A Complex Situation: The Current Russia-Ukraine Crisis

 

A Complex Situation: The Current Russia-Ukraine Crisis

February 3, 2022

© Thomas C. Sorenson, 2022

 

President Vladimir Putin of Russia has threatened that Russia will invade Ukraine. The United States and NATO have threatened to institute crippling economic sanctions against Russia if it does. This crisis is serious, yet it is but the latest event in a long and complex history of relations between Russia and Ukraine. I hope the information I present here will help you better understand that crisis. My purpose here is to explain not to justify. Though it has been so only since 1991, as I will explain below, Ukraine today is an independent, sovereign nation recognized by the international community as such. Russia has no right under international law to invade Ukraine. I’ll say more about what I think about the prospect of Russia doing that at the end of this piece. Time, of course, will tell.

To understand the current situation between Russia and Ukraine we must start with at least a cursory look at Ukrainian and Russian history, ethnicity, and geography. Ukraine is located south of Russia on the north coast of the Black Sea. A peninsula called Crimea extends from the Ukrainian mainland into the Black Sea. The Russian and Ukrainian languages today are both recognized as distinct East Slavic languages. As we will see, Russians historically have not considered Ukrainian to be a separate language but to be only a dialect of Russian.

We start our review of Russian-Ukrainian history with the uncontested fact that Russian history began in Ukraine. More specifically, it began in the city of Kiev (the Russian version of the name and the way we used to spell the name in English) or Kyiv (the Ukrainian version of the name and the way it is often spelled today). Kyiv is located on the west bank of the Dnieper River about 550 miles south southwest of Moscow, Russia. The Dnieper River essentially divides Ukraine into eastern and western sections, a fact that has played a role in Ukrainian history. The first Russian (the Ukrainians would say the first Ukrainian) political entity of any historical significance is called Kievan Rus’. It arose in the ninth century CE. As the name tells us, it was centered on the city of Kyiv. It flourished until roughly the twelfth or thirteenth century. The Dnieper Rover on which Kyiv is located was at that time part of an important trade route between Scandinavia to the north and Constantinople to the south. Kyiv was perfectly situated to control that trade.

The Russian people and most of the Ukrainian people have been Orthodox Christians for centuries. What became the Russian Orthodox Church came into existence in Kyiv. In 988 CE Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kievan Rus’ converted to Orthodox Christianity. He had all of his people baptized as Orthodox Christians. (We don’t do baptism that way any more, by the way.) The Orthodox Church in Kyiv was placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

In 1240 the Mongols from Asia attacked and conquered Kyiv. Thereafter the center of Russian political power shifted to the northeast, first to cities called Vladimir and Suzdal, then to Moscow. Jurisdiction over the Russian Orthodox Church was eventually transferred from the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Patriarch of Moscow. The Grand Princes of Moscow, later to be called tsar or Imperator, expanded their control of the lands of the East Slavic peoples in all directions from Moscow, but for a very long time they did not rule the land that we call Ukraine today. Ukraine came under the control of the Mongols and other peoples thereafter. About that a bit more below.

Ukraine’s history thereafter is extremely complex. I’ll review it very briefly here. At different times Ukraine was ruled by Turkic people called Tatars, by Lithuania, and by Poland. Russian dominance of Ukraine picked up speed in the seventeenth century when Russia and Poland, a major power in the region at the time, divided Ukraine up between them. Poland took Ukraine west of the Dnieper. Russia took Ukraine east of the Dnieper, but it also got Kyiv although that city is on the west bank of the river. From the mid-seventeenth century Russian dominance over Ukraine expanded. By late in the eighteenth century, when Russia was ruled by Empress Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great (who, by the way, was German not Russian), all of Ukraine except its westernmost part had become incorporated into the Russian Empire.

Once they had full control of most of Ukraine the Russians did not create any kind of Ukrainian political unit within the Russian Empire. Ukraine just became part of that empire and was ruled and administered the same way other parts of the empire were. In the imperial period of Russian history, roughly 1700 to 1917, the Russians did not consider Ukrainians to be a people distinct from the Russians. They called the eastern part of Ukraine “Little Russia.” Because imperial officials did not consider Ukrainian to be its own language, the language of public administration in Ukraine under the empire was Russian. To this day most educated Ukrainians are fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. There is also a large number of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, especially on the Crimean Peninsula and in eastern Ukraine.

World War I brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire. The Russian Communists, then called Bolsheviks, staged a coup in St. Petersburg on October 25, 1917. (That was the date of the coup on the Julian calendar the Russians used at the time. On the Gregorian calendar that almost everyone else uses the date was November 7, 1917. That’s why the Soviet Union called that coup the October Revolution. They celebrated it in November.) A long and bloody civil war followed. Much of it was fought in Ukraine. Eventually the Russian Communist Party established its control over all of Ukraine.

