History of Ukraine

The name "Ukraine" literally means "Borderlands".

Early history to 1100AD

Beginning in the first millennium B.C., the territory of what is now Ukraine was populated by Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, and other nomadic peoples. Ancient Greek colonists set up city-states in southern Ukraine. Eastern Slavic tribes settled in Ukraine in the sixth century A.D. Kiev was established in the sixth or seventh century and was taken by the Varangian prince Oleg of Novgorod in 882 A.D.. Well located at the intersection of major trade routes, Kiev soon developed into the center of a mighty state, Rus'. At its height under grand princes Vladimir I (980-1015) and Yaroslav I the Wise (1019-1054), Kievan Rus' was the largest state in Europe in terms of area. Vladimir I adopted Christianity in 988; Yaroslav the Wise codified the laws; he married his daughters advantageously to the kings of France, Hungary, and Norway.

Although Russian historians identify Rus' as the progenitor of modern Russia, it was also the progenitor of Ukraine and Byelarus. Ukrainian scholars are divided whether the Rus' comprised a loosely organized conglomerate of diverse peoples, or whether it was a more homogeneous nation of Ukrainians. Following the Communist collapse in 1992, two schools of historiography regarding Kievan (Kyivan) Rus' have competed, the Ukrainophile and the East Slavic. The Ukrainophile school promotes an identity that is "mutually exclusive" of Russia. It has come to dominate the nation's educational system, security forces, and national symbols and monuments, although it has been dismissed as nationalist by Western historians. The East Slavic school, an eclectic compromise between Ukrainophiles and Russophilism, has a weaker ideological and symbolic base, although it is preferred by Ukraine's centrist former elites.

Decline of Rus'

Feudal fragmentation caused the decline of Kievan Rus' in the 12th century. In 1169 Kiev was sacked by Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir; in 1240 it was virtually destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The Principality of Galicia-Volhynia continued as the successor state of Kievan Rus' in what is now Ukraine until the 14th century, when it was annexed by Poland and Lithuania. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Ukrainian people developed a distinct culture from the other East Slavs but language remained the same.

Cossacks

Dmytro Vyshnevetsky Hetman in 1550

Peasant refugees from Polish landlord rule escaped to the steppes of Ukraine in the 15th and 16th centuries, where they became frontiersmen called Cossacks. Their main center was Zaporizhska Sich, a wild town on the lower Dnieper River. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks seized the Ukrainian imagination. They ranged the steppe in covered wagons, pulling them into tight squares to face a Tatar attack. Urged on by Polish subsidies, they launched lucrative raids on the ports of Poland's enemy Turkey, using sixty-foot‐long double-ruddered galleys. The men boasted splendid moustaches, red boots and wide baggy trousers as they danced, sang and drank horilka in heroic quantities. Some Cossacks aligned with Poland; others led rebellions against the Poles in 1591, 1595, 1625, 1635 and 1637.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the famous revolt against the Polish Commonwealth in 1648-1654

The rebellions climaxed in 1648-1654 in a popular uprising, accompanied by widespread pogroms against Jews, led by the Cossack hetman (general) Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657). Representatives of the Cossack Hetmanate and Czar Alexis signed the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, which led to the birth of Ukraine as it first became based in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad oblasts, but was later given more territory. Khmelnytsky's victory over Poland led to a Cossack "state," the hetmanate. As the creator of the first quasi-independent Cossack state in the 16th century, Khmelnitsky became immortalized in Ukrainian national sentiment. In the Communist era Moscow bolstered his status. The exploits of Khmelnitsky and the Cossacks became the focus of numerous ceremonial acts, exhibitions and dedications. Since 1991, however, Ukrainian scholars are more divided over the issue of whether he sold out the national interest to Russia.

Polish and Russian control

In 1657-1686 came "The Ruin," a devastating 30-year war between Russia, Poland, Turks and Cossacks for control of Ukraine. For three years Khmelnytsky's armies controlled present-day western and central Ukraine, but deserted by his Tatar allies, he suffered a crushing defeat at Berestechko, and turned to the Russian Czar for help. In 1654, Khmelnytsky signed the Treaty of Pereiaslav, forming a military and political alliance with Russia that acknowledged loyalty to the Czar. The wars escalated in intensity with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Defeat came in 1686 as the "Eternal Peace" between Russia and Poland gave Kiev and the Cossack lands east of the Dnieper over to Russian rule and the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper to Poland. In 1709 Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709) sided with Sweden against Russia in the Great Northern War (1700-1721). Mazepa, a member of the Cossack nobility, received an excellent education abroad and proved to be a brilliant political and military leader enjoying good relations with the Romanov dynasty. After Peter the Great became czar, Mazepa as hetman gave him more than twenty years of loyal military and diplomatic service and was well rewarded. Eventually Peter recognized that in order to consolidate and modernize Russia's political and economic power it was necessary to do away with the hetmanate and Ukrainian and Cossack aspirations to autonomy. Peter refused to assist Cossack forces in protecting Ukraine from imminent attack by Sweden, thus abrogating treaty obligations between Russia and Ukraine. Mazepa accepted Polish invitations to join the Poles and Swedes against Russia. The move was disastrous for the hetmanate, Ukrainian autonomy, and Mazepa. He died in exile after fleeing from the Battle of Poltava (1709), where the Swedes and their Cossack allies suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Peter's Russian forces

The hetmanate was abolished in 1764; the Zaporizhska Sich abolished in 1775, as centralized Russian control became the norm. With the partitioning of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper were divided between Russia and Austria. From 1737 to 1834 expansion into the northern Black Sea littoral and the eastern Danube valley was a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy.

