Russia-Ukraine History

This episode explores the history of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, explaining the commonalities and differences in language, history, and culture. The second half of the show explains the modern history of Ukraine and Russia's attempt to absorb them into the Russian and Soviet Empires. The final chapter explains the Ukrainian invasion from the Russian perspective.

Topics Covered
History of The Russian and Ukrainian peoples
Russian and Ukrainian languages 
A Shared History?
History of Ukraine
Holodomor
Modern Ukraine
The Budapest Memorandum
The Maidan Revolution
Euromaidan
Annexation of Crimea

Transcript

The history of Ukraine and Russia
специальная военная операция – Putin does not call the Ukrainian invasion a war, he calls it spetsial'naya voyennaya operatsiya, a special military operation- aimed at freeing the Russian speakers of Ukraine from Nazi oppression
-insert Putin special operation-
Zelenskyy the Ukrainian Jewish president, who lost many relatives during the holocaust, has said this is absurd.
Putin does not believe the Ukrainians are a separate people, he believes they are Russian. Putin has said “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood”
The Russian understanding of statehood is a bit different from ours in the west. The Russian Federation is a massive country, the largest on Earth, constituting 22 different federal subjects based on ethnic groupings. It would be like in the USA if we had 50 states each of which had a different ethnic group, Mexican, Chinese, Ghanaian etc, with the lingua Franca being English.
Putin said famously “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster [in which] tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”
 He genuinely believes Ukrainians to be Russian.

The foundation of the east Slavic states, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus all come from Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine. Originally called Keevan Rus’. This state was a loose federation of east Slavic peoples. 
Starting in the late 9th century those who found themselves in the massive region known as Keevan rus’ spoke a similar language that could be mutually understood called East Slavic. Once the kingdoms of Keevan Rus’ fell to the Mongol invasions of the mid 13th century the state was split in two and the languages diverged, creating the east Slavic branch, Russian and the west Slavic branch, which includes Ukrainian.
Russian maintained the old church Slavonic vocabulary until Peter the Great introduced a large number of western words. While Ukranian adopted many words from Polish. Today Russia and Ukrainian are not mutually intelligible, however Belorussian, Polish and Ukrainian are. 
These shared ethnic ties are one of the reason Poland has been so helpful toward their brother country Ukraine.
-Insert Street interviews and translate


Its not just Putin, many Russian’s also view Ukraine as a Russian culture, Kremlin Advisor Sergei Markov has said “Everybody knows that Ukrainians are Russians, except for the Galicians” (Galicians are people living in western Ukraine)
The people of western Ukraine, Galicians historically were apart of the many empires of Europe, not Russia, including the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during this time, a wave of nationalism arose in Europe. Many peoples on the European continent vied for self determination and their own states. Austria-Hungary was a massive multi-ethnic empire that was particularly affected by this. Eventually it would be carved up and many independent states arose, including a short lived Ukraine .
Those in the East of Ukraine remained under the Czars Russian Empire, their identity was far more Russified.
Volodymyr Zelensky, The Ukrainian president grew up in Kryvyi Rih, in the center of Ukraine, he doesn’t speak Ukrainian fluently, he often switches to his mother tongue, Russian

Culture is, to put It simply, groups of people who share 3 things, religion, history and language. 

The religion of Ukraine is largely eastern orthodox, the same as Russia 
The history of Ukraine, has some commonalities with Russia, but as is to be expected are not exactly the same
in Russia eventually they were able to free themselves of Mongol rule, leading to the deeply Authoritarian ruling style that persists there to this day.
Ukraine however was not able to free itself from Imperialistic rule until the late 20th century, as mentioned before it was dominated by many different empires throughout history, some of these include Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Crimean Khanate, Ottoman Empire, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russian Empire

Ukrainians made up the 2nd largest ethnic group of the Russian Empire, the Russians sought to Russify the Ukrainians, absorbing their culture and making them Russian. Starting in 1804 Ukrainian was banned from being taught in schools. Leading to a degradation of the Ukrainian language. It hadn’t started there, and wouldn’t end there. Persecution of the Ukrainian language was common throughout Russian history. This policy of Russification attempted to turn the many ethnic groups of the Russian empire into Russians.
This isn’t unique to Russians, for example take Canada
In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. Attendance was mandatory from 1894 to 1947. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. 
The goal of these schools was to Canadian-ify the Indigenous peoples of North America.

