The History of the Crisis in Ukraine

“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”- Bertrand Russell

Human perseverance and character are remarkable. They are very often the silver lining of conflict, as people have an amazing natural gift to redeem themselves from the hardships of adversity. It’s the fire which forges the broadsword, the pressure which makes the diamond, and the stress which strengthens the will. But sometimes, when the will bends and its limits are tested, it doesn’t snap back stronger. In fact, it doesn’t snap back at all and the strain leaves it broken and irreparable. This is something like William Butler Yeats’ image of the falcon and its falconer in his poem “The Second Coming.” Yeats begins by portraying a stray falcon, representative of the human spirit, flying off into “the widening gyre.” Perhaps under bearable stressors, this falcon would return to its perch. In this special scenario, however, Yeats’ apocalyptic reality makes the conditions right for it to disappear out of sight, never to return. This is like the beaten will. It is essentially death, and it is what war can create within the body, mind, and spirit. War takes its toll. It separates families and communities, causes long-term psychological damages to its victims, destabilizes economies, and piles heaps of lifeless corpses to tragic heights. It destroys the welfare of nations. This seems almost inconceivable from the relative safety of our unaffected geopolitical position, but it is happening right now to real people in the real world. So when we consider this case, let’s not forget its tangible imprint on the lives of millions, civilians and combatants alike. At the very least, when we think about this issue, let’s give them our first thoughts.

Ukrainians bear a rich history which stretches back to antiquity. However, their time as an independent nation state did not start until 1917, one of the last years of the first world war. Since then, their borders and legitimacy have been constantly contested, as between 1917 and 1921 there was a struggle between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Bolsheviks for sovereignty over Ukraine’s land. The Bolsheviks, in time the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were a revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that seized control of Russia during the October revolution of 1917, completing the transformation of the state from an empire into the first ever communist country. In 1919, they invaded Ukraine and eventually absorbed the country into the United Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR. Joseph Stalin was one of the generals who conducted this invasion; he would become leader of the Soviet Union a decade later in 1929. Upon taking the reins of government, he made it his mission to diminish the rebellious spirit in Ukrainian society, which included measures to ruin the Ukrainian cultural identity and extinguish their language through Russification. Some scholars have supposed that the Holodomor, or terror-famine, an artificial famine prompted by vicious agricultural policy which was responsible for the deaths of 6 to 8 million people, and 4 to 5 million Ukrainians, was planned by Stalin to eliminate independence movements. But whatever its goal, it beset the Ukrainian citizenry with anguish and depression. So much so that some Ukrainian nationalists hailed the Nazis as heroic after a surprise invasion of the USSR in 1941 during World War II and near full occupation of their territory. This illusion soon vanished as the Nazis began enforcing their racial program, killing an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews and displacing over 800,000.

By and by, the USSR would fall, and Ukraine would endure. In 1991, as the notorious hammer and sickle flag lowered over the Kremlin in perfectly conclusive fashion, 92% of Ukraine voted for their independence, with a majority in every region. From that day forward, Ukraine has been an internationally recognized country. Yet as of February 24th of this year, that status has been endangered by a Russian assault disguised as a “special military operation.”

The historical context for this current state of affairs serves a purpose which is two-fold. It puts an accent on the grueling and bloody road which Ukraine has taken to its modern order and it explains the entangled nature of its own character with Russia. This is not to say even remotely that Ukraine is Russia. Only that Ukraine’s present demography and culture has influences which can be traced back to its close relationship with its eastward neighbor.