In 1922 the Russian Communists created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly known as the USSR. It consisted of so-called republics organized by major ethnic groups within the country. Control of the whole country was, however, strongly centralized in Moscow. One of the original republics was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That subordinate political entity in the USSR constituted the first time in all of Ukrainian history that Ukraine had a set political structure based mostly on Ukrainian language. Its borders were mostly those of Ukraine today except that the Crimean Peninsula was at that time part of the Russian republic not the Ukrainian republic.

Then we come to one of most horrendous tragedies in the history of humanity. By the end of the 1920s the Soviet Union was under the control of Joseph Stalin, nee Dzhugashvili. He instituted a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture throughout the country. The Communist Party, headed by Stalin, forced peasants across the USSR to surrender their private land holdings, farm animals, and farm equipment to entities usually called collective farms. All agricultural property was owned by the collective farm not by the people who were part of the collective. Peasants across the country resisted collectivization. In Ukraine, where the best farm land in the USSR was located—Ukraine was once called “the breadbasket of Europe”—the resistance was particularly strong.

To force the Ukrainian peasants to accept collectivization, Stalin created a massive, wholly artificial famine in Ukraine. There were sufficient crops to feed the people, but the government confiscated them and exported them to get hard currency that Russia did not have in its own. Soldiers even entered people’s houses and took away any food they found there. Something like 4 million Ukrainians starved to death. The Ukrainians call this famine the Holodomor. That’s a word based on Ukrainian words for kill and hunger. It has the power and horrific connotation for the Ukrainians that the word Holocaust has for us. Though Stalin was Georgian (from the soviet socialist republic, now independent nation of Georgia). he was dictator over a country primarily run by and for the benefit of the Russians. The Ukrainians quite appropriately blame the Russians for the Holodomor. Though it took place ninety years ago, it colors the Ukrainians’ view of the Russians to this day. As I’m sure you could guess, it does not improve that view.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. German military forces soon occupied all of Ukraine. Scholars say that a great many Ukrainians would have joined the Germans in fighting the Russians both because they hated the Russians for the Holodomor and because they hated Soviet communism. Hitler, however, thought that all Slavic people were subhuman. How anyone could think that of people with history and culture as rich as those of the Slavic people is beyond comprehension, but that’s what Hitler thought. So rather than favoring the Ukrainians and inducing them to help them fight the Russians, the Germans treated the Ukrainians no better than he treated other Slavic people he had conquered like the Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles, and he didn’t treat them well at all. Eventually of course the Soviets defeated and Germans and ended the Second World War in Europe.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. He was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev as head of the Communist Part and for time head of the Soviet government as well. Earlier in his career he had been a Party functionary in the Donbas, a region in far eastern Ukraine where many of the people were (and are) Russians not Ukrainians. He is important for us because in 1954 he transferred Crimea from the Russian soviet republic to the Ukrainian one. No one quite knows for sure why he did it. It isn’t clear that he had the legal authority to do it, but then the lack of legal authority never stopped any Soviet leaders from doing anything.

I lived in Soviet Russia for the academic year 1975-76 doing PhD dissertation research. The Soviet Union felt to me and many other people like a huge, inert mass that wasn’t doing much but that was going to last for long time. So I and a lot of other people knowledgeable about the Soviet Union were surprised if not shocked when the USSR started falling apart in the late 1980s. The history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is complex and fascinating. The important part of that history for us is only that on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. (Because of that calendar difference I mentioned above, December 25 on our calendar is not Christmas on the Orthodox calendar.) The Russian flag replaced the Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin in Moscow. A few months earlier the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had declared itself to be at first autonomous within the USSR, then completely independent as its own sovereign nation. This was the first time in history that there had been an independent Ukrainian nation.

I can’t overstress a point I have already made that plays an important role in the current Russia-Ukraine crisis. Throughout the long history of Ukrainian-Russian relations most Russians have never considered the Ukrainians to be a separate people distinct from the Russians. At times the Russian Empire prohibited the use of Ukrainian in schools in Ukraine. In the Russians’ view Ukrainian was merely a dialect of Russian. While I was in Russia I did a lot of research on a man who was significant in the government of Russia and in the Russian Orthodox Church from the 1860s until the Russian revolution in 1905, the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century not the one that toppled the tsar. This man had significant dealings with what is now Ukraine, mostly in church affairs. I never saw any reference to Ukraine as anything other than Russia politically, culturally, or religiously. When the Soviet Union collapsed and for a very long time before that most Ukrainians hated the Russians, and the Russians considered Ukrainians really to be Russian.