-Insert Gogol Bordello
Gogol Bordello, the popular Ukrainian, Gypsy Punk band takes their name from an ethnic Ukrainian writer named Nikolai gogol
They chose the named Gogol Bordello because the goal of the band is to smuggle Romani/East-European music into the English-speaking world. Nikolai Gogol was one of the most famous classical Russian writers during the Russian empire, he shows the strange relationship between Russians and Ukrainians, Gogol used subjects in his writing such as his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore, his goal was to smuggle Ukrainian culture into the Russian empire. His culture and language were suppressed but sneaking in Ukrainian identity through his Russian writing.

Today roughly 30% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue. 
Ukraine is divided into 3 languages. the West which speaks Ukrainian, the east which speaks Russian, and the middle which speaks a pigeon language called Surzhyk. 

With the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914 the Russian empire haughtily joined after 3 years of getting battered by the Central Powers, The Russian revolution began. by 1922 the Soviet Union was victorious, The Russian Czarist empire which had dominated for centuries was gone. The USSR announced the creation of the Ukrainian soviet socialist republic one of its constituent republics. The USSR attempted to rapidly industrialize and imposed massive collectivization campaigns targeting wealthy landowners known as Kulaks, these programs were disastrous for the peoples of the USSR
Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, with its Vast stretches of plains.
The rapid industrialization of the country led to a series of famines.
One of these has notoriously become known as the Holodomor, or Terror-Famine, 
Ukrainians consider this a genocide targeted at them from the Russian-led Soviet state. The Ukrainian people were forced to meet massive quotas of grain exports, however due to the ineffective collectivization campaigns the skilled farm workers were exiled or killed, leading inexperienced people to take over. The Soviets believed combining farms into collectives would produce a surplus output of food and increased the quota, when the farmers were unable to meet the quota the food was taken from them and the people were left with nothing, those who tried to hide food or go looking for food elsewhere were punished or shot.
An estimated 7 million Ukrainians or 1/8 people starved during 1932-1933 Scholars debate whether it was a famine resulted by bad Soviet economic policies or if the soviets planned it as a way to kill off Ukrainians.

Roughly half a century later the Soviet Union collapsed, 15 separate countries including Ukraine declared their independence, basically the way these new countries worked was whatever Soviet supplies were left in the country, factories, materials, military equipment became the new countries.
Ukraine being located on the border with Europe was left with a massive supply of Nuclear missiles,  in the early 90s Ukraine was the worlds 3rd largest holder of nuclear weapons.
Right before the fall of the Soviet Union the USA and USSR had concluded a series of SALT nuclear disarmament treaties. Reducing the number of nukes both countries had. 
The USA intended on enforcing these disarmament rules and so agreed to the Budapest memorandum. Whereby Ukraine’s territorial independence was guaranteed in exchange for giving up its nukes.
The newly formed Russian Federation, the USA, and United Kingdom, all nuclear arms holders all agreed and signed the agreement, stating that if Ukraine gave up its Nukes, no country would invade Ukrainian territory.


Vladamir Putin came to power in Russia in the year 2000, he has a massive complex about the vast territory that was lost from the USSR
-PUTIN GREATEST GEOPOLITICAL CATASTROPHY
Putin made his name by taking aggressive stances against the enemies of Russia. He invaded Chechnya in the early 2000s, his 2008 invasion of Georgia, and of course his 2014 annexation of Crimea all made him massively popular at home and feared abroad.


The year before the annexation of Crimea, the president of Ukraine was Viktor Yanukovych a Ukrainian puppet to Moscow. In 2013 the Ukrainian government reached an association agreement with the European Union,  this agreement was a prerequisite to join the EU, basically giving Ukraine money and help in exchange for Ukraine adopting European laws and consumer standards.

 but when it came time to sign the deal Yanukovych refused, preferring to strengthen ties with Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets demanding the agreement be signed.
Yanukovych cracked down and killed 100s of people which only added fuel to the fire, eventually the Maidan Revolution was sparked, Yanukovych was ousted and forced to flee the country to Russia.

Putin responded by Annexing Crimea and supporting Russian backed separatists In Ukraine located in the Donetsk and Luhansk’ regions also known as the Donbas.


Crimea is portrayed in the West as an act of unjustifiable aggression by Putin, this however is not the case.