Lithuanians and Poles controlled vast estates in Ukraine, and were a law unto themselves. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted. Heavily taxed peasants were practically tied to the land as serfs Occasionally the landowners battled each other using armies of Ukrainian peasants. The Poles and Lithuanians were Roman Catholics and tried with some success to covert the Orthodox lesser nobility. In 1596 they set up the "Greek-Catholic" or Uniate Church, under the authority of the Pope but using Eastern rituals; it dominates western Ukraine to this day. Tensions between the Uniates and the Orthodox were never resolved, and the religious differentiation left the Ukrainian Orthodox peasants leaderless, as they were reluctant to follow the Ukrainian nobles.

The Cossack-led uprising called Koliivshchyna that erupted in the Ukrainian borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1768 involved ethnicity as one root cause of Ukrainian violence that killed tens of thousands of Poles and Jews. Religious warfare also broke out between Ukrainian groups. Increasing conflict between Uniate and Orthodox parishes along the newly reinforced Polish-Russian border on the Dnepr River in the time of Catherine II set the stage for the uprising. As Uniate religious practices had become more Latinized, Orthodoxy in this region drew even closer into dependence on the Russian Orthodox Church. Confessional tensions also reflected opposing Polish and Russian political allegiances.

Origins of Ukraine: 19th century and World War I

In the 19th century the Ukrainian was a rural area largely ignored by Russia and Austria. With growing urbanization and modernization, and a cultural trend toward nationalism inspired by romanticism, a Ukrainian intelligentsia committed to national rebirth and social justice emerged. The serf-turned-national-poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) and the political theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895) led the growing nationalist movement. Nationalist and socialist parties developed in the late 19th century. Austrian Galicia, which enjoyed substantial political freedom under the relatively lenient rule of the Hapsburgs, became the center of the nationalist movement. The first Ukrainians were Carpathian Russians in Austria-Hungary who denounced Orthodox Christianity for Roman Catholicism in 1893. Before 1917, one could walk on foot from Kiev to Moscow without noticing any linguistic differences. Defeat in World War I and the Russian revolutions of 1917 destroyed the Hapsburg and Russian empires. The Ukrainian elite declared statehood: the Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed at Kiev on Nov. 20, 1917, becoming independent on Jan. 22, 1918. The West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed at Lviv on Nov. 1, 1918. A rival Ukrainian Soviet Republic was established at Kharkiv on Dec. 24, 1917. On Jan. 22, 1919, the two people's republics united. Lenin gave Ukraine Kharkiv, Donbass, and the coastal oblasts, making it an artificial state in the style of the EU. By then, however, the military situation was desperate, as Polish and Bolshevik armies pressed the Ukrainian nationalists from west and east and the peasant anarchists led by Nestor Makhno took control of large areas. Because communist theory denies the existence of race as the adherents flip flop to favor one group over another, Lenin made the Soviet Union autonomous republics so not one ethnic group will have too much power.

Bolshevik Ukraine

The war in Ukraine continued for another two years; by 1921, however, most of Ukraine had been taken over by the Soviet Union, while Galicia and Volhynia were incorporated into independent Poland.

A powerful underground Ukrainian nationalist movement rose in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, led by the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The movement attracted a militant following among students and harassed the Polish authorities. Legal Ukrainian parties, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, an active press, and a business sector also flourished in Poland. Economic conditions improved in the 1920s, but the region suffered from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The situation in Soviet Ukraine under Communist control were sharply different. The communists gave a privileged position to manual labor, the largest class in the cities, where Russians dominated. The typical worker was more attached to class identity than to ethnicity. Although there were incidents of ethnic friction among workers (in addition to Ukrainians and Russians there were Poles, Germans, Jews, and others in the Ukrainian workforce), industrial laborers had already adopted Russian culture and language to a significant extent. Workers whose ethnicity was Ukrainian were not attracted to campaigns of Ukrainianization or de-Russification in meaningful numbers, but remained loyal members of the Soviet working class. There was no significant antagonism between workers identifying themselves as Ukrainian or Russian; however, anti-Semitism was widespread.

Moscow encouraged a national renaissance in literature and the arts, under the aegis of the Ukrainization policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk (1872-1933).

Holodomor

see Ukrainian Famine

With Stalin's change of course in the late 1920s, however, Moscow's toleration of Ukrainian national identity came to an end. Systematic state terror of the 1930s destroyed Ukraine's writers, artists, and intellectuals; the Communist Party of Ukraine was purged of its "nationalist deviationists"; and the peasantry was crushed by means of collectivization, resulting in the Great Famine or "Holodomor" (Голодомор) of 1932-1933, which claimed some 3-7 million lives as crops failed and remaining food wtocks were forcibly removed by the government. Besides Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Volga region were also hit by the famine. Stalin had full knowledge of the destructive force of the famine. It was a by-product of his war on the peasantry that began with collectivization and dekulakization and as an attempt to eradicate peasant culture in its entirety. Ellman explains the causes for the excess deaths in rural areas of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan during 1931-34 by dividing the causes into three groups: objective nonpolicy-related factors, like the drought of 1931 and poor weather in 1932; inadvertent result of policies with other objectives, like rapid industrialization, socialization of livestock, and neglected crop rotation patterns; and deaths caused intentionally by a starvation policy. The Communist leadership perceived famine not as a humanitarian catastrophe but as a means of class struggle and used starvation as a punishment tool to teach peasants to work well in the collective farms.

