Once More: On Russia
and Ukraine
August 21, 2025
I’ve written about the relationship between Russia and
Ukraine before; but, after having disappeared from our news broadcasts for a
while, Russia’s illegal and grossly immoral invasion of Ukraine is once again
making our headlines. So here’s a recap of what I know about that relationship.
And I’ll remind you that I have a PhD in Russian history.
First of all, let’s recognize an undeniable truth. Russians
and Ukrainians are closely related linguistically and culturally. Or at least
many Ukrainians are closely related to the Russians in this way. Linguists
recognize Russian and Ukrainian as closely related but distinct East Slavic
languages. At least in the eastern parts of the country, Ukrainians and
Russians share an adherence to the Orthodox Chrisian faith. The Orthodox
Ukrainians sometimes, but not always, have belonged to Orthodox churches tied to
the Russian Orthodox Church. At least the eastern parts of what today is
Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union from the late
eighteenth century to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The history of today’s Ukraine, however, is quite complex.
Ukraine did not exist as a distinct political entity until the early twentieth
century, and then only briefly until 1991. For most of the time before the
Russian Empire absorbed it, the eastern parts of today’s Ukraine were ruled at
times by the Turks and at times by autonomous people usually called the
Cossacks. The western parts of today’s Ukraine were ruled by western powers.
Part of that land was once part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Other parts
of it were occupied and ruled for years by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
a major Roman Catholic western power for over two hundred years from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
There are several important results of this history. One is
that eastern and western Ukraine are different in some important ways.
Ukrainians in the western part of the country, the principal city of which is
Lviv, consider themselves to be westerners. While many of them were,
historically speaking, Christians of the Orthodox rite, many of them belonged
to churches that recognized the authority of the Pope, which, of course, true
Orthodox Christians do not. Most Ukrainians in the eastern parts of the country
do not think of themselves as Russians, but they are culturally and
linguistically more closely related to the Russians than are Ukrainians in the
west. In eastern Ukraine, especially in the region often called the Donbas in
the far eastern part of the country, the demographics are complex. The
population there is mixed between Russians and Ukrainians. There is no
geographic distinction between these two populations. They intermix and have
lived together for centuries. Many, though perhaps not all, of the Russians in
this region actually speak Russian as their primary language but consider
themselves to be Ukrainians.
While some rulers or forces in the history of Ukraine allied
themselves with the Russians, thereby ending up with their lands being part of
the Russian Empire, no Ukrainians ever became part of any Russian political
entity voluntarily. Instead, over the course of a century or more, Russia
simply expanded to the south and incorporated much of what today is Ukraine.
Russia took the Crimean Peninsula from the Turks, for example, in the late
eighteenth century under Empress Catherine the Great. The western parts of
Ukraine were not part of the Russian Empire at that time.
Throughout the last century of more of the existence of the
Russian Empire, the Russians had to deal with the claim by the Ukrainians not
to be Russians but to be a distinct people with their own language, culture,
and history. The imperial Russian government dealt with that issue by refusing
to recognize the Ukrainians as a people distinct from the Russians. The
imperial Russian government never recognized Ukrainian as a language distinct
from Russian. At times they outlawed the use of Ukrainian in publishing, public
administration, and education. There was no distinct Ukrainian political entity
in the Russia Empire. Most of what today is Ukraine was just a part of the
Russian Empire the same as any other part of the Russian Empire.
The Russian Empire ended in 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II
abdicated early in the year. In October, 1917 (old style, November new style)
the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin staged a coup and took control of the
Russian government. A protracted civil war ensure. During that war some
Ukrainians briefly claimed to have established an independent Ukrainian state,
but the Russians, under the Bolsheviks, quickly conquered all of Ukraine that
had been part of the Russian Empire.
In 1922, the Bolsheviks, by then calling themselves
Communists rather than Bolsheviks, established the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. One of the original so-called soviet socialist republics was the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Communist regime of the USSR set its
boundaries. I don’t know if they were aware of the demographic problem of
intermingled nationalities or not, but the border they set put many Russian
people, especially in the far east of the country, in the Ukrainian republic.