In 2014 when Russia Annexed Crimea 68% of Crimeans identified as Russian, only 16% as Ukrainian and another 12% as Tatars (an ethnic group of Turks scattered all across modern day Russia, Ukraine and Turkey)
Crimea is majority Russian but was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 for Bureaucratic reasons.
1. Since 1991, Crimea tried to have more independence from Ukraine (for example, in 1992 Crimean legislature declared conditional independence from Ukraine, but Kiev never allowed a referendum to be held).
2. In 2014 also, majority of Crimean population voted on a referendum that they wanted to be part of Russia.


• In the  Year 2010: Ukrainian writer Andrukhovych says in interview that if pro-Western win, they should give Crimea and Donbass possibility to secede . Because “politically they are different nation … part of Russian nation … Ukraine is something alien and not interesting for them”.
• Year 2011: Ukrainian writer Shklyar says in interview : “Yes, let's agree, Crimea has never historically been a Ukrainian territory, and if the nation sick and can not digest, assimilate this territory, then it is better to get rid of it. It's all the same when a person has gangrene of a leg, and for the whole body not to be consumed by it, leg gets cut off”.
• Year 2014: 14,000 of Crimean military , 12,000 of Crimean police and 1,500 of Crimean secret service switch to Russia’s service. 


The Donbas contrary to Crimea is majority Ukrainian 


After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, Canada,[7] France, Germany, Italy, Japan,[8] the UK[9] and US[10][11] stated that Russian involvement was a breach of its Budapest Memorandum obligations to Ukraine which had been transmitted to the United Nations under the signature of Sergey Lavrov and others,[12] and in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. On 4 March 2014, the Russian president Vladimir Putin replied to a question on the violation of the Budapest Memorandum, describing the current Ukrainian situation as a revolution: "a new state arises, but with this state and in respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents."[13] Russia stated that it had never been under obligation to "force any part of Ukraine's civilian population to stay in Ukraine against its will." Russia tried to suggest that the US was in violation of the Budapest Memorandum and described the Maidan revolution, also known as Euromaidan as a US-instigated coup.




Since 2014 Ukraine has been in a state of war with the Russian seperatists in the Donbas. Putin refuses to let Ukraine go to the west, his pressure and Western fear of Putin’s aggression and large nuclear arsenal have prevented that.

Putins obsession with Ukraine isn’t only cultural, Ukraine is of vital intertest to protect Russia from a possible invasion by the West. 
Russia knows all too well the horrors of a western invasion of their country. Hitlers invasion of the Soviet Union killed approximately 27 million people including 19 million civilians, 15% of the total population. In Russia World War 2 isn’t known as the second world war but The Great Patriotic War. 7/8 soldiers killed in the 2nd world war in the European theatre were on the Eastern front.

Ukraine is of prime importance in protecting Moscow, the West of Ukraine is mostly mountainous and hilly, the east begins a large flatland leading all the way to the Caucus mountains past Moscow. It is extremely vulnerable to attack.

When Hitler launched Operaition Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941, his troops progressed 50 miles on the first day and continued at this pace until the winter slowed the Germans to a hault. Barbarosa is still the largest invasion force in history.


Putin also fears NATO, the Anti-Soviet, Anti-Russian alliance. Since the dissolution of the USSR it has been expanding to border of Russia, even absorbing states that used to be apart of the USSR, for example Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia

Before its collapse the Russians had an Alliance contrary to NATO called the Warsaw Pact, these countries are now, for the most part, apart of NATO.
In 1991 NATO went to West Germany, today it is literally on the border with Russia with only Belarus and Ukraine preventing it from encompassing the border.




Starting in November 2021 Putin began sending massive amounts of troops and supplies to the Ukrainian border.
-Biden warning of Russian troops-

Putin finally sent NATO an ultimatum, that they move back to their post soviet collapse lines. Basically Germany. NATO ignored it.

Putin launched a full scale of invasion in the early hours of February 24th calling it a special military operation.
Leaders from around the world came out to condemn it.

-Insert world leaders condemning Putin 7:05 seconds
Ukraine’s name means Borderland, which is rather appropriate, Ukraine has always found itself sandwiched between the Great Empires. As the war enters its 2nd month, and media outlets have been reporting the Russians are stalled, and the West will go no further than supplying Ukraine with military weapons and aid, nobody can be sure of what the future of Ukraine or Russia is.