It was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization, and the Great Terror. These groups were associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov (1891-1939) and operated in Ukraine during the civil war, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within General State Political Administration (OGPU) in 1929-31. Evdokimov transferred into Communist Party administration in 1934, when he became Party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov on security matters, and the latter relied on Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as the Great Terror in 1937-38.

Nazi colloboration: 1941-1945

In 1939, after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Galicia and Volhynia were annexed to Soviet Ukraine. Northern Bukovina, formerly part of Romania, was incorporated into Ukraine in 1940, as was formerly Czechoslovakian Subcarpathian Ruthenia (the Transcarpathian Oblast) in 1945.

Ukrainians girls welcome soldiers of the Third Reich with the traditional bread and salt peace offering.

By mid-1941, the Ukrainian SSR had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The addition of the eastern provinces of Poland in late 1939 as well as the seizure of sections of Romanian territory in June 1940 led to some 2.7 million Jews living within the borders of the newly enlarged republic. About 85% lived in cities. By 1944, 1.6 million of these Jews had died at the hands of the Germans and their allies and auxiliaries. Unlike the majority of the Holocaust's victims who died in the industrialized mass murder of the death camps, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine's Jews died in mass shootings during the initial stages of the war.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was welcomed by many Ukrainians at first; the OUN even attempted to establish a government under German auspices. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) considered Ukraine a strategically important region that should be occupied through capturing the hearts and minds of the Ukrainians. According to Rosenberg, everything should have been done to make the Ukrainians view the Germans as liberators. Though he presented his views on different occasions, Adolf Hitler's anti-Slavic racial views prevailed and overrode strategic considerations, leading to a harsh occupation. Very soon the realization that Nazi policies were brutal toward all the Ukrainians, and not only the Jews and Communists, drove most Ukrainians into opposition to the Nazis. Germany forced many Ukrainians to work within the so-called Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU) on tasks such as agriculture, road and railway building, and the construction of fortifications. The German authorities soon faced a serious local labor shortage, especially among skilled workers, as a result of Soviet evacuations before the invasion, the ongoing murder of the Jewish population, and the brutal recruitment, arrest, and deportation of other groups, usually with the cooperation of the local civilian, military, and police authorities. The pool of labor was further reduced as the Germans lost territory in the later stages of the conflict. Nazi administrator Fritz Sauckel's labor recruitment measures strained relations with local officials responsible for selecting the deportees, leading to bribery and corruption. The Kiev area was the main focus for recruitment and deportation, along with the Vinnitsa region of central Ukraine. Over a million locals and prisoners of war were forced into labor in the Ukrainian coal mines in the Donbas region (Donets Basin). The forced laborers endured fines, starvation, imprisonment, beatings, and hanging, but also had better chances for more food, money, and mobility.

In Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia the first stage of partisan development, from 1941 to the fall of 1942, was uncoordinated and resulted in a great many losses. The second stage, late 1942 to 1944, was better coordinated; partisan groups were better defined, and relatively large-scale operations were carried out, often in cooperation with the Red Army. Organized leadership and cadres were created, various forms of actions (such as diversions, sabotage, and direct attacks) were developed; the Germans responded with vicious punitive activities against the partisans. In all, more than 1.3 million partisans took part in actions in Germany's rear in 6,200 units; more than 300,000 received decorations for their actions. The OUN created a nationalist partisan fighting force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); many Ukrainians also joined the Soviet partisans and fought in the Soviet Army against the Germans. After World War II, the OUN and the UPA continued a hopeless guerrilla struggle against Soviet rule until 1953. The devastation caused by the war included major destruction in over 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages.

Fascist insurgency: 1944-1954

Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera.

In the June 1944, when Canadian, British and American soldiers were landing on the beaches of Normandy, their Soviet allies rolled into the German-occupied Western Ukraine. The Red Army soldiers and officers quickly noticed a stark contrast in the attitude of locals compared to other recently liberated regions of the Soviet Union. Instead of cheering crowds of peasant women and children who would offer them water and the traditional Slavic greeting of bread and salt, there was an eerie silence in many villages, and few locals would even talk to the new arrivals. Soon, chilling rumors started about murdered Red Army soldiers found hanged or decapitated in the woods. Rumors were soon followed by orders issued to troops stationed in the allegedly safe rear, far behind the frontline, to increase their vigilance, never to venture anywhere alone or unarmed, and to look out for “bandits” hiding in the forests. The NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs – as the law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1946 was known) units that followed close behind the Red Army quickly proceeded with their routine practice of rounding up numerous suspected Nazi collaborators, as well as members of the Polish anti-Nazi underground, in Lviv and other west Ukrainian cities. However, a number of feared Soviet secret policemen were soon found dead in Ukrainian villages and Galician forests, and in some areas of the countryside those who dared to venture there had to be heavily armed and in large numbers. This was the start of a brutal insurgency that lasted almost ten years in rural Western Ukraine and resulted in one of the toughest counterinsurgency challenges the Soviets ever faced.

In 1948, the CIA report NSC 20/1, section 4: “US objectives with respect to Russia” warned that separating Ukraine from Russia will not work.

