Russia and Ukraine Redux

 

Russia and Ukraine Redux

September 30, 2022

 

I have written about Russia and Ukraine before, using my knowledge of Russian history, in which I hold a PhD. I write about the relationship between those two nationalities and their present political embodiments again because the issues between them just become more and more complex. When Russia invaded Ukraine in March of this year your humble author and just about every expert on Russian affairs assumed that the Russians would easily defeat the Ukrainians militarily. After all, Russia is a very much bigger country than Ukraine. It has a much bigger population. It has a much bigger military. It has an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons. Ukraine has existed as a country recognized as such under international law only since late 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many ethnic Russians live in Ukraine. A war between Russia and Ukraine looked like an enormous mismatch. But it hasn’t turned out to be a mismatch at all. The Ukrainians are resisting the Russian invasion far more effectively than most anyone thought they could. In recent times they have even regained some territory they had lost to the Russians earlier in the conflict. But just today Russia has claimed to have annexed Ukrainian districts that make up the entire eastern part of the country. So here’s another take on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. There should be no real issues between those two closely related people, but of course there are, and we cannot ignore them.

This afternoon I had a regular appointment with my dentist. He said something about how remarkable it is that in 2022 one nation is trying to take over another nation, meaning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I said yes, I have a PhD in the history of one of them. He asked me if Russia had any claim on Ukraine. I didn’t have time to give him an answer. I said only that the Russian and Ukrainian populations overlap. They intermix. There is no clear dividing line between them. I said that it is the eastern border of Ukraine that is primarily at issue, that Russian bureaucrats in Moscow drew that border, and that there is nothing natural about it. That’s what ‘s leading to a lot of the trouble there. My dentist put the question of the relationship of Russia and Ukraine in an interesting way. He asked whether Russia has any claim on Ukraine. That question is more complex than it might at first appear to be. The answer under international law is simply no. Russia has no rightful claim to any of Ukraine’s territory. From the perspective of Russian and Ukrainian history the answer is still no, but the matter is a bit more complex. I will attempt here to explain why that relationship is as fraught as it is.

The ethnic Ukrainians are every bit as ancient as a people as are the ethnic Russians. In fact, centuries ago there was no distinction between them. They were both just the one Eastern Slavic people. What we study as Russian history began in Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian). That history, at least in documentary form, begins with the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE. In the eleventh century CE the center of Slavic civilization shifted to the northeast of Kiev to the cities of Yaroslavl, Suzdal, and eventually Moscow. The territory that today is Ukraine entered a long and complex history of occupation and domination by peoples other than Eastern Slavs. These include the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, and the Lithuanians among others. Some ethnic Eastern Slavic people ended up living, at different times, in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania as borders in the region were redrawn several times. For many centuries few if any of them lived under Russian control.

Beginning at least by the eighteenth century CE, the Russian Empire, which had grown and expanded extensively from Moscow in all four directions, began to occupy parts of the territory we now recognize as Ukraine. By 1789 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (though she was herself German not Russian) occupied Crimea, and all of what is now Ukraine came under Russian domination. What today are the Ukrainian lands were incorporated into the Russian Empire.

In its imperial period, which lasted until 1917, Russia never recognized the Ukrainians as a distinct people with a distinct language and culture that differed from the Russians. There was no distinct Ukrainian political unit of any kind within the empire. Indeed, in the nineteenth century the imperial Russian government outlawed the use of Ukrainian in education and banned the publication of literature in Ukrainian. The Russians in this period always claimed that there was no distinct Ukrainian nationality. To the Russians Ukrainians were really Russians who just spoke a rather odd dialect of Russian. Ukrainian nationalism arose in the nineteenth century, but the Ukrainians were never able to assert any kind of independence from the imperial government in St. Petersburg.

The Russian Empire ended in early 1917, and in November (October old style), 1917, the Russian Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, staged a coup d’état in St. Petersburg that the Soviet Union would always celebrate as the Great October Revolution, though it was initially nothing of the sort. There followed a long civil war in which the Bolsheviks fought against various anti-Bolshevik enemies. Some of those enemies were Ukrainian nationalists fighting to free Ukraine from Russian control. They never succeeded for long in doing so. The Bolsheviks eventually won the civil war and established their control over most of what had been the Russian Empire, including Ukraine.

In 1922 the Russian Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Initially there were five so-called republics. One of them was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was imposed on the Ukrainian people by the Russian-dominated Soviet Communist Party, but it was the first nominally Ukrainian political entity in history. The borders of the five “republics” were, like everything else in the Soviet Union, set by Communist bureaucrats in Moscow. They faced a difficult task in determining what lands were Russian and what lands were Ukrainian. The Russian and Ukrainian people were extensively intermingled with each other. There were Russian-speaking people as well as Ukrainian-speaking people throughout what became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. There were Ukrainian-speaking people in the Russian republic. The overlap of the Russians and the Ukrainians was particularly pronounced in what became the eastern part of the Ukrainian republic. The Soviets set the border between Russia and Ukraine where it is today except that initially they put the Crimean Peninsula in the Russian Republic not the Ukrainian one. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred that peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR.

Thus from 1922 until 1991 there was a Ukrainian political entity, the Ukrainian SSR. It was, however, completely dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was itself primarily a Russian institution. When the Soviet Union was terminated on December 25, 1991, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became the independent nation of Ukraine. The international community, including Russia, recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation under international law. It was the first time in history that such a sovereign Ukrainian state had existed and been recognized as such by the entire world.

Russia respected the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine from 1991 until 2014, when Russia forcibly, and illegally, incorporated Crimea into Russia. By 2014 Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had been effectively ruling Russia since January 1, 2000. Putin is a complex character, but we get a lot of insight into an important part of his thinking from the comment he once made that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. Putin was once a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he was an agent of the Soviet institution charged with keeping the Communists in power, namely, the KGB. (The letters KGB are the first letters of the Russian words for the Committee on State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti.) He was perhaps never all that committed as a Communist, but he was committed to the Soviet Union. In his mind, Russia is entitled to dominate if not outright control all of the lands and people that once made up the USSR. That, of course, includes Ukraine. Beyond that, Ukraine seems to hold a special attraction for Putin. He advocates the old imperial Russian understanding of Ukraine and Ukrainians. He denies that the Ukrainians are a people distinct from the Russians. He denies Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation separate from Russia. Moreover, he fears any association of Ukraine with either the European Union or NATO. Because so many of them have at times in the past lived under the control and domination of more western peoples like the Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians generally think of themselves as more western than the Russians are. They also resent the Russians for centuries of Russian rule that was always unjust and often massively violent; and they fear the possibility of Russia reasserting its control over them. Because he does not think of them as a separate people with a right to an independent existence, and because he is afraid that they will form an alliance with the European Union and join NATO, Putin feels fully justified in his attempt to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation distinct from Russia.

So does Russia have a claim on Ukraine? No, it doesn’t; but it is not hard to understand why Putin and many other Russians think that it does. Ukraine was under Russian domination and control for a very long time. The Russians and the Ukrainians are very closely related linguistically and culturally. Most of both peoples are or in the past were Orthodox Christians. Their histories are closely intermeshed. Russian civilization as we (and they) know it began in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. That we can understand what Putin is doing in Ukraine does not make what he is doing there either legal under international law or moral under any conceivable system of true morality. It is neither. It is however important for us to understand the complex history of Russian-Ukrainian relations if we are to understand at all what is going on between those two nations today.