When the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established, it included the
Donbas, but it did not include Crimea or the westernmost parts of today’s
Ukraine.
Ukraine suffered horribly under the Communists, most of whom
were Russians. Stalin’s murderous purging of so-called enemies of the people
took place in Ukraine as it did in the rest of the USSR, but Ukraine had it
worse then most of the rest of the country. In the early 1930s, Stalin, who by
then had established himself as essentially the dictator of the whole nation,
decided to collectivize agriculture everywhere in the country. That meant he
had to get peasants who owned and farmed their own land to give up that land to
a collective organization. Marxism has never dealt well with peasants. It is
based on an economic model of capitalists employing proletarians, mostly in
factories. Peasants don’t fit that model. Stalin wanted to make Soviet
agriculture fit that model better, so he set out to eliminate private land
ownership by peasants, private land ownership being taboo in a Marxist society.
Not surprisingly, most of the land-owing peasants in the
USSR resisted. Resistance was perhaps particularly strong in Ukraine. Ukraine
has some of the richest farmland in Europe. In the nineteenth century it was
called “the breadbasket of Europe,” the Russians then being able to export so
much Ukrainian grain. Most Ukrainian peasants were having none of Stalin’s
collectivization, so Stalin decided to force them into submission.
He did it through mass, intentionally induced starvation. The
Ukrainians call this policy the Holodomor. It didn’t apply exclusively to
Ukraine, but Ukraine bore the brunt of it. Something like four million
Ukrainians starved to death. Stalin made it happen. He knew it was happening,
and he didn’t care. All he cared about was forcing Ukrainian peasants into
collective farms, and, eventually, he succeeded.
Next came World War II, which the Russians call “the Great
Patriotic War,” or “the Great War of the Fatherland,” either translation fits
the Russian. Some Ukrainians so hated the Russian Communists that they were
willing to ally themselves with the invading Germans against them. It is
commonly thought that Hitler might have been able to defeat the USSR had he
accepted the Ukrainians and other non-Russian Soviet people as allies. He,
however, though all Slavic people were subhuman; and he wanted to exterminate
them so he could settle their land with Germans. The Soviets, of course,
defeated the Germans; and Ukraine remained part of the USSR under Russian
domination.
One significant event in the history of Russian-Ukrainian
relations occurred in 1954. Nikita Khrushchev was a Stalinist functionary who
had worked mostly in Ukraine. By 1954, he was the head of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union and thus essentially in charge of the whole country. In
1954, for reasons no one is entirely sure about, he transferred the Crimean
Peninsula from the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic. Crimea had been part of Russia for well over one
hundred years by that point, and the Russians mostly thought of it as theirs. After
1954, it technically wasn’t. It was part of Ukraine.
Come 1991. On December 25 of that year, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics ceased to exist. The powers in Ukraine had been working
toward national independence for some time by then, and on that date at the
latest Ukraine became a fully sovereign, independent nation. Both the Russians
and the rest of the world recognized it as such.
When Ukraine became an independent nation, something like
one-third of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was situated in Ukraine. In
1994, Ukraine agreed to give up those nuclear weapons in exchange for security
guarantees. In the treaty establishing that agreement, Russia committed to
“refrain from the threat or use of the use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Ukraine sent all of the
nuclear weapons on its territory to Russia.
On January 1, 2000, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became the
President of Russia. He was largely unknown to most of the world at that point.
He had been a minor KGB officer, though Russian president Yeltsin had made him
the head of the FSB, the Russia successor to the Soviet KGB. President Yeltsin
then made him his Prime Minister, and, when Yeltsin resigned as president at
the end of 1999, Putin became the president. He has served as the head of the
Russia government either directly or indirectly ever since.
Putin has always dreamed of Russia becoming the power on the
world stage that the USSR had been. He has called the dissolution of the USSR “the
greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.” As he developed his
rule, Putin began to adopt the old Russian imperial attitude toward Ukraine. He
began to echo the old imperial contention that Ukrainian is not a language
distinct from Russian. It is, he said, only a dialect of Russian. He has
asserted that there really is no such thing as a Ukrainian, all so-called
Ukrainians being really Russians. He began not to recognize Ukraine as an
independent, autonomous nation. He began to make wild accusations against the
Ukrainian government, calling it "fascist," which it definitely was
not.