In a 2015 lecture entitled “Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?,” John Mearsheimer, political scientist, international relations scholar, and the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, arranges the issue of the 2014 Crimean Crisis as a contest between two anachronistic schools of thought. I specify anachronistic because he categorizes each foreign policy attitude as belonging to a century. He names the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a 19th-century man, and our leaders, our elite, of the 21st-century variety. This defines 19th-century diplomats as those who espouse the balance of power politics and 21st-century diplomats as those who don’t, and by implication, those who condone imperialistic tendencies because they have faith in the civility and pacifism of foreign forces. In other words, the 19th-century approach suggests that politicians should take any measures necessary to evenly distribute power throughout the world because an imbalance, paired with the greedy, megalomaniacal qualities of many rulers, would result in global catastrophe. They would believe nuclear weapons should be quantitatively equalized in the world because it would create a balance of powers and ensure everyone the means to lay waste in check out of mutual fear. The 21st-century approach suggests that politicians and their countries should be idle as other countries amass strength beyond their borders because they are worthy of trust, in this morally advanced world, to use their power wisely. They believe that we shouldn’t give much thought to the accumulation of nuclear armaments because our fellow people of the world are upright to the degree that we should be unsuspicious of their ambitions. Understanding the full scope of these two foreign-policy persuasions as they apply to contemporary Ukraine demands a look back on the 2014 Crimean crisis, an important precursor to today’s situation.

Although, before even considering the details of this geopolitical event, it is relevant to first refer to the ethno-linguistic composition of Ukraine, as well as a few surveys which polled its citizen’s national interests around the time of these problems in Crimea. Ukraine is a starkly divided place. The majority of people from the West are fluent in Ukraine’s native tongue, while the majority of people from the East are Russian-speaking and a significant portion of them were born ethnically Russian. According to two surveys conducted by the International Republican Institute in 2015, there were also ideological differences between regions. In the West of Ukraine, in cities like Lviv and Ternopil, there was overwhelming support for entrance into the European Union, a union including 27 other European nations, over its eastern counterpart, the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Approval for the former was at 90% or higher. But this rating lowered dramatically in cities nearer to Russia, with Kharkiv, a Northeastern city, for example, having just 30% of its population approve of this proposition. These numbers were almost identical to those regarding entrance into NATO, a Western military aid network, with approval from 83% and 85% of Lviv and Ternopil respectively, and 22% from Kharkiv.

The statistics regarding Ukraine’s collective opinion on these alliances, particularly its polarity, are noteworthy. It set the stage for not only this year’s incident, but for Ukraine at the end of 2013, when protests erupted after President Viktor Yanukovich rejected, due to pressure from Putin, an association agreement bringing the country towards the European Union. The fallout from this controversial decision was then mismanaged by Yanukovich and his administration as the response from the police to rising social upheaval led to a lot of civilian deaths. At long last, a few foreign ministers from Germany and France flew to Kyiv to make a deal which would prepare for elections in May to remove Yanukovich from office and placate the mob. However, because the protestors had angrily declined this deal and were growing only more violent by the day, Yanukovich fled the country, scared for his life. Yanukovich was supplanted by a character named Petro Poroshenko, a president who was both more reluctant to do Putin’s bidding and more friendly towards the U.S. and the West.

It is key to remember at this moment that roughly 5 years before, at the Bucharest Summit of 2008, NATO declared that it welcomed Ukraine’s aspirations for membership in its organization, and that it had agreed that this country will become a member. Since NATO was founded in 1949, it has gradually been extending itself towards the East. Countries adjacent to Russia, such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, have been included starting from 2000. Russia expressed in the middle of the 1990s that it would be resistant to NATO’s continued expansion, which transpired anyways. Ukraine’s shift towards Western hold, despite its diverse populace, was a prospect which Putin considered a grave threat to his people’s security, and one that he was unafraid to retaliate against. Gradually, Putin lost tolerance for the preferential negotiations that Ukraine was having with the West. And when he did, it was 2014, and he invaded and annexed Crimea.

More recently, in an annual news conference this year prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin considered the same case once again. This time he formulated it in terms he thought the U.S. could sympathize with. He asked to imagine that Russia and their comrades from the East stationed missiles in Mexico and Canada decades after they heard complaints and apprehensions about encroachment. “How would they react?” he posed rhetorically.