In 2014 Vladimir Putin’s Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula militarily and eventually annexed to Russia. Most of the international community doesn’t recognize that annexation and has imposed sanctions on Russia because of it. Recall that in Soviet times Crimea was first part of the Russian republic, then from 1954 on part of the Ukrainian republic. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 Crimea was part of the new Ukrainian nation. The Crimean port city of Sevastopol was the home port of the Russian Black Sea fleet. It had been the home port first of the imperial Russian Black Sea fleet, then of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, then the Russian Black Sea fleet again for a very long time. Sevastopol remained the home port of the Russian fleet when it became part of the independent nation of Ukraine. Moreover, the population of Crimea was mostly Russian not Ukrainian. Despite the economic sanctions imposed on Russia in response to what Russia did in Crimea, that annexation of Crimea to Russia is very popular among the Russian people. It did however violate international law. Whatever else it may mean, Russia’s annexation of Crimea gives the Ukrainians one more reason to hate the Russians.

Today Russian president Putin has stationed over 100,000 Russian troops on the Russian-Ukrainian border and has threatened to invade Ukraine. His threat is, perhaps among other things, an attempt to force concessions from NATO and the United States. So to understand what Putin is up to we must know some of the history of relations between Russia and NATO. The United States and several western European countries created NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, on April 1, 1949. They created NATO specifically to stop the spread of Soviet influence in western Europe. It did that by having the United States commit to its European allies that it would defend them against any Soviet attack. Several years later, in 1955, the Soviet Union created the so-called Warsaw Pact. It members included the Soviet Union and all of the Communist ruled, Soviet dominated countries in eastern Europe from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south. Thereafter the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was also a standoff between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved in July 1, 1991, shortly before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO is of course still very much with us.

When the Soviet Union was disbanded in late 1991 all fifteen of the former soviet socialist republics became independent nations. Particularly striking was the regained independence of the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They had long been part of the Russian Empire. They all became independent nations after World War I. However, after the singing of the Nazi-Soviet treaty known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, those states came once more under Soviet pressure and occupation. The Germans occupied all of them for a time during World War II. As the Soviets pushed the Germans out of the Baltic states they incorporated all three states into the USSR, each of them becoming one of the soviet socialist republics. Each of them became an independent nation again upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded to the east. Beginning around 1999 NATO started accepting applications to join the alliance from former Warsaw Pact members and the three Baltic nations. Poland became a member of NATO in 1999. The three Baltic states join in 2004. Today all former Warsaw Pact members except for three former soviet republics, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, are members of NATO.

From the time it first started to happen, Russia has considered NATO expansion into lands formerly under their control to be an aggressive act against Russia. Adding former Soviet controlled nations to NATO may seem in the west to be designed to protect them from Russian aggression. Russia, at least in the person of its president Vladimir Putin, sees it as aimed directly against Russia. We need to consider why that is so. Recall that NATO was always a strong adversary of the Soviet Union. Recall also how so many times nations to Russia’s west invaded it over the centuries. The invasions of the French under Napoleon in June, 1812 and the Germans under Hitler in June, 1941, are the most famous invasions of Russia, but there had been numerous other invasions from the west in earlier centuries. After World War II the Russians had established their dominance over all of the nations of eastern Europe (except Austria if you consider Austria to be in eastern Europe). The Soviets did that in significant part to create buffer states between the Soviet Union and the west. Now all of that buffer except for Russia’s ally Belarus is gone. NATO, Russia’s opponent  all through the Cold War, has expanded into the nations that had formed Russia’s buffer. To Putin the wolf is at the door. He greatly fears that NATO’s expansion might one day extend to Ukraine. If Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would feel nearly surrounded by a potentially aggressive enemy.

Putin clearly intends his threat to invade Ukraine to be an attempt to get NATO and the US to back off. He has demanded that the three Baltic states be expelled from NATO, that NATO remove its forces from the former Warsaw Pact nations that have joined it, and that NATO pledge that it will never accept Ukraine as a member. It seems perfectly obvious that NATO never could accept any of these demands and never will. Doing what Putin wants would be a betrayal of NATO’s newest members. It would leave Ukraine more at Russia’s mercy than it already is. The odd thing about Putin’s demands is that he must have known that NATO and the US would never accept them. It seems so obvious that NATO and the US would never accept them that we have to ask whether Putin had some hidden motive behind his demanding them. Putin is after all an old Cold Warrior and KGB operative full of deceit and subterfuge. There are, I think, a few things that might be Putin’s hidden motive.

