The History of Ukrainian Statehood

Evan Owens / Staff Reporter

“Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.”

Those were Russian president, Vladimir Putin’s words on February 21, three days before he ordered Russian forces across the border into Ukraine, starting a full-scale war between the two nations.

A war which has already cost thousands of lives, fought between two neighboring countries deeply connected in culture and past.

Putin’s motivations can be interpreted strategically. According to the New York Times article, “The Roots of the Ukraine War: How the Crisis Developed,” written by Dan Bilefsky, Richard Pérez-Peña and Eric Nagourney, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding onto his doorstep through invading Ukraine.

Since Ukraine has the second largest gas reserves in Europe, according to the Harvard International Review article “The Forgotten Potential of Ukraine’s Energy Reserves,” Putin’s invasion can also be interpreted as stopping Ukraine from becoming a rival petrostate, an outcome that could be devasting for Russian control over European energy.

But all of this is masked by Putin’s historical revisionism, where he justifies his invasion by claiming Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia. His February 21 speech was just the latest example of this.

Putin’s oversimplified version of history is ripe with bias, conveniently disregarding a thousand years of empire, religion, and war, which have all compounded into the Ukraine known today. This is that story, the story of Ukrainian statehood.

The story begins all the way back in the ninth century when Viking slavers, called the Rus, arrived in Kyiv, which was at the time a trading post. From Kyiv, the Rus soon became the rulers of the region, founding the powerful Kievan Rus empire.

The Kievan Rus empire converted to Christian Orthodoxy while in power. A religion shared by Russia and Ukraine today, this is one of the reasons the nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus as their cultural ancestors.

Existing for a few hundred years, the Kievan Rus empire collapsed at the hands of the Mongols in the 1240’s. Kyiv then became a vassal to the Golden Horde, a faction of the Mongol empire.

At this point, Ukrainian and Russian history branched in opposite directions. Kyiv was taken over by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1362, and for hundreds of years, the Ukrainians lived under Lithuanian, and later Polish rule, while much of Russia, including Moscow, stayed under Mongol rule.

The next centuries in Ukraine saw religious war, and class unrest. “The Ukrainian-speaking peasantry was oppressed in order to generate an agricultural surplus for Polish-speaking landlords,” Yale Professor Timothy Snyder wrote in his essay “Kyiv’s ancient normality.”

This led to a revolution in 1648, where the Cossacks, a group of people who had previously served as cavalry for the Polish-Lithuanian Army, were able to form a new Ukrainian state, the Cossack Hetmanate.

For over a hundred years, the state existed, but at the same time, a new empire began to emerge in Moscow, out from under the ruins of the Mongol empire. This empire was called the Muscovy, a precursor to Tsarist Russia.

“[The Muscovy] first moved south, then east, in an extraordinary campaign of expansion,” wrote Snyder. Before long, Kyiv, and much of Ukraine was part of the Russian empire.

Because their shared history, the Russians saw themselves and the Ukrainians as the same, but in the over five hundred years since the Kievan Rus empire, a distinct national identity had formed in Ukraine.

An identity that never went away, despite Russian attempts to suppress it.

“Starting in the eighteen-sixties, there was a more than forty-year period of prohibition on the publication of Ukrainian,” said Harvard professor Serhii Plokhy in conversation with the New Yorker.

So, for years, the Ukrainian identity quietly existed under the surface of the Russian Empire, waiting for its moment to self-determine.

This would continue all the way until WW1, where following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, a new Ukrainian state formed. Unfortunately, at the same time, civil war was raging in Ukraine.

As Snyder writes, the “Ukrainians found themselves amidst an unenviable crossfire of Russian Whites, the Red Army, and the Polish Army.”

It was impossible for the Ukrainian state to survive the immense bloodshed of the Russian civil war, and by 1922, the nation was fully under Russian Soviet Rule, where it would eventually exist as a Soviet Republic.

Again under Russian control, the following decades were brutal for the Ukrainian people.

“Ukraine was the deadliest place in the world during the time when Hitler and Stalin were in power, between 1933 and 1945,” Snyder states in his essay.

Through the Holodomor, a Soviet engineered famine recognized widely as a genocide, millions died in Ukraine in the 1930s.

WW2 only added to the hardship. The holocaust cost 1.6 million lives in Ukraine following Nazi occupation, and Germany redirected most food out of Ukraine, to support their own war effort.

But the Ukrainians persevered. Persevered through the Second World War, and then through 46 more years of Soviet Rule.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, a push for Ukrainian independence was reignited. A referendum was held in December of 1991.

“Support for independence was more than ninety per cent in December of 1991. […] The majority of every region was for independence,” said Plokhy to the New Yorker.

Ninety-two percent of voters approved Independence, and the official independent state of Ukraine was formed.

The Ukrainian people persevered through a thousand years of war, religion, and the expansion of empires, forging their own national identity.

Putin may believe that Russia and Ukraine are one, but the true history shows they are not. The two nations are two distinct entities, with similarities in culture and religion, who have found their own paths through history.

As recent days have shown us, the Ukrainian people feel this way. They are not and will not become part of Russia, at least not without a fight.

Main Sources:

Kyiv’s ancient normality (redux)

Vladimir Putin’s Revisionist History of Russia and Ukraine

The real and imagined history of Ukraine

Putin Calls Ukrainian Statehood a Fiction. History Suggests Otherwise.

Putin’s Speech Laid Out a Dark Vision of Russian History

Supporting Sources (For numbers/extra details)

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/olli/class-materials/Summary_of_Ukrainian_history.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine

https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-Nazi-occupation-of-Soviet-Ukraine