More on Vladimir Putin's Illegal, Immoral Invasion of Ukraine

 

More on Vladimir Putin’s Illegal, Immoral Invasion of Ukraine

March 5, 2022

 

Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has had the Russian military invade Russia’s neighboring nation of Ukraine. His actual motivation for doing so is hard to discern. It certainly seems to me and to a great many more or less informed observers that while he can almost certainly defeat Ukraine militarily, he cannot rule it peacefully. The Ukrainian people will never docilly accept Russian domination again. Perhaps we can’t know why he really did it, but we can know why Putin says he did it. He says that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people not two and that all he is doing is bringing some wayward Russians home. He also says he invaded to protect Russians living in Ukraine from the Ukrainians. These claims of his are simply absurd. They are absurd on two grounds. First, Russians and Ukrainians are not one people. They are clearly two related but different peoples. Second, even if they were one people, Putin would have no right to invade the Ukrainians’ country.

The Russians and the Ukrainians are not the same people or ethnic group. The first place where we see that they aren’t is in their languages. The Russian and Ukrainian languages are closely related, but they are not identical. Both of them are what the linguists call East Slavic languages. There are three such languages today, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian. In the past Russian rulers have insisted that Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian, but no reputable linguist would say that today. I know they aren’t the same from personal experience. I can still read a fair amount of Russian. I cannot read Ukrainian. The two languages are not mutually comprehensible. I have witnessed people speaking Spanish and Italian more or less understanding each other. Russian and Ukrainian are not close enough to each other to make that possible with them.

Ukrainian people have asserted their separate identity from the Russians for at least the past two hundred years. Ukrainian literature is not Russian literature. Some prominent people identified as Russians have been born in Ukraine, but that doesn’t make them culturally or linguistically Ukrainian. Many Ukrainian citizens speak Russian as their native language and self-identify as Russian, but that fact does not make Ukrainians and Russians the same people. Linguistically and culturally Ukrainians and Russians are not the same people. Putin’s contention that they are just makes no linguistic or cultural sense.

It doesn’t make historical sense either. The histories of the Russians and the Ukrainians has at times been closely related, intertwined even, but they are not identical. The historical developments that led to both today’s Russia and Ukraine begin in the city the Ukrainians call Kyiv and the Russians call Kiev. Beginning in around the eighth century CE a political entity called Kievan Rus’ developed on the west bank of the Dnieper River. It came to be ruled by a person called the Grand Prince. In 988 CE Grand Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus’ converted to Orthodox Christianity. He probably did that because Kiev was located on and controlled an important trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. The economic importance of Constantinople to Kievan Rus’ probably accounts for Vladimir’s acceptance of Constantinople’s type of Christianity. When Grand Prince Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity all of his people were converted as well. Mostly because he made the Rus’ Orthodox, today the Russians and Ukrainians both call him Vladimir the Great and even venerate him as Saint Vladimir. At the time of Kievan Rus’ there was no Russian and no Ukrainian language as we know them today. The people of Kievan Rus’ spoke a language called Old Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic. It is the language of the Russian Orthodox Church to this day. It is the mother tongue of today’s Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian, but it is not identical to an of them.

Kievan Rus’ power began to wane in the couple of centuries after Grand Prince Vladimir. As it did the political center of the eastern Slavs shifted to the north northeast of Kyiv. In 1240 CE the Mongols sacked Kyiv, and Kievan Rus’ was no more. In time Moscow became the most powerful political entity of the eastern Slavs. There is a direct historical development from Moscow coming to dominate the eastern Slavs to Moscow as the capital of the Russian Empire (until Peter the Great moved it to his new city of St. Petersburg), then of the Soviet Union, then of today’s Russian Federation.

The most important historical fact here for our question of the distinct identity of the Ukrainians is that the territory today called Ukraine developed differently than did Russia. Over the centuries, as Moscow became a power to the north, the land we now call Ukraine was overrun and controlled by a succession of (except for the Poles) non-Slavic people. At different times local Turkic people, the Ottoman Turks, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Poles and Lithuanians together, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled all or at least some of what is now Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine thus developed along very different tracks from the thirteenth century CE to the eighteenth century CE. In those five hundred years Old Slavonic developed into today’s three distinct east Slavic languages of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian. For much of that time Ukraine was ruled by nations to its west or northwest. While Russia occasionally fought wars against western nations, it was rarely ruled for any time at all by western powers. Because it was so often ruled by nations to its west Ukraine developed a more western cultural orientation than Moscow did.

By the eighteenth century what had been the Grand Principality of Moscow had grown and morphed into the Russian Empire. That empire gradually expanded to the east and to the south. By the end of the eighteenth century most of what is now Ukraine had been absorbed into the Russian Empire. Through the remainder of the imperial period of Russian history the Russians considered the Ukrainians to be essentially Russians who spoke a regional dialect of Russian not a separate language. The empire forbade the use of Ukrainian in education and public administration. It even made publishing literature in Ukrainian a crime.