In 2014, Putin began to incorporate Ukraine back into
Russia. He engineered a peaceful Russian takeover of Crimea and declared it to
be part of Russia. The international community on the whole has never
recognized the legitimacy of Russia’s takeover of Crimea. Ukraine, of course,
has never recognized Crimea as part of Russia, considering it still to be part
of Ukraine. The status of Crimea has long been complicated by the fact that the
Crimean port of Sevastopol has long been the homebase of first the Russian,
then the Soviet, then again the Russian navy. Nonetheless, the international
community has never recognized Putin’s annexation of Crimea as in any way
legitimate.
Russian invasion of Ukraine
Then we come to February 24, 2022. The world knew that Putin
had been massing military forces on Russia’s border with Ukraine for some time.
What we didn’t know was if Putin would really commit the illegal and grossly
immoral act of actually invading Russia’s neighbor, one of the largest nations
in Europe. Most of us were shocked and outraged when he did it. He sent massive
Russian forces into Ukraine in an attempt to conquer the country, remove its
democratic government, and make Ukraine once again part of Russia, as it had
been in the old Russian Empire.
Frankly, I, and a great many experts with more knowledge of
the matter than I had, expected Russia to defeat Ukraine militarily in a matter
of weeks. We were wrong. The Russians and Ukrainians are today still engaged in
a brutal, bloody war. Russia has taken some Ukrainian territory, and other
parts of Ukraine have gone back and forth from Ukrainian control to Russian
control and back to Ukrainian control. Estimates I have seen in the press put
Russia’s casualties as high as one million soldiers killed or wounded. Russia’s
vaunted machinery of war has not performed anywhere near as well as the world
expected it to. The European Union and the United States have poured massive
amounts military aid into Ukraine, and that aid has certainly played a major
role in Russia’s inability to defeat Ukraine so far.
So what Putin is up to, illegal and immoral as it is, is not
hard to understand from a historical perspective. Russia controlled Ukraine, in
both the imperial period and the Soviet period, from the eighteenth century
until 1991. The tsars told their people that Ukrainians were really Russians
who just spoke a dialect of Russian rather than their own language. The Soviets
didn’t necessarily make that claim, but, while the USSR was, to some extent,
organized on ethnic lines, everyone knew that it was the Russians who ran the
show. Putin is out to reestablish Russian control over a region that had been
part of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The fact that Ukraine had
become an independent nation recognized as such by the whole world should have
stopped Putin from invading. It didn’t. Putin’s primary agenda is the
reestablishment of the Russian Empire, or at least the establishment of Russian
dominance if not direct political control in all of what had been part of the
Russian Empire. To do that, he has to control Ukraine, the largest and richest
of the former soviet socialist republics other than Russia. So he invaded and
now is stuck with a war he can’t seem to win but isn’t exactly losing either.
How will that war end? There’s no way to know. The Russians
may eventually wear the Ukrainians down to the point that they have no choice
to surrender. Or Putin may come to his senses and pull his forces out of
Ukraine. Or Putin may lose control of Russia, with a successor either ramping
up Russia’s war in Ukraine and eventually winning it or ending it by pulling
out.
A compromise between the Russians and the Ukrainians is very
hard to imagine. Their aims in the war are diametrically opposed to each other.
One suggestion that has been made, however, is, I believe at least worthy of
consideration. This solution would have Ukraine cede the Donbas and Crimea to
Russia in exchange for an end to the war and security guarantees for Ukraine
from Russia and perhaps the western powers as well. This solution makes some
sense ethnically. There are at least substantial Russian minorities if not
majorities in both Donbas and Crimea. Those eastern parts of Ukraine have a
different history than the western parts of the country do. They are more
aligned with Russia culturally than are the western parts of the country. This
proposed compromise might actually work.
