Understanding the Ukrainian Scene in 2024
Amid the pervading blast of anti-Russian pro-Ukrainian rhetoric and sentiment, it may be useful to consider what it is that Russia is after; it was clearly stated in the years preceding the 2022 invasion. There are four items on the list: firstly that Ukraine should declare that it will not join NATO, providing a buffer between NATO members and Russia, as Finland does; secondly ‘de-nazification’ which means that the OUN, and the Azov regiment should be ostracised; thirdly that Ukraine should renounce its claim to Crimea, which has, after all, been part of Russia since 1785; fourthly some acknowledgement of the rights of Russian people living in Ukraine, an issue because 30% of the population of Ukraine is Russian.
This dispute between two members of the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has become a major international concern because it is an episode in a campaign running in the background of American foreign policy since December 1950 when President Truman, explaining US intervention into the Korean Civil War, proclaimed that ‘global communism’ was a threat to democracy. The Cold War, the European manifestation of this camaign, was won by the Western Alliance in 1991 but the background campaign did not end there because although the USSR lost that war and itself collapsed, communism continued to exist. Since 1991, the NATO front line has advanced around 1000 kilometres eastward and is now on the Russian frontier which is the reason that Russia proposed that Ukraine should become an agree, non-combatant buffer zone. The Western Alliance did not accept that proposal and intends to appropriate Ukraine.
That is the international context of the war and study of regional history provides further explanation of why it has broken out in this place at this time.
So, the river Dnieper divides the rolling fertile steppe north of the Black Sea into two regions, east and west and the whole territory, now known as Ukraine, became a single political entity during the dissolution of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great united it as an Administrative Area within the Russian Empire; ‘Ukraine’ means something like ‘extremities’, perhaps translatable in this context as ‘borderlands’. Modern Ukraine occupies an area of 600,000 sq km with a population of 44 million; it is bigger than France, three times the size of the UK with two thirds the population. A few years earlier, in 1783, Catherine had annexed Crimea, at the time an independent Moslem Khanate, relic of the Tarter incursions; the peninsula became an integral part of the Empire, administered directly from Moscow and subsequently repopulated by Russian settlers.
In earlier times, around 850 CE, Viking raiders came down river and set up a trading post at Kiev, which became the centre of a loose federation of principalities called the Kievan Rus, covering parts of what are now Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, with competing dynasties, flexible alliances, undefined borders. There was also a Moscow Rus, precursor of modern Russia; the prevalent syllable ‘rus’ deriving from the Russian word for ‘fair-haired’, or an Old Scandinavian word for ‘people who row’ or simply the Latin word for countryside. The most significant event of this period, in relation to current affairs, was conversion to Christianity in 986 followed by the ‘Great Schism’ of 1054 CE, which divided the Church into (broadly speaking) the Roman Catholic rite, headed by the Pope in Rome, and the Orthodox rite reporting to various Patriarchs in Constantinople, Kiev and Moscow. At the time of the Schism, the Kievan church remained in the Orthodox tradition.
Mongol incursions in mid-13th century wiped out the warring aristocracies and introduced a period of anarchy which ended 1363 CE when the multi-national Grand Duchy of Lithuania won a decisive battle. As the Mongols withdrew, western Ukraine became part of the Grand Duchy, converting to Roman Catholicism in 1596 and the east, remaining Orthodox, was absorbed into a nascent Russian State. For more than 250 years, from the withdrawal of the Mongols until unification as one administrative area by the Empress Catherine in 1795, the region west of the Dnieper River was part of Poland-Lithuania, westward oriented, Ukrainian-speaking and Catholic by religion while east of the river was part of Russia, eastward-leaning, Russian-speaking and Eastern Orthodox by religion. These geographical, cultural and religious demarcations are fundamental to current political realities.
Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow and consequent dissolution of the Russian Empire, Ukraine became, in 1922, a founder member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); Crimea remained part of the Russian SSR until 1954 when Nikita Khrushchev reassigned its administration to Kiev. During this period there emerged in western Ukraine a fiercely right-wing political group called the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, firmly suppressed by the totalitarian government of the time but revived in WWII, following the German invasion, to set up a small fascist state in the north-west, avowing allegiance to Adolf Hitler and implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, massacring tens of thousands of Jewish and Polish residents. After 1945, the OUN re-grouped with support from Western Intelligence Agencies and formed anti-communist alliances in other European countries. Today, the stridently right-wing, nationalistic, OUN is prominent in Kievan politics; its more militaristic branch, the Azov Regiment is an element of the regular army and active in street militias and demonstrations.
At the breakup of the USSR in 1991, most of its constituent republics signed up to a new supra-national body, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Ukraine, like the other member republics including Russia itself, went through a period of brutal privatisation in which public assets were sold off by naïve committees to sharp opportunists, carpetbaggers and the occasional entrepreneur in rigged auctions for peppercorn prices. To many Russians this was a period of national degradation that Mikhail Gorbachev led them into and that Vladimir Putin led them out of.
Meanwhile, emerging from USSR aegis, the republic, still economically dependent, opted for a democratic system of government, strikingly in-appropriate for a polity so fundamentally divided into pro-European and pro Slav communities, without any democratic traditions or institutions, so a series of elections alternated power between the two groups until finally, in 2014, a more permanent pro-European government announced the renunciation of ties to Russia and the intention to apply for membership of the EU. Predictably, the pro-Slav eastern region sought to separate itself from this political re-alignment and some Russian enclaves openly rebelled against Kiev leading to a low-level civil war that has been grumbling on for 8 years, the pro-Slav eastern region supported by Russia against the pro-European western region supported by Western agencies. Since 2014, the EU and European Financial Institutions have allocated over 18 billion euros in grants and loans to Kiev, feeding outstanding levels of corruption.
The Russians have four motivations driving their military action:
- having watched NATO roll its front line 1000 km eastwards since 1992 they want to stop the tanks before they arrive on Moscow’s front lawn
- Crimea has been part of Russia or within its aegis for 250 years and is not up for grabs
- There are brutal, extremist factions in Kiev which need dealing with
- The Russian people of Dombass and other enclaves need protection.
These are limited objectives and, left alone together, Russia and Ukraine will easily resolve the whole issue. The US, attended by its NATO subsidiary, has no defined, achievable objective.