Russians suddenly stranded in other former Soviet Republics. Whether trying to find their way to stay within these newly independent countries (many of which were hostile to them), or to find some way back to Mother Russia, these ethnic Russians in the “Near Abroad” were on their own. This was to become a problem in several places.
Crimea was a paramount Russian concern. Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based there, and Russians have a profound emotional attachment to it due to the enormous blood shed in conquering and then defending it, both in the Crimean War (against Britain, France and Turkey in the 1850s) and World War II. After independence, Ukraine immediately agreed to permanently lease the naval base to Russia. Under the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, Ukraine gave up all the nuclear weapons on its soil, in exchange for Russia explicitly recognising Ukraine’s current borders and the US pledging to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Ukraine had always been a linguistic continuum, Ukrainian-speaking in the west and gradually getting more Russian with each mile east that you travel. Politically the same thing happened after independence, with western Ukraine strongly in favour of joining the EU, and the East more aligned with Russia. Until 2014, a clear majority opposed joining NATO, preferring to be a neutral “bridge” between East and West. Independent Ukraine’s first few leaders prioritised friendly relations with Russia, while also seeking to also build bridges to the West as a second priority. This was to change when Russia attacked Ukraine, as shown in the chart below:
With poverty and corruption rife, popular resentment led to the Orange Revolution in 2004, which elected avowedly pro-Western leaders for the first time. Putin and the majority of ethnic Russians were (and still are) convinced that this was all a Western plot to deny Russia its god-given imperial greatness, and Putin set about undermining the new government by any means necessary, including poisoning the newly elected president Yushenko. He needn’t have bothered -- the pro-Western leaders proved their own worst enemies, unable to get control of corruption or to improve living standards. In 2009 the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich won election, albeit to get votes in western Ukraine he explicitly promised to put Ukraine on track for eventual EU membership. This plan was endorsed by a supermajority of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament).
2011-12 was a pivotal moment in Russia, when Putin announced that he would amend the constitution to abolish term limits and become eligible to be president for life. Massive demonstrations put him on thin ice, but he was saved when he launched his anti-LGBTQ campaign with the fanatical support of the Russian Orthodox Church. This is when Russia really became a full-fledged dictatorship with avowedly imperial ambitions.
In 2013, under extreme pressure from Putin, Yanukovich reneged on his promise to lead Ukraine toward the EU, and said Ukraine would seek an economic union with Russia instead. Protests erupted, most famously at the Maidan square in Kyiv. When the protests wouldn’t stop, Yanukovich’s agents shot at the crowd repeatedly, killing over 100 people. In the ensuing days the demonstrators began firing back, assisted by many police. In February 2014, just as Russia was hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Yanukovich was forced to flee to Moscow. In a special election, billionaire Petro Poroshenko was elected president of Ukraine on a pro-Western platform. Putin promptly invaded Crimea and Ukraine’s easternmost provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, on the pretence of protecting the large ethnically Russian populations there. The Ukrainian army proved completely incapable of responding and Putin easily captured these lands. Eventually a static, low-grade war developed.
With this development, a clear majority of Ukrainians began for the first time to favour joining NATO, and the majority in favour of EU membership increased. But with Ukraine now engaged in an active territorial dispute, it was automatically ineligible to join either organisation. While the Ukrainians’ refusal to accept any loss of territory is completely understandable, it’s also true that had they accepted the losses in 2014, and sought EU and NATO membership under their diminished de-facto borders in existence from 2014-22, they would have been eligible. And had they joined NATO, Putin would never have invaded again in 2022. I state this not to tell Ukraine what to do, merely to state a fact. I personally see no scenario where Ukraine ever gets back the lands they lost in 2014, though I very much hope I am wrong about that.
From 2014-19 Petro Poroshenko proved not just inept at reform, but staggeringly personally corrupt, and his popularity declined steadily. Meantime, an actor named Volodymr Zelensky was starring in a popular television show called “Servant of the People”, about an ordinary man who suddenly becomes president and starts building an honest government. Both Zelensky and the viewers started to take this idea seriously. As the 2019 elections approached, Zelensky declared his candidacy. Watching all this very closely, Putin judged (correctly) that Poroshenko was sure to lose his 2019 re-election bid, and he probably expected that a newbie like Zelensky would be more malleable (Western observers also thought Zelensky would be more pro-Russian).
Zelensky did win, but proved as ardently pro-Western as any of his predecessors. Also in 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared autocephaly (independence) from the Russian Orthodox Church under which it had been subordinate for centuries. The global Orthodox leadership in Istanbul accepted this, but the Russian church leaders were enraged. And by this time they had become a critical ally and constituency for Putin as already explained. With the Russian Church’s active support, Putin decided that if he couldn’t control Ukraine quietly from the sidelines, he would invade and subjugate it outright, eradicating any concept of Ukrainian nationality to “permanently fix the problem”.