Reconstruction proceeded rapidly in the late 1940s and the 1950s, as the Soviets needed the food and raw materials of Ukraine. Political repression of nationally conscious Ukrainians also intensified. The widespread acculturation and assimilation of the Soviet Jews by the 1930s led Stalin to consider the "Jewish question" as settled; he now viewed the Jews as a national rather than a religious group. With the influx of Jews into the Ukraine and Russia from Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Bukovina following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, there followed an intensification of Jewish religious activity, and the reopening of many synagogues. However, political unrest preceding the creation of the state of Israel unleashed Stalin's massive repression against Jews during the "black years" of 1948-53. Suspected of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, Jews were systematically removed from positions of leadership in culture, science, medicine, politics, and economics. The anti-Semitic campaign ended only with the death of Stalin in March 1953.

Denazificatrion and reconstruction: 1954 to 1991

Stalin's death finally brought relief in many ways. The thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, who had served as Ukrainian party chief in the 1930s, led to the emergence in the late 1950s and the early 1960s of the "sixties generation" of writers, artists, and intellectuals. In order to mark the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Following Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, Moscow, under Leonid Brezhnev initiated a series of crackdowns on Ukrainian dissidents, including Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931), the author of Internationalism or Russification?; Vyacheslav Chornovil (b. 1938), the editor of the underground Ukrainian Herald; and Valentyn Moroz (b. 1936), the author of stinging attacks on Soviet policy. In 1972, Petro Shelest, the national-Communist Ukrainian party chief, was replaced by hardliner Volodymyr Shcherbytsky.

The Number Four reactor at Chernobyl exploded during a routine power test in April 1986. Radioactive contaminants from the Chernobyl disaster fell on northern Ukraine and several neighboring countries, reaching as far as Japan and the United States, causing casualties, sparking a major embarrassment for the Soviet Union, and inciting fears of nuclear energy.

The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 started a slow revolution. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 undercut trust in Moscow. "Glasnost" permitted Ukrainian intellectuals to discuss the "blank spots" in their history, and growing political liberalization led to the reemergence of dissident groups and the emergence of nationally minded cultural organizations. A major turning point occurred in late 1989, with the founding of Rukh and the removal of Shcherbytsky from power.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union: 1991

In 1990 Leonid Kravchuk, formerly in charge of ideology in the CPU, was appointed chairman of the presidium of a revamped supreme soviet, one fourth of whose deputies were nationalists and "democrats" elected in the semifree elections of 1990. On July 16, 1990, Ukraine proclaimed its sovereignty, an ambiguous formula that meant independence to the nationalists and autonomy to the Russian minority. On Nov. 21, 1990, Ukraine and Russia signed a treaty recognizing each other's sovereignty and promising not to interfere in each other's affairs.

As the Communist system collapsed in 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and the other republics engaged in lengthy negotiations with Gorbachev over the form of a new union. In August 1991 an abortive coup by committed KGB operatives in Moscow destroyed Gorbachev's strength and impelled the republics to go their own way. The Ukraine national assembly declared independence on Aug. 24, 1991. Several days later the CPU was suspended and its property was confiscated. A popular referendum on independence was held on December 1, and over 90 percent of the voters supported the declaration. Most of the countries of the world recognized the new Republic of Ukraine in the months that followed. Ukraine became a member of the Council on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and after much controversy a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994. As a consequence of the autonomous republics system, Ukraine became a second Yugoslavia.

Although not a member of NATO, Ukrainian contractors served as part of George W. Bushs "coalition of the willing" in the Afghan war. The Biden regime abandoned them in Afghanistan in August 2021, along with contractors from Bulgaria, Romania, and the Georgian Republic. The Russian Federation evacuated them.

The nominal successor to the Soviet Union was the Commonwealth of Independent States; Ukraine joined on Dec. 8, 1991. Serious tensions soon emerged with Russia as Moscow took possession of the Black Sea fleet anchored at Sevastopol, while some Russian politicians wanted the Donbas and the Crimea; the latter, being in Russian hands since 1783, had been transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet authorities without referendum or self-determination of peoples in 1954. The Ukrainian government responded by taking steps to create its own army and navy. Crimean secessionists elected Yuri Meshkov as president of the Crimea in early 1994. The Kiyv government established closer economic and political ties with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Ukrainian nationalists fears of Russia led it to postpone action on its earlier promise to give up strategic nuclear missiles, prompting concern in the West. After the signing the Budapest Memorandum by the presidents of Ukraine, Russia, and the United States in early 1994, Ukraine began shipping these weapons to Russia. Thereafter, Ukraine's relations with the United States and western Europe improved.

Leonid Kravchuk, the most powerful politician, became Ukraine's first popularly elected president, with over 60 percent of the vote, on Dec. 1, 1991. His authority, like that of the legislature, declined precipitously, however, as he proved unable to solve the country's mounting economic difficulties. In contrast to Rukh, which had split into pro-Kravchuk and anti-Kravchuk factions in 1992, the former Communists remained strong, controlling many local government councils, industrial plants, and collective farms. The CPU was officially reconstituted as a powerful political force in late 1993. Ukrainian neo-Nazis also become more prominent. Elections for the supreme soviet in March 1994 yielded a legislature in which the CPU and its left-wing allies were the strongest bloc, followed by the center-right nationalists grouped about what remained of Rukh and the centrist pro-government "independents." Kravchuk ran for reelection in the presidential election in June 1994. No candidate won a majority, so a second round was held in July, pitting Kravchuk against former premier Leonid Kuchma. Kuchma won the election with 52 percent of the vote.

