Russia and Ukraine, a history of rivalries

Russia Y Ukraine are immersed in a crisis that threatens to provoke a new military conflict due to accusations that the government of Vladimir Putin is preparing an invasion of its pro-Western neighbor.

The current tensions have historical roots. Here is a summary in five chapters.

common roots

The two countries share a thousand-year history, dating back to the so-called Kievan Rus, a principality that existed from the 9th to the 13th centuries.

This entity straddled contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Moscow considers this area as its cradle.

In a text published in July, Putin stated that “Russians and Ukrainians are a single nation” that belongs to “the same historical and spiritual space.”

In his annual press conference, he claimed that Ukraine had been “created by Lenin” in the early years of the Soviet Union, a way of denying the specificities of this nation, which he presented as artificial.

Two languages

Moscow regularly accuses the Kiev authorities of wanting to “de-Russify” their country by favoring the Ukrainian language.

Ukraine retorts that it is only correcting the Russification forced under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian and Russian, which belong to the same East Slavic language family, have many similarities, but also differences.

Ukrainian dominates in western and central Ukraine, and Russian in eastern and southern Ukraine.

After the independence of Ukraine after the fall of the USSR in 1991, Ukrainian became the only state language.

Although Ukrainians are mostly bilingual, Ukrainian is considered the mother tongue by 78% of the population and Russian by 18%, according to a recent survey.

But the use of Russian has declined in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, and a law passed in 2019 requires the Ukrainization of various sectors, including trade and services.

Famine

Among the main historical facts in dispute between Russia and Ukraine is the “Holodomor”, the great famine that killed several million people in 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine.

Both Kiev and historians describe this tragedy as a “genocide” orchestrated by Stalin against the Ukrainian people who resisted the collectivization of the land.

But Moscow and other historians reject this characterization, placing the events in the broader context of famines that also claimed many victims in Central Asia and Russia.

This controversy is unlikely to abate because the Kremlin, which espouses a glorified view of Russian history, tries to downplay Stalinist crimes.

The divisions of the Donbas

The Donbas, a region in eastern Ukraine, is the epicenter of the conflict that has pitted Kiev’s forces against pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow since 2014. This mining and industrial basin is economically vital to Ukraine.

It is also at the center of a cultural battle between Kiev and Moscow, which argues that the region, along with much of eastern Ukraine, is populated by Russian-speakers who need to be protected from Ukrainian nationalism.

However, the Russophilia of the region is due, at least in part, to the forced Russification and repopulation of the region after World War II, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Russian workers.

This influx, along with the victims of the war and the Holodomor, changed the ethnic and cultural balance.

The situation in Crimea

Even more complex is the situation in Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014 after a pro-Western revolution in Ukraine.

In Russia, the peninsula is considered an integral part of the country.

Under the USSR, generations of Russians vacationed there, helping to develop a strong attachment to the region.

Crimea was part of the Russian Empire from the 18th century and then, under the Soviet Union, it was integrated into Russia until it was annexed to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 by a decree of Nikita Khrushchev.

His annexation by Moscow was not recognized by the international community and Ukraine demanded his return.