The name Ukraine arose in this period of history. It is a word build on the Russian root “krai.” Krai meant the border regions of the empire to the south. In Russian the word Ukrainian mans “the land on the border.” In contemporary Russian krai means brink or brim, but it can also mean land. When Russians speak of our “krai” they mean our “land.” The Russian claim to Ukraine as actually being Russian is reflected even in the name Ukraine, though that of course doesn’t make the claim correct. Ukrainian nationalism arose within the Russian Empire, but the Ukrainians were never able to break free from the empire or create any distinct state called Ukraine.

The Russian Empire ended in 1917. In November, 1917, The Bolsheviks, who were the Russian communists led by Vladimir Lenin, staged a coup in St. Petersburg against the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy earlier that year. There followed several years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and various anti-Bolshevik groups (that were never able to coordinate their efforts against the Bolsheviks). The Ukrainians mostly fought against the Bolsheviks both because they opposed communism and because they were trying to break Ukraine free from Russian domination. They succeeded neither in avoiding communism nor in establishing an independent Ukraine.

By 1922 the communists had conquered not quite all but most of what had been the Russian Empire. In early 1922 they created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Though there eventually came to be fifteen such “republics,” at the beginning there were only four, the Russian, Belarussian, Transcaucasian, and Ukrainian Republics. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was the first political entity of any significance called Ukraine. The borders of that republic were set not by the Ukrainians but by mostly Russian bureaucrats in Moscow. Each of the so-called republics was in theory autonomous, but they were all firmly under the thumb of the Russians in practice.

By 1989 the Soviet Union had begun to fall apart. Moscow lost control of the non-Russian republics. On August 24, 1991, the Supreme Soviet (the legislature) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proclaimed that Ukraine would no longer obey the laws of the USSR but only those of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This declaration amounted to a de facto proclamation of Ukrainian independence. In a popular referendum held on December 1, 1991, 90% of the voters voted for Ukrainian independence. On December 25, 1991 (which is not that date in the old calendar the Russian Orthodox Church still uses and thus was not Christmas in Russia), the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. Ukraine then became officially its own independent nation free of foreign control in any significant way for the first time since the days of Kievan Rus’. Neither Ukrainian-Russian history nor the understanding and will of the Ukrainian people supports Putin’s claim that the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people.

Yet even if Russians and Ukrainians were the same people as Vladimir Putin claims, Russia would have no moral or legal right to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Putin claims that he has invaded Ukraine for, among other reasons, the protection of Russians living in Ukraine. I trust that he knows but is ignoring the fact that the history of nations made up of one dominant ethnic group making claims against other nations because members of that dominant ethnic group live there has a brutal history. Nazi Germany and the Sudetenland are the classic example. The victorious allies created the nation of Czechoslovakia after World War I. That new nation included something like three million ethnic Germans. Most though not all of them lived in parts of Czechoslovakia adjacent to Germany called the Sudetenland after the Sudeten Mountains. By 1938 Adolf Hitler had begun to claim that the Czechs were oppressing the Germans of the Sudetenland. He claimed the right to occupy the Sudetenland to protect the Germans there. Though Hitler had no such right under international law, at the Munich Conference of September, 1938, the British and the French, desperate to avoid another war with Germany, agreed to let Hitler occupy the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise not to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia. Neither the Czechs nor the Slovaks had any say in the matter. Between October 1 and October 10, 1938, Hitler occupied the Sudetenland. Hitler was never a man of his word when it suited him not to be. On March 15, 1939, he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland, thereby plunging Europe into the unspeakable tragedy of World War II.

Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin makes claims about Russians living in Ukraine identical to those Hitler made about Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The population of Ukraine does in fact include many Russians. The major Ukrainian city of Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian) located near the Russian border is majority Russian. In the eastern part of Ukraine two breakaway provinces with majority Russian populations, Donetsk and Luhansk, have been fighting Ukraine (with military help from Russia)for years. Putin has made the outrageously absurd claim that Ukrainians in that part of the country are committing genocide against the Russians. Except for those two breakaway provinces, no Ukrainian Russians have asked Russia to invade Ukraine to protect them or for any other reason. Yet even if they had, Putin would have no moral or legal right to invade Ukraine. Putin doesn’t like this fact, but under international law Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation. It has as much right not to be invaded as any other independent, sovereign state does.

There simply is no moral or legal question about it. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under international law. It is also grossly immoral. Putin has his Russian military inflicting death and destruction on Ukraine with no legal grounds for doing so and no moral grounds either. Russian and Ukrainians are closely related to each other linguistically, culturally, and historically, but they are not the same people. Putin’s claim that they are is just false. It has no support in fact whatsoever. Yet even if they were the same people Putin would have no right to invade, destroy, and kill in Ukraine the way he is doing today. Our response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must be cautious and measured. Putin, after all, controls the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn’t use it if he thought it necessary. So we condemn. We sanction Russia and its oligarchs. We watch Putin pursue an unprovoked act of aggression against a peaceful neighbor. We are powerless to stop him. Perhaps we wish we could, but because of all those Russian nuclear weapons we can’t. We don’t like it, but sadly that’s how it is and how its going to be.