The national goal was the creation of a market-oriented economy and the establishment of stable democratic institutions and a system of laws. However the goals were partly frustrated by political deadlock, inexperience, an inefficient state apparatus, a collapsing economy, internal anti-Russian xenophobia, and external tensions with the Russian Federation. The Soviet culture of corruption continued after independence, and rampant criminality became even more widespread in the mid-1990s. In the latter 1990s, Viktor Yushchenko, as chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, tamed rampant inflation and introduced responsible economic controls. From 1999 to 2004, Ukraine's GNP nearly doubled.

Official trade unions have been grouped under the Federation of Trade Unions. A number of independent unions, which emerged during 1992, among them the Independent Union of Miners of Ukraine, have formed the Consultative Council of Free Trade Unions. While the right to strike is legally guaranteed, strikes based solely on political demands are prohibited.

Ethnic tensions in Crimea during 1992 prompted a number of pro-Russian political organizations to advocate secession of Crimea and reincorporation to Russia. (Crimea was ceded by the RFSSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, in recognition of historic links and for economic convenience, to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's union with Russia.) In July 1992, the Crimean and Ukrainian parliaments determined that Crimea would remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction while retaining significant cultural and economic autonomy.

In July 1994, Leonid Kuchma was elected as Ukraine's second president in free and fair elections. Kuchma was reelected in November 1999 to another five-year term, with 56% of the vote. International observers criticized aspects of the election, especially slanted media coverage; however, the outcome of the vote was not called into question. Ukraine's March 2002 parliamentary elections were characterized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as flawed, but an improvement over the 1998 elections. The pro-presidential For a United Ukraine bloc won the largest number of seats, followed by the reformist Our Ukraine bloc of Viktor Yushchenko (who was then a former Prime Minister), and the Communist Party.

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances: 1994

See also: Near abroad

At the time of Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, including an estimated 1,800 strategic warheads, 176 long-range ballistic missiles, and 42 strategic bombers.

To solidify security commitments to Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed the December 5, 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The memorandum included assurances against the threat or use of force against Ukraine's territory or political independence. The countries promised to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine.

The United States took custody and control of Ukraine's obsolete nuclear stockpiles for disposal in exchange for assurances by the United States and NATO to safeguard Ukraine's independence. Ukraine was coaxed to give up it nuclear weapons in exchange for a written pledge, should Ukraine ever be threatened or invaded, the United States would be there to intervene with military power.

By 1996, Ukraine had returned all of its operational nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for economic aid and security assurances, and Ukraine became a non-nuclear weapon state party to the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). The last strategic nuclear delivery vehicle in Ukraine was eliminated in 2001 under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). It took years of political maneuvering and diplomatic work, starting with the Lisbon Protocol in 1992, to remove the weapons and nuclear infrastructure from Ukraine.

Failed color revolution: 2004

See also: Color revolution and Psyop

Kuchma's second term in office as president (1999-2004) was characterized by the collapse of the national democratic-centrist alliance, the "Kuchmagate" crisis, the rise of a non-Communist opposition in the 2002 elections, and the election of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 following the Open Society Foundations' Orange Revolution. The deep divisions that have become evident under Yushchenko had their origins in Ukraine's regionalism, the "Kuchmagate" crisis, antiregime protests, and different attitudes to dealing with the past. The country is divided by linguistic and regional cleavages that appear sharply in regional polarization in national elections. These divisions have led to constant questioning of the viability of the Ukrainian state and predictions of violence and civil war. Secessionist movements have made few inroads, however, and violence has been nonexistent. Because the Russian "minority" group in Ukraine is actually quite large, it has immense influence in the state without resort to regional autonomy or secession. The balance of power between Ukraine's regions and ethnic groups has ensured that neither side has dominated. This does not make for rapid reform.

The campaign leading to the October 31, 2004 presidential election was characterized by widespread violations of democratic norms, including government intimidation of the opposition and of independent media, abuse of state administrative resources, highly skewed media coverage, and numerous provocations. The two major candidates—Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader (and former Prime Minister) Viktor Yushchenko—each garnered between 39% and 40% of the vote and proceeded to a winner-take-all second round. The November 21 runoff election was marred by credible reports of widespread and significant violations, including illegal expulsion of opposition representatives from election commissions, multiple voting by busloads of people, abuse of absentee ballots, reports of coercion of votes in schools and prisons, and an abnormally high number of (easily manipulated) mobile ballot box votes. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Kyiv and other cities to protest electoral fraud and express support for Yushchenko, and conducted ongoing peaceful demonstrations during what came to be known as the "Orange Revolution."

The OSCE International Election Observation Mission found that the November 21, 2004 run-off presidential election "did not meet a considerable number of OSCE commitments and Council of Europe and other European standards for democratic elections…Overall, State executive authorities and the Central Election Commission (CEC) displayed a lack of will to conduct a genuine democratic election process." Other independent observers were similarly critical. On November 24, 2004, the CEC declared Prime Minister Yanukovych the winner with 49.46% compared to 46.61% for Yushchenko. The U.S. and Europe refused to accept the result as legitimate due to the numerous, uninvestigated reports of fraud. European leaders traveled to Kyiv to mediate a political solution between the parties. On November 27, Ukraine's Supreme Rada passed a resolution declaring that the election results as announced did not represent the will of the people. On December 1, the Rada passed a vote of "no confidence" in the government. On December 3, Ukraine's Supreme Court invalidated the CEC's announced results and mandated a repeat of the second round vote to take place on December 26. An agreement mediated by the European leaders resulted in new legislation being passed by the Rada and signed by the President December 8. The electoral law was reformed to close loopholes that had permitted pervasive electoral fraud. The constitution was amended, effective not earlier than September 2005, to transfer power, especially with respect to appointment of ministers, from the president to the cabinet. Yet another law was passed, in first reading, to devolve some powers of the central government to regional councils. In addition, Prime Minister Yanukovych requested and was granted a leave of absence, and Prosecutor General Hennadiy Vasilyev submitted his resignation.

