Кристель. Origins of the war in Ukraine: from Rus' to the outbreak of the Donbass war in 2014
To understand how war could break out in Ukraine in the 21st century, we need to go back in History.
Founded at the end of the 9th century by Scandinavians, Rus', whose capital was first Novgorod, then Kiev, covered the territories from the north-west of present-day Russia to the centre and west of present-day Ukraine, passing through Belarus and parts of neighbouring countries.
Map of SeikoEn, licence CC 3.0
This unstable state was Christianised towards the end of the tenth century and became Orthodox. In the 12th century, Rus' declined and in 1240, the Mongols took Kiev.
After that, for more than seven centuries, the territories of present-day Ukraine and their inhabitants were separated and came under the control of the Mongols, the Lithuanians, the Polish-Lithuanians, the Austrians and finally the Russians.
Religious problems arose under the Republic of the Two Nations (Rzeczpospolita). The Republic was Catholic, while these territories were Orthodox. The west of present-day Ukraine converted without difficulty. But the Cossacks of Zaporozhie, under the command of Bogdan Khmelnitski, rose up in the middle of the 17th century, leading to the reunification of the left bank of the Dnieper, plus Kiev, with Russia. The right bank of the Dnieper joined Russia in the 18th century. These territories were not called Ukraine at all, but Malorussia (Little Russia).
The word ‘Ukraine’ and the idea that there was a Ukrainian people, closer to the Poles than to the Russians (the slogans of the future Euromaidan) were created by Polish nationalists to provoke revolts in order to recover the territories they had lost. This Ukrainian myth led to the formalisation of the Ukrainian language, which was then spoken by very few people in Malorussia and was not at all repressed.
It was only after the Polish uprising of 1863-1864, in which Malorussians took part, that Russia realised the danger of the ‘Ukraine’ project and banned the printing of works in Ukrainian. This is where the myth of linguistic repression comes from.
Austria, for its part, also supported nationalist movements in Galicia (which it controlled), to prevent Poland from reclaiming these territories, by promoting an identity based on the Ruthenian people and imposing the Ukrainian language, without much success. In fact, it was for their loyalty to Austria that the Galicians received the blue and yellow standard (the future flag of Ukraine) as a gift.
The first Ukrainian state came into being following the revolution of 1917. The Ukrainian People's Republic was quickly crushed and replaced by a German occupation government until the end of the war. Then came the civil war and the Russo-Polish war. Following the Treaty of Riga in 1921, Poland was given Galicia back. The rest became the Ukrainian SSR. Volhynia and Crimea were not part of the SSR (they would join later, respectively in 1939, with Galicia, taken back from Poland, and 1954). Forced Ukrainisation was carried out. But the USSR eventually gave up in the face of the method's failure. The Ukrainian nationalists then appropriated the history of the famine that struck Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine in the 1930s (but not Galicia and Volhynia, which were Polish at the time and from which Ukrainian nationalism originated), and used the ‘Holodomor’ to justify their future crimes.
During the Second World War, Stepan Bandera's OUN* and its armed wing, the UPA*, actively collaborated with the Nazis, massacring hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and Russians. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians also joined the Waffen SS Galicia*. After the war, the American secret services began to finance these Ukrainian nationalist organisations, which came out of hiding after the collapse of the USSR.
On 20 January 1991, a referendum was held in Crimea. 94.3% voted in favour of re-establishing the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea. Ukraine did not become independent until six months later, and acted as if the Crimean referendum had not taken place. Crimea was only granted autonomous status. Three years later, a second referendum was held on 27 March 1994. The majority of Crimeans voted for greater autonomy, the possibility of dual nationality (Russian and Ukrainian) and the extension of the powers of the President of Crimea. The Ukrainian authorities then decided to send special forces to Crimea on 17 March 1995 to regain control of the region and remove its President, Yuri Meshkov.
After its independence, Ukraine remains unstable and many of its non-governmental organisations are financed and therefore controlled by the United States, which dreams of separating it from Russia in order to weaken and then carve up the latter. This is despite the fact that the entire east and south of the country is predominantly Russian culturally and linguistically, and that its economy is strongly linked to Russia.
