What is Ukraine and Why Does It Matter?

What is Ukraine and Why Does It Matter?

Ukraine has become a central player in the impeachment investigation of US President Donald J. Trump. That investigation focuses on Trump withholding Congressionally approved military assistance to Ukraine in an attempt to get Ukraine to investigate conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and his son and about the hacking of the DNC’s emails actually being done by Ukraine not by Russia. Beyond that, Russia has invaded and annexed Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that became part of the independent nation of Ukraine when the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became an independent nation. Russia is giving military aid to Russian separatists fighting against Ukraine in the eastern part of that country. Ukraine is a place few Americans know anything about, and it is a bit odd that it plays such a central role in American politics today. So I thought I’d say a bit here about the history of Ukraine and its relationship to Russia. We can’t understand what’s going on with Ukraine today without knowing at least a bit about the history of that part of the world.

I’ll start with semantics. The word Ukraine comes from Russian (or at least Slavic) roots that mean “by the border.” The region that today is the independent nation of Ukraine is located on what was the southern border of the European part of the Russian Empire. It was the border region between Russia and various neighbors including at different times the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The tsarist government of Russia never recognized Ukrainians as people separate from the Russians with their own language and their own culture. That government considered the Ukrainian language simply to be a dialect of Russian. Even today to most Russians Ukraine is or at least historically was and today ought to be part of Russia.

Beyond that, Russian history begins in what today is Ukraine, specifically in the city of Kiev, the capital city of the Ukrainian nation. In the tenth century CE Kiev occupied a commanding place on the Dnieper River, part of a significant trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople. The ruler of the Kievan state was called a grand prince. In 988 CE Grand Prince Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity, probably because Constantinople was such an important trade partner. Vladimir’s conversion is the reason why most Russians and Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians to this day. The Russian Orthodox Church’s earliest monasteries were in Kiev, where they are still a major tourist attraction.

In the thirteenth century Kiev and all other significant Russian centers were conquered by the Tatars from the east. There was then no significant Russian state until the rise of Moscow. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Moscow became the dominant Russian power. The Grand Princes of Moscow did it by first acting as the Tatar’s tribute collectors, then by becoming the chief Russian power opposing Tatar domination. The center of Russian political and cultural life shifted to the north and east from Kiev though the people of what is now Ukraine remained indistinguishable from the people in what today is Russia.

Eventually much of what today is Ukraine was conquered by other imperial powers, in particular the Ottoman Empire. As the Russian Empire expanded it incorporated Ukraine. For example, in 1783, Russia, then ruled by Catherine the Great, annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire with no distinct political identity. At the same time, the language of the Slavic people living in Ukraine did what languages do. It evolved, and it didn’t evolve in exactly the same way that Russian evolved. Linguists eventually came to recognize Ukrainian as an East Slavic language distinct from Russian. By the mid-nineteenth century at the latest Ukrainian people began to assert that they were in fact Ukrainians not Russians. They began to demand that Ukrainian be used in the schools of their region, a demand the Russian imperial government never granted. To the imperial government there was no significant distinction between Russians and Ukrainians. To most Russians there was no significant distinction between Russians and Ukrainians.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks (a particular type of Russian Marxist) carried out a coup d’état and began consolidating their rule over most of what had been the Russian Empire. They had to fight a long civil war against anti-Bolshevik forces to do it, but by the early 1920s they were more or less firmly in control of the territory of the Russian Empire minus part of Poland and all of Finland. In 1922 they created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At first it consisted of only four so-called republics, and Ukraine was one of them. The borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic were the borders of today’s Ukrainian state except that initially Crimea was assigned to the Russian republic not the Ukrainian one. Those borders were set by Communist bureaucrats in Moscow. The Russian Black Sea fleet had long had its home port at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Many of the people who lived there considered themselves to be Russians not Ukrainians. In the eastern parts of the Ukrainian SSR Russian and Ukrainian populations overlapped and intermixed.