Except for one thing. Every time I have heard this solution
mentioned, someone says “Chamberlain.” Someone says, “appeasement.” Someone
says “Munich, 1938.) These references are, of course, to the agreement Neville
Chamberlain and the French made with Hitler that allowed Hitler to invade the
part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland without opposition from Britain
or France in exchange for Hitler’s promise never to take any other land by
military force. With historical hindsight, we all know how disastrous that
agreement was. Hitler had no intention of complying with it other than by
invading the Sudetenland, which he promptly did. The world called the Munich
agreement appeasement, and appeasement has become a buzzword for how you do not
deal with a militarily aggressive dictator.
And yes, the proposed settlement that I am considering here
would, to some extent, appease Vladimir Putin. There would, however, be at
least two difference between that agreement and Munich, 1938. The first is that
the Czechoslovaks, whose land was to be invaded, were not even present at the
Munich conference. The Ukrainians would be very much present and involved in
any negotiations that led to this proposed settlement of the war. The Russians,
the Europeans, and the Americans might well all pressure Ukraine to accept the
deal, but Ukraine would be free to do so or not, at least technically.
The second difference is that in the Munich accords, Britain
and others agreed to let Hitler start a war that he had not yet started. The
Russian-Ukrainian war has, of course, most definitely been started. It has gone
on for over three and a half years. It has cost an enormous number of lives on
both sides. It has destroyed a lot of Ukrainian property, and the Ukrainians
have also destroyed some Russian property. Allowing a war and stopping a war
are not the same thing.
Do these differences make a difference? To some extent yes,
but they probably don’t make enough of a difference to make this settlement of
the war feasible. This settlement would indeed reward Putin for having
committed the gross violation of international law and of common human decency of invading
Ukraine. It wouldn’t give him everything he had hoped to achieve by invading
Ukraine, but it would give him at least part of what he had hoped to achieve. Thus,
there would be significant appeasement of Russia, the aggressor and law
violator in the invasion of Ukraine. It seems likely that the world would never
accept such appeasement. Neither would Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has
said loud and clear that it will never agree to cede any Ukrainian territory to
Russia. Of course, in international relations, noes like that don’t always
remain noes, but that is where the Ukrainians stand today. So far, the Russians
have given no indication that they would accept this settlement either.
And there’s one further problem with this settlement.
Neville Chamberlain was a fool to believe anything Adolf Hitler said. Hitler
was a murderous dictator with an agenda of conquering and inhabiting all of
central and eastern Europe. His entire regime was based on a lie, namely, that
the Jews were the cause of all of Germany’s problems. He wasn’t about to admit
that his hatred of Jews was grounded in a lie, nor was he ever going to give up
his desire to exterminate all Slavs, whom he considered to be non-human, and
replace them with Germans. It was indeed foolhardy to believe him when he said
he would stop with the Sudetenland.
Vladimir Putin is also a murderous dictator. He too has an
agenda, though one quite different from Hitler’s. His agenda is to reestablish
Russia as the dominant power over all of the land that was once part of the
Russian Empire or of the Soviet Union. (The territorial extent of the Russian
Empire at its height and the territorial extent of the USSR at its height are
nearly but not quite identical.) Putin lies with impunity. He kills opponents
with impunity. He has proven his willingness to use the Russian army in a way
similar to the way Hitler used the German army. There very probably is no more
reason to trust anything Putin says than there was to trust anything Hitler
said.
So, it seems to me, that Ukraine and Russia, and indeed the
whole world, are stuck with a problem to which there is no obvious solution. The
histories of Russia and of Ukraine have led us to this point, and no one can
understand the Russian-Ukraine conflict without knowing those histories. US
president Trump is trying these days to broker a settlement between Russia and
Ukraine, though he is doing it quite ineptly, as one would suspect he would. It
seems unlikely that he will succeed. Putin can manipulate Trump to do anything
Putin wants, which means Trump is unlikely to get the Ukrainians to agree to
whatever proposals Trump makes. I wish I had a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian
war. I don’t. I don’t think anyone does. Putin won’t give up, and Ukraine won’t
give in. That’s what the whole world has to deal with. I wish the whole world
good luck in trying to do so.