The December 26 re-vote took place in an atmosphere of calm. While irregularities were noted, observers found no systemic or massive fraud. The OSCE Mission noted that "campaign conditions were markedly more equal, observers received fewer reports of pressure on voters, the election administration was more transparent and the media more balanced than in previous rounds…in our collective view Ukraine’s elections have moved substantially closer to meeting OSCE and other European standards." On January 10, 2005, after the CEC and the Supreme Court had considered and rejected numerous complaints and appeals filed by the Yanukovych campaign, the CEC certified the results: Yushchenko had won 51.99% of the votes, with 44.20% for Yanukovych. President Yushchenko was inaugurated January 23, 2005.

Ukraine held parliamentary and local elections on March 26, 2006. International observers noted that conduct of the Rada election was in line with international standards for democratic elections, making this the most free and fair in Ukraine's history. Unlike the first rounds of the 2004 presidential election, candidates and parties were able to express themselves freely in a lively press and assembled without hindrance. There was no systemic abuse of administrative resources as there had been under the previous regime. The Party of Regions and the bloc of former Prime Minister Tymoshenko, whose government the President dismissed in September 2005, finished ahead of the pro-presidential Our Ukraine bloc. Other parties passing the 3% threshold to enter parliament were the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party of Ukraine. No party held the majority of Rada seats needed to form a government. Following four months of difficult negotiations, a government led by Prime Minister Yanukovych and including representatives from the Party of Regions, Our Ukraine, and the Socialist Party took office on August 4, 2006. This, the first government formed after the extensive constitutional amendments brokered as part of the Orange Revolution, has been the focus the Prime Minister's growing influence, sometimes at the expense of the President. Amid shifting political alliances, the "Anti-Crisis Coalition" formed by the Party of Regions, Socialist and Communist parties has grown into a "Coalition of National Unity," as some members of the pro-presidential "Our Ukraine" bloc have moved into the Prime Minister's camp. Meanwhile, others have joined forces with Bloc Yuliya Tymoshenko.

Western-backed regime change: 2011/2015

See main article: Euromaidan coup

Swastika on display in a Kyiv mall , February 2019.

2010 Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian "Party of Regions" won the free, fair, open and democratic presidential election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

On June 23, 2011 two emissaries of the Obama administration — the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, and his aide, and former subordinate to Hillary Clinton in the U.S. State Department, Jared Cohen — visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, pretending to be on his side, while deceiving him to reveal to them ways to reach out online to members of Ukraine’s pro-nazi organizations in order to generate mobs for the demonstrations which were to be organized on Kiev’s Maidan Square to overthrow Ukraine’s President.

In the same month the Obama administration quietly put out for bid to American contractors their planned project to renovate a school in Sevastopol, in Crimea, in Ukraine, in the location where Russia since 1783 had (and still has) its largest naval base:

Federal Contract Opportunity for Renovation of Sevastopol School #5, Ukraine N33191-13-R-1240. The NAICS Category is 236220 - Commercial and Institutional Building Construction. Posted Aug 20, 2013. Posted by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (DOD - Navy). The work will be performed at Sevastopol 99000.

This was before the Maidan coup, and there were 28 years still remaining on Russia’s lease there. That part of their plan — to terminate that contract and replace Russia’s largest naval base, by yet another U.S. naval base — got foiled by Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, protecting Crimeans when they (as soon as the coup occurred) demanded to have a referendum on becoming restored again to being a part of Russia, as they had been between 1783 and 1954 (when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea, from the Russian part, to the Ukrainian part, of the Soviet Government).

In a 2013, an Obama administration-backed color revolution was unleashed, in which the Ukrainians nationalists protested against Yanukovych and wanted a pro-EU and NATO course by the government. These protests were dubbed "EuroMaidan". The key figures of the opposition were Victoria Nuland, Yulia Tymoshenko, Vitali Klitschko and neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok. As a result, prime minister Mykola Azarov resigned and Yanukovich was discontinued on February 22, 2014 by the parliament.

In response to the armed fascist coup of a democratically elected president, Russian soldiers landed in Crimea the same month. Because many of the people living in Crimea are ethnic Russians, there was an ongoing dispute whether Crimea belongs to Ukraine or to Russia. On March 11, 2014, Crimea declared its independence from the illegally US-installed Ukrainian regime. On March 16, 2014, Russia sponsored a referendum in Crimea about joining Russia. As a result of it 95.5% of voters supported joining Russia. The decision of the voters was ratified by the Russian Duma. Since March 18, 2014, Russia claims Crimea as a part of its territory. Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela recognized Crimea as a part of Russia.

In response, the United States and Europe imposed the Magnitsky Act sanctions sponsored by Sen. John McCain against Russian trade.