First, he may be playing to his domestic audience more than to Ukraine or the west. Like I’ve already said, historically at least Russians don’t see  Ukrainians as a people distinct from themselves. Many Russians may believe that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent, sovereign nation. The Russian people reacted very favorably to Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Many Russians share Putin’s belief that NATO is a threat to Russia’s national security. Putin’s favorability ratings are not always very high. He has probably retained his hold on power by falsifying election returns in various ways (and by having his chief opponents jailed or even murdered, but that’s a matter for another day). I would not be surprised if his strong stance against the west and Ukraine boosted his standing in the polls.

Another possible reason for what Putin is doing has to do with Putin’s long-range foreign policy goals. According to people knowledgeable about such things, those goals are first to create a Russian sphere of influence that reproduces the Russian or Soviet empire (they were geographically nearly the same thing) to the greatest extent possible. Putin has said that he considers the collapse of the Soviet Union to have been the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. It doesn’t matter if he’s right about that or not. (He isn’t.) What matters is that that’s what Putin thinks. He can’t come close to achieving this goal if he can’t get Ukraine into his sphere of influence. He may hope that even though the west will not accept his demands, in the long run NATO will back off their support for Ukraine because of the danger his threats against that country create.

Second, Putin wants to deepen fractures that already exist in the European Union. (Many, though not all, Ukrainians would very much like to join the EU, but so far Ukraine has not been invited in.) Not all members of the EU have the same economic relationship with Russia. Germany, for example, is more dependent on a supply of Russian natural gas than are some other EU members. Political attitudes toward Russia differ too. Neo-fascist leaders like those in Hungary and Turkey are more inclined to like Putin and Putin’s Russia than are the true democrats in countries like Germany and France. Putin forcing Europe to make new decisions about sanctions on Russia could indeed deepen those fractures.

Third, Putin hopes to drive a wedge between the United States and its NATO allies. It is much easier for the US to take a firm stand against Russia than it is for America’s European allies. We’re a lot farther away from Russia than they are. We are in no way dependent on Russian natural gas and other natural resources as some European countries are. That means we can worry less about Russia’s response to severe sanctions against it than the European nations can. Perhaps all this is speculation, but it makes sense to me.

Finally, will Putin really invade Ukraine? There is no way to know for sure. I doubt that even Putin himself knows for sure whether or not he will. Russia is far stronger militarily than Ukraine even when we take Russia’s huge nuclear arsenal out of the picture as most unlikely to be used. The military aid Ukraine is receiving from the US and from NATO helps that country’s military preparedness, but it can’t put Ukraine on an equal footing with Russia in that regard. Russia could probably overwhelm Ukraine and occupy the country with relative ease. What Russia could not do is subdue all Ukrainian resistance or get the Ukrainian people to accept any kind of Russian control over them. They have already rebelled once against a pro-Russia leader. It's a pretty sure bet they would do it again. Russia would probably face at least ongoing guerilla war against it. The notion of Russia conquering and in any way ruling Ukraine is one that Putin’s military and political strategists would, I am sure, much rather avoid than undertake. The US and NATO threat of severe sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine may have some deterrent effect on Putin, or it may not.

The thing that could prompt Putin to do something he otherwise would not do is that he has painted himself into a corner. He has threatened to invade Ukraine. He has positioned a huge, highly trained, and well equipped army on the Russo-Ukrainian border. He has made demands that NATO and the US will never accept. Putin may think that he has no way out of the situation he has created than to invade Ukraine. No leader wants to lose face. Authoritarian leaders like Putin want to lose it less than most.

Yet there is one thing Putin could do that would be a use of military force against Ukraine but would not be a full-scale invasion. There are a lot of Russians everywhere in Ukraine, but the population of the eastern part of the country has a particularly high percentage of Russians living among the Ukrainians. A couple of areas in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine have already declared themselves to be independent of Ukraine. They have set up small state structures of a sort. The Donbas Russians are already receiving military aid from Russia. Russian soldiers have been and may still be on the ground there. Putin could send his troops into far eastern of Ukraine, then annex it to Russia the way he did with Crimea. The Ukrainian armed forces would probably fight back, but they are no match for Russia’s mighty military capabilities. I understand that the troops Putin has sent to the Ukrainian border are not positioned for invading Ukraine in the far eastern end of the country. Still, invading and annexing east Ukraine could give Putin a way out short of an all out invasion.

So there you have it. Actually, if you’ve read this far you probably have more than you want to have. The current crisis arising from Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine is complex at best. Historically, relations between Russia and Ukraine are at least fraught. The two peoples, the Russians and the Ukrainians, are either separate peoples or not depending on who you talk to. I take some comfort from the pledge the US and NATO have made not to enter into a war between Ukraine and Russia. I pray that for the sake of both people but especially for the Ukrainians that Russia does not invade.