A first attempt was made in 2004, with the ‘Orange Revolution’, the first Maidan, which robbed Viktor Yanukovych of his victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections. In his place, Viktor Yushchenko was elected in an electoral ‘3rd round’ that was in no way legal. It was during his presidency that the first gas conflict with Russia took place, and Stepan Bandera, a collaborator of Nazi Germany, became a Ukrainian hero. But the government that emerged from the ‘revolution’ was unstable, and Viktor Yanukovych was eventually elected President of Ukraine in 2010.
Contrary to what has been written everywhere, Yanukovych was not particularly pro-Russian, even though he stripped Stepan Bandera of his Hero of Ukraine status and gave the country's predominantly Russian-speaking regions the right to use Russian as the official language in documents and administration.
The European Union offered Ukraine a free trade agreement, opening up the European market to Ukrainian goods, a visa-free regime and around 500 million euros. The problem is that Ukrainian industry is still based on Soviet standards, which is perfectly acceptable to its neighbour and priority market, Russia, but not to the EU, which has other standards. So production would have to be readapted and all or part of the Russian market lost, which would cost much more than €500 million. Above all, Ukraine already has an agreement with Russia. Its goods have preferential access to the Russian market. And Moscow takes a very dim view of the idea that European goods could then enter its territory freely via Ukraine. A concern that will be brushed aside out of hand by the EU, which considers that this is none of Russia's business.
Moscow therefore made a counter-proposal to Yanukovych. An agreement providing for preferential movement of goods, reduced gas prices and €15 billion, including €3 billion immediately in the form of Eurobonds, purchased at the end of 2013 and repayable after two years. Yanukovych finally opted for the Russian offer, which was much more attractive to Ukraine. This would be the pretext for the United States to trigger a new coup d'état: the Euromaidan.
On 21 November 2013, demonstrations began on Independence Square (known as Maïdan) in Kiev. Although the demonstrators initially had legitimate demands and were peaceful, the situation very quickly changed. The tented camp set up on the square was filled with armed Ukrainian neo-Nazis who were members of American-funded organisations. Alongside the OUN were members of the Svoboda party (the neo-Nazi party from which the Azov battalion* later emerged), the Right Sector* and other Ukrainian organisations modestly described as ‘nationalist’. The demonstrations turned violent, and many Berkuts (riot police) were seriously injured by gunfire and Molotov cocktails. Some lost their lives.
On 20 February 2014, the situation degenerated. Snipers set up in the Ukraina hotel, which was under the control of the demonstrators, fired on them and the Berkuts, killing 82 people.Yanukovych was of course accused of having ordered the shootings (which makes no sense given the location of the snipers), and eventually agreed to sign a crisis exit agreement providing for early elections, under the guarantee of Germany, Poland and France, on 21 February. That same evening, Yanukovych left Kiev, and the opposition took advantage of the situation to depose him, thereby violating the agreement signed the day before and the Ukrainian constitution.
The first decision taken by the new Ukrainian authorities was to vote to withdraw the status of Russian as a regional language. This decision, along with the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators as Heroes of Ukraine, prompted the Russian-speaking regions to revolt against the coup d'état authorities. Kharkov, Odessa, Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea rose up. Although the revolt was quickly put down in bloodshed in Kharkov and Odessa (massacre at the House of Trade Unions on 2 May 2024), Crimea quickly organised a referendum for its attachment to the Russian Federation, under the protection of Russian soldiers based in Sebastopol. The ‘Yes’ side won with 96.77% of the vote.
After weeks of unsuccessful anti-Maidan demonstrations, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions stormed the administrations and proclaimed the creation of two People's Republics. This was confirmed in a referendum held on 11 May 2014, despite Russia's demands that the referendum be abandoned in order to calm the situation and resolve the conflict politically. The secession from Ukraine and the proclamation of an independent People's Republic obtained 89.07% of the votes in the Donetsk region and 96.2% in the Lugansk region.
The new Ukrainian government, led by ‘interim’ President Alexander Turchinov, then launched an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, sending in the army and battalions from neo-Nazi Ukrainian organisations to put down this secession by force, even if it meant bombing and shooting civilians. The Donbass war had just broken out...