In 1954, for reasons no one quite understands, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That change made little or no difference to the people living in Crimea. Despite the fact that it consisted of eventually fifteen so-called republics the USSR was heavily centralized in Moscow, which was where most of the important decisions were made. That transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR meant however that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Ukrainian SSR became the independent, sovereign nation of Ukraine (1991) Crimea was part of the state of Ukraine not part of Russia.

In 2014 Russia, under its authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin, Russia invaded Crimea, held what was probably a sham plebiscite, and incorporated Crimea into Russia, effectively stealing it from Ukraine. It’s not hard to understand why Russia did it. Crimea had long been part of Russia and had been part of Ukraine only since 1954, a mere thirty-seven years. (And that it became part of Ukraine was at first a mere technicality.) As it had for a very long time it included the home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Many of Crimea’s residents were Russians not Ukrainians. It really should have surprised no one that Russia would want to take Crimea from Ukraine. Still, Crimea had been within the borders of Ukraine that other nations of the world recognized when Ukraine became an independent nation. Russia’s violation of those borders and its taking of part of Ukraine’s territory undeniably violated international law. The United States and other countries responded by imposing sanctions on Russia, sanctions that are still in place. In addition to taking Crimea from Ukraine Russia has been backing a struggle of Russians in eastern Ukraine with various kinds of military assistance, something the United States and other nations also oppose.

If Russia had left Ukraine alone after the breakup of the Soviet Union Ukraine, frankly, probably wouldn’t mean much to the US or the nations of western Europe. Yes, it has a democratic form of government; but it is remote from western Europe and suffers from decades of Soviet rule. That rule has resulted in Ukraine (and the rest of the former USSR) in obsolete industries and unproductive collectivized agriculture. Ukraine used to be called the bread basket of Europe, but no longer. Even without Crimea it has a significant Black Sea coastline, but the Black Sea is itself remote and isolated from the world’s other oceans. Like so many formerly authoritarian nations that become independent and nominally democratic (including Russia), Ukraine has suffered from rampant corruption in its political and economic systems. The current government of Ukraine is supposedly working to clean up the corruption, but since its inception in 1991 the independent nation of Ukraine has had a long way to go if it is ever going to become economically successful and politically viable.

Ukraine is important in the world today less for its own sake than because of its relationship to Russia. Russia is a much more important player on the international stage than Ukraine is. Russia’s a whole lot bigger. It has a huge number of nuclear weapons. It is not the power that it was when it was the dominant element of the USSR, but it is easily the most powerful of the fifteen independent nations that used to make up the USSR. Russia has enormous natural resources, especially but not only petroleum and natural gas. Russian culture is one of the world’s great artistic cultures. Russia has produced world class creators in every field of human endeavor. I do not mean to belittle Ukraine here. I spent three days in Kiev in the summer of 1968, and I enjoyed seeing the great cultural landmarks there. But it simply is true that Russia is bigger and more internationally prominent than Ukraine has ever been. None of which excuses Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. I understand why Russia took Crimea, but I don’t condone aggression or that kind of blatant violation of international law. Not at all. I only want us Americans to have a better understanding of Ukraine than most of us do.

So here’s what I think we need to understand about Ukraine. Historically it was not a nation or culture distinct from the Russian nation and Russian culture. Most of it was either part of the Russian Empire or part of the Russia dominated USSR for over two hundred years. Many if not most Russians still think of Ukraine as simply part of Russia. Russian history and culture began in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s history was simply part of Russian history in the early years of that history and again at least from the late eighteenth century until 1991. US president Donald Trump is trying in illegal and unethical ways to use the Ukrainian government for his own purposes. He may well want to abandon Ukraine to the Russians altogether, for his pal Vladimir Putin very much wants to make Ukraine again part of Russia.

The foundational question for us about Ukraine is whether or not we care if Russia occupies and annexes the whole country. We have taken the position that we do care and that we don’t want that to happen. We have taken that position less because we care about Ukraine and more because we see Russia as an enemy. Whether or not Russia really is or need be an enemy is a question we need not address here. President Trump has no legal or moral right to use Ukraine as a pawn in his schemes to hold onto power in this country. That truth however does not alter the fact that Ukraine’s relationship with Russia is long and complex. We would all do well to understand that relationship better than most of us do.