THOUGHTS ON UKRAINE - PART ONE, THE BACKGROUND
THOUGHTS ON UKRAINE - PART ONE
The area that we now know as Ukraine has rarely been an independent entity. We first hear of it as part of Kievan Rus, a state established by Vikings who went east and, centred on Kiev, gave their name to Russia. Kievan Rus was defeated by the ‘Golden Horde’, successor to Genghis Khan’s empire, and by 1240 Ukraine was occupied by the Mongols. Eventually the Poles and the Lithuanians expelled the Mongols and Ukraine was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, while Crimea became a semi-independent khanate and eventually a protectorate of the Turkic Ottoman Empire. From 1386 when the heir to the kingdom of Poland and the heir to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were the same man the two states were in a de facto union, eventually formalised by the treaty of Lublin in 1569 when the union became the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth. After one of the many wars and skirmishes in the region, in 1689 the area of Ukraine east of the River Dnieper was ceded to Russia. Although there was and is much argument as to whether that ceding was legal, and the largely Russian speaking area was eventually restored to Ukraine, it is there that separatist agitation became an uprising in 2013.
For a brief period the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth was a major regional military power, until beginning in 1772 it was conquered, broken up and divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Poland ceased to exist for 150 years. The Russian sector included Ukraine, which remained Tsarist Russian until the end of the First World War, which saw the reconstitution of Poland (including part of west Ukraine) and the Russian Civil War. In the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks were opposed by the so-called White Russians, a mix of unreconstructed tsarists, constitutional monarchists, socialists and liberals whose only common agenda was anti-Communism. In Ukraine there was a separate civil war, from 1917 to 1921, called by some the War of Independence. Various factions, not all of whom wanted complete independence from Russia, fought Ukrainian Bolsheviks for control. Eventually the Bolsheviks won, and the Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
During the Second World War German invaders of the Ukraine were at first greeted as liberators, but the German civil authority’s failure to capitalise on this, despite the urgings of the German Army, soon turned to resistance and the formation of bands of partisans operating behind German lines. By the end of the Second World war Germany had been defeated and Ukraine remained part of the USSR.
As for the Crimea, in 1783 in one of the many Russo-Turkish wars where Russia slowly expanded to the Black Sea, Catherine the Great took the Crimea, the first Moslem territory to be lost by the Ottomans, and incorporated it into Russia. There it remained, Tsarist and Soviet, until 1954 when in a tidying-up exercise Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, effectively the dictator of the USSR, moved the Crimea from being a province of Russia into being a province of Ukraine. Given the geographic position of Crimea this made eminent sense, and as Ukraine was part of the USSR, politically it mattered not at all. Then, in 1991 the USSR dissolved, and the constituent republics were allowed to decide whether to become independent or to remain as part of a Russian ‘Confederation of Independent States’, which in practice was intended by Russia to be the USSR under another name. In Ukraine in a plebiscite produced a 90 % vote for independence (56% in Crimea).
The early years of Ukrainian independence were marked by corruption and crime with successive presidents jockeying to establish closer relations with Europe or alternatively ties with Russia. Any attempts to move closer to Europe, and particularly any intimations that Ukraine might apply to join the EU were met with strong Russian opposition including at one stage Russia removing the subsidy on gas supplies. Various relatively bloodless revolutions in 2004 and 2013 led to the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in February 2014 and the ousting of the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, thus exacerbating Russian concerns about its own security should Ukraine attempt to join NATO. This led to Russian occupation of Crimea the same month and formal annexation in March 2014. It has to be said that there is a strong argument for Crimea being part of Russia, as it had been from 1783 until 1953 when it was moved into Ukraine purely for administrative convenience. Had the Soviet Union not disintegrated as quickly as it did, Crimea could almost certainly have been negotiated back into Russia. As it is, in my many visits to pre-annexation Crimea, I found all the signs written in Russian, the people all speaking Russian and most that I spoke to saying that they were Russian, with a few (and it was only a few) identifying themselves as ‘Russian and Ukrainian’. Ukraine cut off the supply of water to the north coast of Crimea and western nations condemned the annexation and expelled Russia from the G7.
What we do not hear very much of these days is the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 which said that, in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons, inherited from the former armed forces of the USSR, the territorial integrity and independence of Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine would be respected. The guarantors were the United States, the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation.
In February 2016 Ukrainian citizens were granted visa free travel into and around the Schengen area for up to 90 days and it was clear that eventual accession to the EU was well in train. On 21 April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine and in the parliamentary elections of July 2021 his newly formed ‘Servant of the People’ party won an absolute majority of seats for the first time in the history of independent Ukraine. Zelensky was not a professional politician, he was an actor and television comedian (he was the voice of Paddington Bear), and some remarked that Ukraine had gone the reverse of the United Kingdom where the latter had elected a politician who became a comedian. Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform and had gone a long way towards making Ukraine a modern democratic country when Russia, which was already supporting the separatists in the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine, invaded in February 2022.
Russia does, of course, have genuine security concerns which must be recognised. I have been working in Russia and Russian near abroad for around two to three months every year for twelve years or so, and Russians say to me ‘Your Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan told our Mr Gorbachev that the West would not take advantage of the breakup of the Soviet Union – and look what has happened! NATO has advanced 1000 miles nearer Moscow!’ Whether Thatcher and Reagan actually did make this promise is immaterial (the cabinet papers of the period are yet to be released) but that does not matter – as is often the case perception holds more weight than truth, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, to say nothing of the rest of Germany, all previously part of the USSR or of the Warsaw Pact or of neutral Yugoslavia are now members of NATO. When I remonstrate that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, the Russians say ‘no it isn’t, it’s an anti-Russian alliance and it always was’. All that, however, does not justify Putin’s war.
Next week: the War in Ukraine