It’s a good question because U.S. policy conforms to the principle of the Monroe Doctrine, a position designed to keep European powers outside of the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine opposed European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and held that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile act against the U.S. It was even invoked in 1962 when the Soviet Union began construction on missile launching sites in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy promptly put an air and naval quarantine around the island until an accord was reached to have the Soviets withdraw the missiles and dismantle the sites in exchange for similar action from the United States to its obsolete air and missile bases in Turkey.

This is all reminiscent though, and calls for a return to the ideas presented earlier by John Mearsheimer in his 2015 lecture. It is rather questionable how the United States can maintain both the Monroe Doctrine and its 21st-century diplomatic perspective at once. This is of course to assume that it does. But given its history with foreign relations like the Cuban Missile Crisis, along with the current justification for NATO expansion, I think it’s safe to make such an assumption. The U.S. is under the impression that it is not contradictory to want a fundamental rule which prohibits foreign intervention in their own affairs, but a rationale which allows for it when it’s the other way around.

A little wrinkle in the expansionary efforts of NATO and the European Union involves the actual definition of expansion. Ukraine is an autonomous country and is entitled to enter into diplomatic relations as they please, with obvious extreme exceptions. But if they ask to join one or both Western alliances, and they initiate all discussion and bargaining, could either alliance be fairly accused of attempting to stretch their influence? There is a difference between active recruitment and letting a country which is independently attracted come into the fold.

Still, it seems that the primary cause of this Ukrainian Crisis is a kulturkampf between the East and the West. There are different forces pulling the different people of Ukraine in different directions towards different goals. The West of Ukraine wants to join the European Union and NATO to reap protection from Western nations, whereas Putin wants to avoid all threats to Russia’s security while preserving the Russian ethos of the East. I’m sure it’s accurate that Putin deals in sneaky, callous ways. It’s very hard to pass off the many stories about the mysterious deaths of his rivals as coincidence. Even so, it never seemed like there was concern about Putin’s hopes for boundless Russian growth and the malicious, warmongering tactics he gladly employed in order to realize them, until after the fact. It is very possible that he is lying to his own people and to the world about why he’s mounted this attack.

This could very well be a resource war, masked as a matter of domestic security, as there is also an economic dimension to this picture. Maybe Europe and Russia are attracted to Ukraine because of its material fruits. As written in Common Grounds, “[Ukraine has] 5% of the earth's natural and mineral resources, including coal, oil, natural gas (2nd most in Europe), lithium (for batteries), iron ore (for industry), titanium (20% of proven world reserves, for aerospace) and gallium (2nd most in world, for electronics). Ukraine is also incredibly rich agriculturally—1st in Europe in arable land and 25% of the world's volume of black soil —capable of meeting the food needs of 600 million people.”

It would not be unreasonable to think that this is the chief determinant of this clash, because it must be at least a contributing factor. But I don’t expect anyone to know Putin’s authentic intentions. They could be much worse than I claim here, but there is a strong reason to take Putin’s explanation at face value. NATO and the European Union have been approaching Russia with each year, and a concord between either of them and Ukraine would create positive motion towards Western culture along with a direct and immediate material threat.

Regardless of the true source of this war, it could never justify the destruction it is causing. The answer to whether or not NATO is right in pressing onwards closer to Russia could never excuse the needless loss of human life that is currently taking place. Putin invaded Ukraine, and for that much, he is certainly to blame. I fully condemn murder and all the atroscities which accompany war. Keep in mind, none of this piece aims to justify the war, only to explain it. Now the question must be asked: should the United States intervene in these international politics across the globe? Is this just a case of the bully on the schoolyard who needs to be put in their place after picking on the smaller kid? Or would an escalation of the conflict incite even worse damages than it already has? It’s a delicate, intricate situation which must be handled with painstaking care, keeping the health of individuals and communities at the forefront of it all. I encourage everyone to treat it with respect, open-mindedness and thoughtfulness. It is warranted.