Ukraine

There have been a lot of rumors and misinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine and the country’s relationship with Russia ever since the latter’s invasion on February 24, 2022. Most of it comes from conspiracy theory-leaning journalists and analysts across the political spectrum – people who are so anti-NATO that they are de facto pro-Russia, and some of whom openly express admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their anti-Western bias is palpable, and it’s painfully obvious from their statements that they have never even traveled to Bosnia or Serbia or the rest of the former Yugoslav countries and probably couldn’t name all of them without looking at a map. 

Even though their claims are demonstrably false, I have had too many conversations with people who believed them, so I decided to take advantage of my traveling situation and see what I could find out myself by crossing the border into Ukraine. After all, part of why I became a journalist is so I wouldn’t always have to rely on the news to get my information.  

I ended up staying almost a month there at the end of 2023, starting with a week in Lviv, the largest city in the west, dating back to 1256. An ominous air raid siren could be heard by early afternoon on my first day exploring the center. While most of the banks and businesses kicked everyone out and locked their doors, there were still many people casually walking around undeterred, as if the siren was sounding by accident. I stayed for a few nights in a spacious studio apartment downtown for $18 a night. Lodging is cheap for obvious reasons, but so is everything else. Hostels run as low as $3 a night and less than $20 for an apartment in both Lviv and Kyiv. 

Ukraine has had a fascinatingly tumultuous history, and understanding it is critical to understanding why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade. Kyiv, the capital and the seventh-largest city in Europe, was the heart of the Kyivan Rus’, a vast federation of Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic tribes that, for almost 400 years and at its longest point of expansion, comprised the entirety of modern-day western Ukraine and stretched all the way north to the White Sea through modern-day Russia. The region still holds a special place in the hearts of Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarussians, and is one reason why Putin decided to launch a full-scale invasion after annexing Crimea and support destabilizing separatist movements in the east. 

After the Mongols chipped away at the remaining empire in the late 1230s, it didn’t take long until lands west of the Dnipro River, comprising most of Ukraine and Belarus, fell under the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The territory was later transferred to the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland during the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth. Russia’s zealous sense of entitlement over the Kyivan Rus’ started growing once large swaths of territory, including Kyiv, was absorbed into the Russian Empire from Poland, with most of the rest of modern-day Ukraine eventually becoming annexed by Catherine the Great, who had split the rest of the territory with Austro-Hungary by the end of the 18th century. 

The appellation Kiyvan Rus’ wasn’t used until the mid-19th century when Russian historians began doing it as a mandated form of Russification by Tsar Alexander after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. He was starting to feel threatened by a burgeoning sense of Ukrainian nationalistic identity that had developed over the past couple of generations, brutally enforcing culturally oppressive laws and even banning books from being printed in the Ukrainian language.  

The Russian Empire suffered an embarrassing defeat against Japan in 1905, an event that added another crack in the oppressive wall that Tsar Nicholas III had been holding together. Discontent over ethnic reprisals, oppressive policies, and lost territories during World War One led to two revolutions in 1917 – the February Revolution that abolished the Monarchy and the October Revolution that overthrew its successor, the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). Intense fighting occurred between several nationalist groups, even after the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) – the Bolshevik-backed puppet government, installed in 1919 – was incorporated into the nascent communist experiment of the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922.  

After Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s death in January 1924, years of previous machinations by Joseph Stalin soon led to his eventual rise to and consolidation of power. His collectivization policies in Ukraine – the USSR’s largest grain importer – failed so horrifically that years of yield shortages soon followed. Collectivization was widely unpopular among the peasants, and rebellions against the government were commonplace. There is still much debate if Stalin purposefully intended the poor yield results as retribution. All evidence points in the direction of his capitalizing on the opportunity to collectively punish the Ukrainian peasantry by seizing their yields so he could finally kill the independence movements in what became known as the Holodomor famine.  

Estimates vary widely due to the Soviet government destroying all records of it happening. Most experts agree that the famine resulted in the deaths of approximately 3.5 - 5 million people from 1930 - 1933, and is recognized as a genocide by the United Nations. Families resorted to eating their pets, shoes, and even each other to survive.  

Eleven years later, in 1944, Stalin ordered the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic Muslim minority group, 5,000 kilometers east to the Uzbeck SSR by loading them into overcrowded cattle trains in grueling conditions. He then relocated ethnic Russians to Crimea to replace them, essentially eradicating the Tatar culture. The Tatars were banished from their homeland until Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the restriction in 1989. The event is not widely recognized as a genocide, but it is, by definition, a form of ethnic cleansing, a term that was first used three years earlier by Romanian Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu as he was scheming his Jewish deportation plans.

After the war, all of present-day Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, a move long overdue in the eyes of the Kremlin and Russian nationalists. However, in 1954, Chairman Kliment Voroshilov signed off on the transfer of the Crimean Peninsula to the UkSSR, sixteen months after Stalin’s death, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of the Russian Old Guard after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. Despite the signing of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship – legal documents in which Russia officially recognized Ukrainian sovereignty and promised to respect and defend its territorial integrity – Putin and the rest of the Kremlin vehemently deny the legitimacy of the transfer and annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation in 2014. Today, it is one of the central hotspots of the war.

One of several spurious reasons Putin gave the world as the reason behind the invasion was that Ukraine was close to joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance he claimed was threatening Russia’s sovereignty by continually violating a promise made by US diplomat James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. “Not one inch eastward!” is the famous line repeated ad nauseam by conspiratorial left- and right-wing media figures. The reality is that, according to Soviet leader Gorbachev himself, he was referring to East Germany. There was no promise that other former communist countries would be excluded from joining after the Soviet Union dissolved, and there was no treaty. 