As a result of the reincorporation of Crimea, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic declared their independence and created a confederation called "Federal State of Novorossiya". Novorossiya was dissolved in May 2015 but the separate Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics however still exist. In June 2014 Petro Poroshenko was elected as new president of the Western-installed Kyiv regime and Arseniy Yatsenyuk became prime minister. Since then the U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime backed neo-Nazi paramilitary terror attacks against the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics. When President Donald Trump attempted to hold back military aid to the fascist Kyiv regime, U.S. Democrats impeached him.

Ukrainian collusion: 2016

Main article: Ukrainian collusion

The government of Ukraine in collusion with the Democratic National Committee colluded to interfere in the 2016 United States Presidential Election and to subvert American democracy. In so doing, they sought to blame Russia for foreign influence.

Paul Sperry of Realclearinvestigations documented how the Ukrainian government, working with both the Obama administration and the 2016 Clinton campaign, Ukrainian officials intervened in the 2016 race to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump in a sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation. The improper, if not illegal, operation was run chiefly out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C. where officials worked with Alexander Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American Banderist and Clinton campaign operative, to attack the Trump campaign. The Obama White House was also deeply involved in an effort to groom their own favored leader in Ukraine and then work with his government to dig up dirt on and investigate their political rival.

Alexandra 'Ali' Chalupa (left) and Col. Alexander Vindman (right), two Ukrainian Banderists deeply involved in the plot to remove President Trump and drive the United States to war with Russia.

Ukrainian and Democratic operatives also huddled with American journalists to spread damaging information on Trump and his advisers – including allegations of illicit Russian-tied payments that, though later proved false, forced the resignation of his campaign manager Paul Manafort. The embassy actually weighed a plan to get Congress to investigate Manafort and Trump and stage hearings in the run-up to the election. As it worked behind the scenes to undermine Trump, Ukraine also attacked him publicly. Ukraine's ambassador took the extraordinary step of attacking Trump in an Op-Ed article published in The Hill, an influential U.S. Capitol newspaper, while other top Ukrainian officials slammed the GOP candidate on social media.

The Ukrainian mischief is part of Special Counsel John Durham’s broader Trump-Russia inquiry, as of 2022 a full-blown criminal investigation with grand jury indictments – into efforts to falsely target Trump as a Kremlin conspirator in 2016 and beyond.

Nine days after the U.S. presidential election, the Russian Federation sponsored a U.N. Resolution entitled Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance aimed at condemning the neo-fascist groups openly displaying Nazi symbols and regalia in Ukraine and Donbas. The Obama administration voted against the resolution.

Impeachment 2.0: 2019-2020

See also: Impeachment sham

In December 2016 Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain visited the Azov Battalion. Graham told them "Your fight is our fight, 2017 will be the year of offense" to retake Crimea. However, the election of Donald Trump a month earlier interrupted the neocon globalist agenda for war with Russia. When the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and Mueller investigation failed to remove President Trump, undeterred, Ukranian nationalists and their American collaborators attempted to impeach President Trump in the fall and winter of 2020 for not enthusiastically supporting war with Russia over Ukraine.

Russia-Ukraine war: 2022

See also: Russia-Ukraine war

Former comedian, now President Volodoymr Zelensky (second from left), chest exposed, tight leather pants, wearing high heels depicted as the modern "Churchill"; (right) Vladimir Putin's "My Pet Goat" moment, receives briefing on Zelensky.

In the run up to the war, both the United States and NATO rejected without consideration two treaty proposals by the Russian Federation to avoid war. The treaty proposals would require NATO to pledge not granting Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia NATO membership; U.S. missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed; and NATO deployments to Eastern Europe reversed. The U.S. and NATO rejected the proposals without consideration and instead sent more NATO forces to Eastern Europe and continued to heavily arm Ukraine.

In early December 2021 it was reported that the Armed Forces of Ukraine deployed 125,000 troops against the Donbas against 15,000 separatist forces. NATO-backed neo-Nazis attacked the Donbas on February 14, 2022. In Donetsk region, between the evenings of 18 and 20 February 2022, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded 2,158 ceasefire violations, including 1,100 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 591 ceasefire violations in the region. In Luhansk region, between the evenings of 18 and 20 February, the Mission recorded 1,073 ceasefire violations, including 926 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 975 ceasefire violations in the region.

With a diplomatic solution rejected out of hand by the United States and NATO, the Russian Federation entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022 to put a stop to the eight year war against the people of the Donbas by the Kyiv regime which had already claimed 14,000 lives. After more than two weeks fighting claiming more civilian lives with NATO-supplied weapons, on March 11, 2022, EU external minister Josep Borrell back peddled on EU policy which provoked the war saying, "I am ready to admit that we made a number of mistakes and that we lost the possibility of Russia’s rapprochement with the West. There are moments that we could do better, there are things that we proposed and then could not implement, such as, for example, the promise that Ukraine and Georgia will become part of NATO." The following day NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg began walking back NATO threats to Russia by saying membership for Ukraine was not relevant or on the agenda.

