On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The significance and impact of this date is extremely important in understanding the future of Ukraine. Before World War II, Russia considered Ukraine a piece of land. They, and most countries around the globe, called it “the Ukraine.” A small connotation that referred to “the Ukraine” as just that, a piece of land rich in: iron ore, manganese ore, mercury, titanium, and nickel; not an independent sovereign state. However, that all changed on November 9, 1989.
A Brief History of Ukraine
From around 1772 to 1795, a significant portion of the Western Ukraine was absorbed into the Russian Empire by way of partitioning Poland. (see the below map provided by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.)
The Aftermath of the World Wars
Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, after World War I, Ukraine declared it’s independence. A civil war ensued with rival governments seeking control. In 1921, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established when the Red (Communist) Army took control of over two-thirds of Ukraine. The remaining third was returned to Poland. In 1932, millions of Ukrainians perished when Stalin introduced “collectivisation.” In 1939, all of Ukraine was annexed by the Soviet Union. This was under the terms of the “Nazi-Soviet” Pact. More than five million Ukrainians died during World War II. At the time of the war, Ukraine had 1.5 million Jewish citizens, most killed by the Nazis.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Crisis
In 1977, Russia began the construction of a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The Chernobyl Power Complex was located about 130 km north of Kiev, Ukraine (now called ‘Kyiv the Ukrainian pronunciation), and about 20 km south of the border with Belarus. It consisted of four nuclear reactors and was commissioned on September 26, 1977.
On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Power Complex exploded. The result of the explosion caused a radioactive plum across Europe. However, the political aftermath was even more devastating. The Chernobyl disaster exposed the Soviet government’s lack of openness to the Soviet people and the international community. The event also contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. Some even say, it was probably the final straw in a string of events bringing a political system to an end.
The 1990’s: Independence and the North Atlanta Treaty Organization (NATO)
Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans from both East Germany and West Germany wished for unification into a single German State. However, Russia still possessed approximately 380,000 troops in its German Zone, in addition to legal rights over the East. In order to achieve unification, Russia had to agree to give up both; removal of Russian troops and any legal rights it maintained over East Germany. Russia agreed to the terms of this agreement. Why?
What evolved was the Final Settlement of 1990. In exchange for financial inducements, Gorbachev signed the treaty. The treaty applied exclusively to Germany, on this all parties agreed. But they did not agree on what this meant for the future. NATO members took it to mean the treaty allowed expansion to countries east of Germany. Russia, by contrast, understood the treaty as prohibiting NATO expansion east of Germany. Russia argued the agreement only explicitly allowed NATO alliance activity in eastern German territory, not beyond. Russia refers to this as the “not one inch” pact. On August 24,, 1991, Ukraine officially declared itself an independent country.
In January 1994, NATO leaders approved President Clinton’s Partnership for Peace proposal. The proposal increased security cooperation with Europe’s new democracies until the expansion of NATO could be peacefully achieved. On March 21, 1997, U.S. President William Clinton met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki. Like Clinton, Yeltsin had just been re-elected.
On the agenda was the expansion of NATO and an agreement with Russia. According to President Clinton as noted in his autobiography, My Life, President Yeltsin asked President Clinton to commit secretly on limiting future NATO expansion, specifically, into the Warsaw Pact nations. This included the Baltics and Ukraine. According to President Clinton, the following conversation occurred with President Yeltsin and the proceeding is directly from My Life, p. 750,
“Yeltsin was afraid of the domestic reaction to expansion. At one point when we were alone, I asked, ‘Boris, do you really think I would allow NATO to attack Russia from bases in Poland?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I don’t, but a lot of older people who live in the western part of Russia and listen to Zyuganov do.’ He reminded me that, unlike the United States, Russia had been invaded twice, by Napoleon and Hitler, and the trauma fo those events still colored the country’s collective psychology and shaped it politics.”
Later that same year, July 1997, Poland, Hungry, and the Czech Republic joined NATO. At the same time, President Clinton signed a partnership agreement with Ukraine.
Entering the 21st Century
As Ukraine entered the 21st Century, it had to conduct a balancing act between overtures to the West, such as joining NATO, and maintaining a peaceful alliance with Russia. In November 2004, pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, won election as Ukraine’s President, beating opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. The opposition, however, opined that the election was somehow rigged. As a result, Yushchenko launched a mass protest campaign which became part of the Orange Revolution.
Ukrainian’s Supreme Court later declared the election result void and ordered a new election. On December 26, 2004, Yushchenko won the election re-run and became Ukraine’s 3rd President. He remained in office until February 25, 2010, when Yaunkovych won a second round of elections to become Ukraine’s President.
After Yanukovych was elected, in June 2010, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to withdraw its hope of ever joining NATO. On November 21, 2013, President Yanukovych suspended preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union. The protests, in turn, precipitated a revolution, the Maidan Revolution, that led to Yanukovych’s ousting in February 2014. After security forces killed 77 protestors in Kyiv, President Yankovych fled to Russia.
In February and March 2014, Russia invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. This event took place in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. Because Crimea was made up of a majority of Russian people, President Putin used this as a justification for invasion.
In May 2014, Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian Presidential Election. He did so on a pro-Western platform. He remained in office until April 22, 2019, when he lost to Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukraine and the Era of Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin is approaching his 70th birthday. He has been in power 22 years. Some scholars believe Putin has always intended to put the old Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) back together again. Ukraine’s taste of freedom has shaken his grand plan. Putin sees the only way to control Ukraine’s ambivalence is by pure force. In Russia, Putin believes that society serves the state. Therefore, the person who controls the state must control society.
Putin has used the excuse of NATO expansion to justify these actions. He told the Russian people, should Ukraine enter NATO, Russia would be invaded for a third time. We have to look back to 1997, when President Clinton assured President Yeltsin that a NATO country would never invade Russia unless provoked, to see this illogical deduction made by Putin.
The graph to the left provided by Statista reveals just how vulnerable the Ukrainian Army is compared to Russia. It would not take long for Russia to engulf the country. So, how can Putin be threatened by such a small army?
In 2000, the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant was finally shut down. The fields are untilled, the cities abandon, and the entire Chernobyl zone in northern Ukraine is still so radioactive, nobody would want to conquer it. Yet, because of one man’s obsession with unifying the old Russia, Ukraine remains to be conquered. Hopefully, we will never revert back to calling it, “the Ukraine.”
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