A brief history of Russia and the Ukraine

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. The Economist 6 min read 29 Apr 2025, 06:21 pm Ist Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Photo: Pool via Reuters) Summary Seven cards that illustrate Vladimir’s distortion of history. In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published an essay with arguments he would later use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It ran through 1,000 years to argue that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, brutally divided by ‘external forces’ with an ‘anti-Russian’ agenda. The war of Mr. Putin is supposed to fix this. There is the truth in his claim that Ukraine and Russia are close, as the following maps demonstrate. What is nonsense is the claim that their separation in two countries is the result of an external plot, which has imposed the Ukrainians against their wishes. For Mr. Putin is the origin of the Russian-Ukrainian identity Kyivan Rus, a confederation of Princedoms that lasted from the late 9th to the mid-13th century (see map 1). The center was Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine. The rulers were the Russian, Scandinavian Vikings who gradually established dominance over the region and merged with local Slavic tribes. (“Rest” is the origin of the word “Russia”.) When it comes to political and cultural tradition, Kyivan is indeed the cradle of Russia and Ukraine, as well as the country now called Belo Russia. It was a refined European civilization with roots in the Byzantine Empire and its Orthodox Christian Religion. However, in the middle of the 11th century, Kyivan rested rest to fragment semi-autonomous automatic automatic (see map 2). These include Galicia-full hynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and Belo-Russia, Novgorod in the northwest of contemporary Russia, and Vladimir-Suzdal, in the west of Russia. In 1240, the Mongol Empire besieged Kyiv, which eventually destroyed the remaining Kyivan as a single entity. Look at the complete image (The Economist) When the Mongol Empire and its successors began to decline in the 14th century, the rival policy filled the vacuum. In the east of the region, power eventually accumulated in Moscow, which led to the creation of the Grand Princality Muscovy. To the West, the Kingdom of Poland and the Lithuania’s Grand Hertag wise teamed up in 1569 to create the Polish-Litaus Commonwealth. In 1648, the Cossacks, Settlers on the Steppe merged in disciplined military units led a rebellion against the Commonwealth. This led to the formation of their own state, the HETMANATE (see map 3). Many Ukrainians look back at the HETMANATE as the origin of their identity as an independent state. The original Cossack countries are indeed called ‘Ukraine’, a Slavic word meaning ‘borderland’. Early Cossack Warriors practiced a limited form of democracy, a contrast to the autocratic regime of Muscovy. The fact that the Hetmanates came into being as an act of resistance to larger neighboring forces is a history that resonates with Ukrainians today. In the 19th century, the folk memory of the Cossacks state helped to inspire the birth of a recognizable form of the cultural nationalism of Ukraine. Look at the full image (the economist), but the Cossack state had a difficult time. In 1654, threatened by the Poland as well as the Ottomans in the south, Cossack leaders promised allegiance to the Tsar of Muscovy. A few decades later, intellectuals wrote in Kyiv who is believed to be one of the oldest texts that set out the basis of a ‘slave-rossian’ nation. They hoped to convince the tsar to defend them, not only because of their shared history and orthodox religion, but also in the name of ethno-national unity. At the end of the 17th century, the Hetmanates’ area divided into two: Muscovy took control of the eastern bank of the Dnieper River, the Polish-Litaus Commonwealth seized the West. In 1708, Ivan Mazepa, a leader of the food bag, led a failed uprising against the Tsar Peter the Great. (Russia sees Mazepa as a traitor; in Ukraine he is a hero.) Peter became Russia’s first emperor in 1721. In the late 18th century, the Russian Empire broke up the Polish-Litaus Commonwealth with the help of Austria and Prussia. The Russians also seized territory in the South Cupraine of the Ottomans. This includes Crimea, which was attached to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1783. She supervised the final dismay of the Cossack Hetmanate. On the eve of the First World War, the Russian Empire extends from the Sea of ​​Japan to the Baltic Ocean (see map 4). Look at the full image in 1917, weakened by the war, Russia experienced two revolutions. The first overthrew the Romanov dynasty. The second was the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Kyiv officials founded the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), a state in Union with Russia. In January 1918, the UPR declared independence. Eventually, Lenin took the UPR by force. But the strength of the Ukrainian national identity forced him to create a socialist Ukrainian Republic and to allow the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1922, Ukraine became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – or Soviet Union. The Ukraine’s area expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany, signed in 1939, the two countries cut up Eastern Europe. In the subsequent battles, the parts of Poland established by Ukrainians were added to the Soviet -Kyraine. In 1954, the Soviet Union transferred the administration of the Soviet Russia to Ukraine. Look at the full image, but Ukraine has also experienced great suffering. In the 1930s, Josef Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization of agriculture led to a famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, who killed millions of people. In the mid -20th century, Ukraine finds himself part of what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale, later called the ‘Bloodlands’: Area in which Hitler and Stalin, although enemies, enabled each other’s crimes against the inhabitants. The collaboration between some Ukrainian Nationalists and the Nazis during the war is by Mr. Putin argued as evidence for his claim that the Ukraine of today is run by fascists. In 1986, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the world’s worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl took place in Ukraine. The damage, and the subsequent cover, increased the Ukrainians’ anger against the Kremlin. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, intended to reform the Soviet Union through openness and reform – Glasnost and Perestroika. But Eastern Europeans, subject to Soviet control by the Framework of the Warsaw Treaty, took the opportunity to claim their freedom. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed and brought independence into its 15 constituent Republics (see Map 6). Mr. Putin called it the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. View Full Image (The Economist) Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994, he agreed to deny in exchange for safety insurance of America, Britain and the Russian Federation. (Ukraine used this agreement, known as the Budapest memorandum, to ask America and Britain for help on the eve of Russia’s invasion of 2022.) In 2004-05, the ‘Orange Revolution’ highlighted the democratic ambitions of Ukraine. Thousands protested against a directing presidential election that overcame a pro-Russian candidate. Ukraine’s democratic resolution was even more visible during the “Maidan Revolution” in 2013-14. It was a response to the refusal by Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, who was nice to Russia, to sign an association agreement (an extensive free trade agreement) with the European Union. Thousands of Ukrainians took the streets; Mr Yanukovych fled to Russia. The new government of Ukraine signed the agreement and Mr. Putin upset. His response to the Maidan characterized Russia’s first military invasions in independent Ukraine. In 2014, the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops to the Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine (see map 7). Russia’s separatist proxies – led by Russian intelligence officials – declared ‘People’s Republics’ in Donetsk and Luhansk. By December 2021, just before Russia’s full -scale invasion in February 2022, the conflict had killed more than 14,000 people. The war continues. Take a look at the full image (The Economist) © 2025, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. 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