NATO-backed neo-Nazi proxy forces attacked the Donbas again on February 14, 2022. Military forces of the Russian Federation (RF) entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022 to put an end to the ethnic violence and de-nazify the areas where the children and grandchildren of World War II Nazi collaborators had been carrying an ethnic hatred of Russians since the Holodomor of the 1930s and earlier. A wave of patriotism swept over Russian society, viewing the operation as a second Great Patriotic War. Soldiers felt they were sent to finish the job of de-nazifying Ukraine that their grandfathers left unfinished after World War II. The use of civilian human shields by the U.S-trained Armed Forces of Ukraine led to civilian casualties and was a primary strategy of the NATO proxies. Ukrainian security forces committed reprisal actions and atrocities against ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in areas which Russian forces vacated. Numerous attacks by Ukrainian forces on its own citizens, which had been ongoing in the Donbas region for the eight previous years, spread outside the Donbas to create false flag images of attacks by Russians. Efforts to rehabilitate the image and reputation of Nazis and Nazism by Western and Ukrainian media and psyops were non-stop since the beginning of the Russian incursion, with permanent and debilitating damage to the West's educational system and image throughout the civilized world. By early April 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine had been so degraded and decimated, or were out of fuel and unable to retreat, the Maidan regime doubled down on soft power, psychological operations and propaganda to garner sympathy from the West for continued support.

Ukraine missile attack on Poland

On November 15, 2022 two Ukrainian S-300 missiles, alleged to have been launched to shoot down a Russian cruise missile, were fired westward and hit a Polish grain storage facility, killing two civilians. The Polish government, Ukrainian government, the Associated Press, most of all Western propaganda media and so-called national security and intelligence experts called for invoking NATO Article 5. Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak declared that the strikes came from Russia. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba claimed Russian denials were a conspiracy theory and that “No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages." Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted that the “Russian attack on collective security in the Euro-Atlantic is a significant escalation” of the conflict.

However an AWAC radar plane and other ISR aircraft (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) aircraft regularly flying in the region, and ground radar, tracked the missiles' trajectory and determined the Kyiv regime had launched the missiles. That did not prevent an anonymous "senior U.S. intelligence official" from reporting to the Associated Press that Russia had fired the missiles at Poland. The fake news story was disseminated globally, as all fake news stories emanating from Kyiv, and its CIA counterparts in Kyiv, have been disseminated globally to world media for the entirety of 2022 and late 2021.

When called out on the lies, Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky doubled down. Both socialist premier Joe Biden and NATO chief warlord Jens Stoltenberg blamed Ukraine for the attack. Zelensky refuted the Western leaders' statements that the missile which killed two innocent civilians in Poland was Ukrainian. "I have no doubt that it was not our missile or our missile strike." Zelensky insisted that he received reports from the corrupt Armed Forces of Ukraine command that told him the missile attacks did not come from Ukraine," he told the people in a live nationwide address on Ukrainian state-controlled media. The Russophobic Financial Times of London quoted a diplomat from a NATO country in Kyiv saying: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

Historiography

The scholarly study of the Ukraine's history emerged from romantic impulses in the late 19th century. The outstanding leaders were Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), based in Kiev, and his student Michael Hrushevsky (1866-1934). For the first time full-scale scholarly studies based on archival sources, modern research techniques, and modern historical theories became possible. However, the demands of government officials—especially Soviet, but also Czarists and Polish—made it difficult to disseminate ideas that ran counter to the central government. Therefore, exile schools of historians emerged in central Europe and Canada after 1920.

Strikingly different interpretations of the medieval state of Kievan Rus' appear in the four schools of historiography within Ukraine: Russophile, Sovietophile, Eastern Slavic, and Ukrainophile. The Sovietophile and Russophile schools have become marginalized in independent Ukraine, with the Ukrainophile school being dominant in the early 21st century. The Ukrainophile school promotes an identity that is mutually exclusive of Russia. It has come to dominate the nation's educational system, security forces, and national symbols and monuments, although it has been dismissed as nationalist by Western historians. The East Slavic school, an eclectic compromise between Ukrainophiles and Russophilism, has a weaker ideological and symbolic base, although it is preferred by Ukraine's centrist former elites.

Many historians in recent years have sought alternatives to national histories, and Ukrainian history invited approaches that looked beyond a national paradigm. Multiethnic history recognizes the numerous peoples in Ukraine; transnational history portrays Ukraine as a border zone for various empires; and area studies categorizes Ukraine as part of Eurasia, or more often as part of East-Central Europe. Plokhy (2007) argues that looking beyond the country's national history has made possible a richer understanding of Ukraine, its people, and the surrounding regions.

After 1991, historical memory was a powerful tool in the political mobilization and legitimation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, as well as the division of selectively used memory along the lines of the political division of Ukrainian society. Ukraine did not experience the restorationist paradigm typical of some other post-Soviet nations, including the Baltic states, although the multifaceted history of independence, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Soviet-era repressions, mass famine, and World War II collaboration were used to provide a different constitutive frame for the new Ukrainian nation. The politics of identity (which includes the production of history textbooks and the authorization of commemorative practices) has remained fragmented and tailored to reflect the ideological anxieties and concerns of individual regions of Ukraine.

See also

• Ukrainian Sich Riflemen
• Essay: Understanding the organization of Ukrainian forces

External links

• CIA Factbook
• Ukraine page at The Economist
• www.ukraine.org
• Ukraine magazine, English edition
• Ukrainian Collaboration with Germany in World War II (1941 – 1945)
• "Between Hitler and Stalin: Ukraine in World War II," a 2003 Canadian film produced and directed by Slavko Nowytski and narrated by Jack Palance.
• U.S. State Department Background Note: Ukraine (2008), the source for several sections of this text
• 2014 Mariupol. Crimes of the Ukrainian regime . The war in Ukraine has been going on for 8 years. youtube.