But what is in writing is the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, in which neither Russia nor NATO considered each other to be threats, that each country had the right to pursue its own avenue for safety, and, just like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, promised to recognize and respect the sovereignty and territorial frontiers of the post-Soviet countries (the Treaty of Friendship was signed two weeks later). It’s often overlooked that Putin himself was open to the idea of joining the alliance during an interview in 2000.

You will often hear those same ignorant pundits and propagandists use this as justification for Russian paranoia against NATO and aggression against Ukraine, that NATO is getting too close to Russia’s borders. NATO has been on Russia’s border since 1949 as Norway was one of the initial twelve countries to join the alliance. The only three former Soviet countries that have since joined have been the Baltic states, which happened in 2004 (a little-known fact is that the Baltic countries expressed a desire to join NATO in 1949 when they were part of the Soviet Union). 

While at a hostel in Varna, Bulgaria, over the summer, I asked an Estonian man named Aivar if compulsory military service was mostly because of Russia. He didn’t hesitate to say, “It’s only because of Russia.” None of the countries that have joined NATO since its inception have been coerced in any way; they all feel the threat Russia poses and want a security guarantee. 

Since gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine has struggled with a steady stream of economic crises, corruption scandals, and Russian destabilization efforts. As is the case with the rest of the former communist countries, all of the important lands and industries were transferred to the rapacious hands of wealthy businessmen in the upper echelons of the government, allowing organized crime and corruption to flourish. While several countries have experienced significant progress toward ameliorating corruption, Ukraine lags behind the rest. And while substantial improvements have happened, there is still a long way to go. The issue of pervasive corruption is one of the major roadblocks that has been preventing Ukraine from even being able to join NATO in the first place.

Before the 2022 invasion, another determining factor that prevented Ukraine’s ascension was the ongoing territorial dispute with Russia, an issue that Ukraine had been dealing with long before Russia annexed Crimea in early 2014. That same year saw Russia gradually smuggling military vehicles and equipment into the Donbas region in the east and fully supporting destabilization efforts by separatist groups that led to years of fighting and a few thousand civilian deaths, the overwhelming majority of which occurred in the first year. 

Another trope that needs to be addressed is that Putin had to invade to rescue the thousands of ethnic Russians in the Donbas from persecution. Those who were persecuted were suspected of insurgency and actively supporting the separatist movements and, again, most of those incidents occurred in 2014 and 2015. 

After independence in 1991, Ukraine began making gradual steps towards integrating into Western culture and economics. In 2004, protests erupted in Kyiv after it was suspected and later confirmed that the run-off vote in the presidential election was rigged in favor of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian candidate, and Viktor Yushchenko, who favored more Western integration. After several months of protests, in 2005, another election was held with the outcome this time favoring Yushchenko. The win must have been an extra middle finger to Russia from Yushchenko, who had also barely survived a suspected poisoning attempt ordered by Putin less than a year prior and was left permanently disfigured.

The series of protests came to be known as the Orange Revolution, named after the color of Yushchenko’s political party, and was preceded by another pivotal series of protests in Kyiv just nine years later: the Maidan Revolution, or Revolution of Dignity. This is an event that those same media conspiracy theorists I mentioned earlier claim was actually just another coup orchestrated by the CIA. To save time, I recommend reading this detailed article by Cathy Young and watching the great documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, available for free on YouTube and recommended by several locals, one of whom was a participant in Maidan. 

The Ukrainian Motherland Monument is a magnificent statue that sits on a hill in the center of Kyiv along the Dnipro River. The statue sits on top of an imposing museum, holding high a shield with the Ukrainian trident coat of arms emblazoned on the front. It’s a new look, replacing the old Soviet hammer and sickle logo that now sits Inside on display. About a hundred meters down the hill is another smaller museum that has relics from the ongoing war. Above the door is a giant mural with a map of Europe and an enlarged Ukraine filled with bullet holes and a caption that reads, “Ukraine, the shield of Europe”. It's a very appropriate message at the moment, in my opinion. 

Right now, Ukraine is a safeguard from a rising trend of global democratic backsliding. While most people seem to favor a free, open, multicultural society, there also seems to be a great deal of overlap with those who feel like they have been disillusioned by democracy and feel that autocracy is a viable alternative. This is a concerning trend and just one reason why the West needs to continue supporting Ukraine. The incompetent media have done a major disservice to the public by continually failing to provide them with proper context about the multi-billion dollar aid and weapons packages that the US has sent. What most people don’t realize is that the weapons the US has been supplying were paid for years ago, and Ukraine is repaying everything back, similar to Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act in 1941. Even though public opinion still seems to favor providing aid to Ukraine, I feel that it would be more heavily skewed in that direction if that information circulated through media wartime discourse. The details of the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 can be read here.

I don’t think those who claim to be in favor of democracy and multiculturalism yet fervently chastise NATO and the West will be content with the immediate shift in global power toward Russian and Chinese hegemony. In a broader sense, the war is about democracy vs. autocracy; about freedom vs. totalitarianism. The destabilization effects a Russian victory would create across Europe could be enough to once again throw the entire continent, and by extension the world, into chaos. Ukraine is a beautiful country filled with wonderful people who possess a strong collective national identity and fierce resiliency against invading forces and oppressive leaders. Slava Ukraini.