Many people have criticised Biden for failing to prepare Ukraine for war. I think Biden’s approach before the Russian invasion was near-flawless. No one thought the Ukrainian army could hold out in a conventional war, so Biden supplied Ukraine with large quantities of Javelin anti-tank missiles and other weapons and tactics that would be very useful in the guerilla war that most experts expected. And when Putin was gearing up to invade, Biden tried repeatedly to warn Zelensky, but the entire Ukrainian government insisted that no, Putin would never be so stupid as to invade the ethnic Ukrainian heartland. So prior to the invasion, Biden did all that anyone reasonably could. It’s what Biden did after the invasion that was inexcusable.
When Putin did invade and Ukraine astonished the world by pushing the Russians back, Biden’s administration adjusted well and began providing weapons appropriate to the conflict that emerged. Initially it was reasonable to supply limited weapons with restrictions on their use, to show Putin that the US did not want to escalate into World War III. But Intelligence quickly picked up that Putin’s boss Xi Xinping (ruler of China) had warned Putin not under any circumstances to use nukes. And anyway, Putin would never do anything that threatens his own personal survival. So Putin’s threats of nuclear war were empty. Especially when it became clear that Trump would probably win the US elections, Biden had to provide vastly more weaponry and to allow Ukraine to use those weapons to obliterate bases inside Russia itself. He refused. That was a tragic mistake.
So now the war is in deadlock, and likely to continue for as long as Putin lives. Russia’s current war efforts is not sustainable -- in 2024 Russia captured an additional 0.6% of Ukraine’s territory at a cost of around half a million dead or maimed. With Trump in office, Putin knows he can kill unlimited Ukrainian civilians without repercussions. So he has ramped up his war effort to even more unsustainable levels to try to force a quick surrender. This will fail.
In the near term, Ukrainian civilian casualties will skyrocket when Ukraine runs out of Patriot anti-missile defence systems. The vast majority of incoming explosinves are Iranian Shahed drones, and Ukraine’s domestically produced weapons take out nearly all of those. But only Patriot missiles can intercept Russia’s less numerous but more damaging Russian ballistic missiles. Germany has promised to provide Taurus missiles, which are effective against fixed targets and will allow Ukraine to retaliate, but not to defend its civilians from mass bombardment. Ukraine’s recent attack on airfields deep inside Russia reduced the number of Russian planes that can launch those missiles, but civilian casualties will nonetheless soar when the Patriots are used up, unless Trump changes his policy and provides more.
So, expect a prolonged bloody stalemate.
And at the same time, Putin is fighting a dirty war on other fronts – his efforts to hack western European computer, banking and defence systems and interfere in Western elections are well known. Putin is also trying to use Ukrainian refugees to turn European governments and people against Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees have already been arrested for attempting terrorist acts – they are either economically desperate and lured by high Russian payoffs, or Putin is threatening their relatives in occupied Ukraine if they don’t cooperate. And at the same time he’s using every propaganda tool available to him (including sympathetic networks like Fox News, sympathetic European political parties, and the Russian diaspora who are in many cases fanatically pro-Putin) to spread propaganda that all Ukrainians are nazis and terrorists.
For politicians like Orban of Hungary, Fico of Slovakia and Trump of the US, Putin is a compelling role model – initially elected and re-elected democratically, now president for life with all political opposition either dead or exiled. And all of these leaders find it convenient to disdain Ukraine’s desire for democracy and NATO membership. Poland is a rare exception where the main populist political party is broadly pro-Ukrainian. I think the Poles’ exceptionally high empathy for Ukraine comes from their own experience. After Poland was re-established as an independent country in 1919, nationalists in both Germany and Russia saw its very existence as a national insult, and Stalin and Hitler took great delight in carving it back up. Now Putin sees Ukraine as both a personal and national insult whose entire national identify must be eradicated — Poles know what that feels like, and what it leads to. By contrast, the main who just barely lost Romania’s recent presidential election had stated that Ukraine is not a country and Putin should be free to dispose of its population however he sees fit. That level of antipathy goes back to the 1800s, when Eastern Europe had a distinct ethnic pecking order in which the Austrians sat at the top and Ukrainians very much at the bottom.
Ukrainians fully understand that they are in a war of national survival. In 1922 Ukraine surrendered to Russian domination, and within 10 years, millions of them had been starved to death in the Holodomor. Much more recently, Russia has abducted over 20,000 Ukrainian children from captured territories, and is indoctrinating them in Russia to fight against their own families. Anyone caught speaking Ukrainian in Russian-controlled territory disappears. And Russia slaughtered over 1,300 civilians in just four weeks of occupation of the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Bucha in the early days of the war. Ukrainians know that if they surrender this time, it will likely be at least another 100 years before they get another chance, and by then they may be wiped out as a people. Putin seeks not a genocide, but an ethnocide — the complete destruction of a national identity.
If you want to keep up on the news of the war, I highly recommend subscribing to the Kyiv Independent. The Moscow Times (now published from the Netherlands) as well as the BBC and Al-Jazeera are also good.
Slava Ukraini!