by Anatol Zukerman
During the meeting with Trump in Alaska last month, Putin spoke of the root causes of the war in Ukraine. Those roots are very deep, indeed.
In 1654 Ukraine was partitioned along the River Dnipro after a twelve-year war between Russia and Poland. “After the Treaty of Pereyaslav the Zaporozhian Host [government] became a suzerainty under the protection of the tsar of Russia” (Wikipedia). In the 18th century Katherine the Great occupied Ukraine on her way to wrest Crimea from the Turkish Sultan. Since that time Ukraine was a part of Russian empire for 240 years, but Ukrainians still remember this little ditty: “Katerina, crazy broad, what have you created! Our free and fertile land you contaminated.”
This resentment was suppressed by imperial Russia, but exploded during the Russian Civil War in 1918, when the Ukrainian Hetman (leader) Simon Petliura formed a sovereign Ukrainian Republic and killed Russians, Jews and Poles. The Bolsheviks removed Petliura, established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and stopped antisemitic pogroms that had raged in Ukraine since the 1880s. In the 1930s Stalin forced the national collectivization of farms, which caused mass starvation in Ukraine.
The next attempt at Ukrainian sovereignty happened during World War II, when Stepan Bandera collaborated with Hitler and established the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN formed the Halitsiya SS Division that fought Russia until 1953, eight years after the end of WWII. During the German occupation the Ukrainian politzai were even more ferocious killers of Jews than the German SS.
Most recently, Ukraine became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and immediately started discriminating against its Russian minority. Ukrainian nationalists built memorials to Stepan Bandera, marched with his portrait while giving the Nazi salute and banned the Russian language in schools and governmental institutions. That gave Putin a reason to demand “denazification” of Ukraine.
No wonder that Ukraine became a candidate for the most recent NATO expansion, which Russia considers an existential threat. Since 2003 Russian emissaries rejected proposals to include Ukraine into NATO and warned the United States of an imminent war in the event of any further NATO expansion. Their voices fell on deaf ears. In 2014 the predominantly Russian populations of Crimea and the Donbas had referendums declaring their desire to secede from Ukraine, which triggered a civil war that raged for 8 years prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion.
In 2014 and 2015 several countries signed Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 peace agreements. Key signatories included representatives from Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), but the war still raged on, while Russians and Ukrainians blamed each other for the failure. The US media compared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with Hitler’s invasion of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. But the Czech government did not discriminate against its German population and did not invite foreign forces, as did Ukraine. Somehow these facts eluded the US media.
The future of Ukraine is not clear. Some political observers predict a partition of Ukraine, while others foresee Russia’s total occupation of it. While Putin continues to grind away to capture square feet of Ukrainian land, Trump put the United States square into central Ukraine by signing a mineral excavation deal with Zelenskyy, and European leaders rattle their swords at Russia. Zelenskyy flies around the world in search of money and weapons and diplomats yammer uselessly at peace conferences. Meanwhile, hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers die every day.
Trump hops from one extreme to another. One day he moves the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, another day he arranges meetings between Putin and Zelenskyy. But the US and the European Union already achieved their strategic goals: they weakened Russia and Ukraine and tested their weapons in a real war. In response, Russia and China created a block of Eastern powers by signing a pact of mutual support and bringing North Korea into the Ukrainian war. This is East versus West, as George Orwell predicted. A new world order is here.
—
