If the war in Ukraine in the past year has shown anything, it is that all clichés about the country’s ethnic divisions have become a thing of the past. Because never since the Ukrainian independence in 1991 has such a large part of the population felt Ukrainian as in these months of national disaster. And that while Ukraine was a divided country for years, with irreconcilable differences between the Ukrainian speakers in the center and west, who were pro-EU and pro-NATO, and the Russian speakers in the south and east, who mainly looked to their eastern neighbor Russia and wanted to separate their regions from the rest of Ukraine.
It started in 2014
The accelerated development of Ukrainian national identity dates back to nine years ago, when Russian troops occupied Crimea and invaded Donbas in the wake of the Maidan uprising. Since then, the Ukrainians have become more and more united.
Read also: The Russians have the firepower, the Ukrainians morale
This development was most evident in cities with a predominantly Russian-speaking population outside those areas, such as Kharkiv and Odesa. When pro-Russian separatists also tried to take power there in early 2014, they encountered resistance from a majority of the population. That was certainly something no one expected in Western Europe and the US, which had little faith in a Ukrainian nation-state.
This distrust in itself was not strange. Finally, the formation of the Ukrainian state failed miserably several times in the twentieth century. For example, the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists to declare independence in 1918, 1939 and 1941 respectively failed. As long as the Soviet Union existed, an independent Ukrainian nation seemed to be less and less possible, also because any desire for independence was suppressed by Moscow.
Only when the power of the Moscow center suddenly evaporated on August 24, 1991, a few days after the failed coup against Gorbachev, did the Ukrainians seize their chance. Almost unanimously, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic voted to detach from the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, the division between them remained great. The brand new independence seemed to be a recipe for new problems. However, a referendum on independence held on December 1 of that same year was cause for optimism. With a turnout of 84 percent, more than 90 percent (83 percent in the Donbas region, of which 54 percent were Russian speakers) supported the new state.
Much to the chagrin of the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the chances of Moscow’s continued dominance over Ukraine had been lost. Initially he threatened that Russia could question the borders of the new Ukraine. For example, Russia could claim Crimea and the eastern parts of the country, including the Donbas. But Ukraine did not succumb to that blackmail and Yeltsin backed down, although with his actions he laid the foundations for the later anti-Ukraine policy of his successor Putin.
In the years that followed, Ukrainian nation-building got off to a slow start. This was mainly because the democratically elected rulers depended on the strings of oligarchs, who were sometimes controlled from Moscow. Nevertheless, the country became more modern, thanks to contacts with EU member states such as Poland. In the western and central part of the country it was already growing nineteenth century rooted desire to belong to Europe, because only in this way could Russia’s political, economic and cultural influence be counterbalanced. From then on, a future membership of the EU was regarded as the best protection of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Diminished famine
Ukrainian nation-building entered a new phase in 2004 when an uprising broke out in Kyiv after the presidential elections in which the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych had cheated. For the first time, the West now also seemed to realize that there is one independent Ukraine existed. The actual winner, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, worked as president in the following years to further build on Ukrainian national identity.
He called for an annual national commemoration of the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine artificially created by Stalin between 1932 and 1933, which claimed the lives of 4 million Ukrainians and had been obscured in Soviet historiography. He also drew attention to the mass murder by the Nazis of the Kyiv Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar and raised the shield of the nationalist guerrilla army of the radical nationalist and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera, which had opposed both the Soviet regime and the Nazis. fought. But it still failed to ease existing tensions between the west and south-east of the country.
Yet the development of a national self-consciousness continued. So emphasized the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andruchovich in his collection of essays Angels and demons of the periphery from 2006 that Ukraine was a country in itself, separate from Russia and Europe, just like the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. At most, the countries that were part of this separate world sought protection under the umbrella of the EU. He further wrote: “As the greatest sin of the enlargement of the European Union completed on 1 May 2004 [toen tien landen tot de EU werden toegelaten, red.] future historians will describe the circumstance that this territory, my Eastern Europe, was torn and divided between several centers, one of which – Moscow – is practically no longer a center, but wants at all costs to keep up the appearance of it, in which it is partly also succeeds.”
Andruchovich, one of Ukraine’s leading intellectuals, also had a keen eye in 2006 for the stark contrast between his country’s western and central regions and the southeastern regions. The population of the latter region “hate or at least despise everything Western: Europe is too far away, too complacent, too jovial and too unrealistic, Europe has been invented in Kyiv to let its head run wild, Europe does not exist, because it only knows betrayal.”
Words like that make you understand how easy it was for Putin to bend those heated areas to his will. Especially when, from 2012, he started to push for a reintegration of the post-Soviet space, which, just like for Yeltsin in 1991, was incomplete without Ukraine.
Maidan
Everything changed when the Majdan Revolution broke out in 2014. Incumbent President Yanukovych, who stole $70 billion from the state treasury, was ousted by protesters demanding political reform and an end to government corruption. Ties with the EU, which had been broken by Yanukovych under pressure from Moscow, also had to be strengthened.
According to Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology, support for independence rose from 84 to 90 percent between January and March 2014. Conversely, support for joining Russia fell from 10 to 5 percent.
Achievements such as the heroic defense of Donetsk airport against a large Russian army between May 2014 and January 2015 further contributed to the myth-making of the united Ukraine fighting against its large neighbour. The same was true for the mass deletion of Lenin statuesmerging two Ukrainian Orthodox denominations and renaming cities with Soviet names.
The Russian response to that revolution led to the Ukrainian national identity further strengthened, especially in Russian-speaking cities. In the following nine years, many of the political and ethnic divisions that hindered this process have virtually evaporated.
Read also: The early years of Volodymyr Zelensky: on tour with bacon and potatoes
The current anti-Russian attitude of a city like Kharkiv speaks volumes in that respect. As more Russian missiles strike there, the population’s determination to stand their ground only seems to increase.
A large part of the Ukrainians, with or without military training, have now taken up arms. In Kyiv alone, tens of thousands of Kalashnikovs were distributed to ordinary citizens at the beginning of the war. During rocket attacks, concerts are given in bomb shelters and the national anthem is played.
The treatment of the fallen is also impressive. As their remains are carried through the streets, bystanders kneel in respect for their heroes.
Since February 24, the leader of the Ukrainians has been Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who taught himself Ukrainian at a later age. In 2019, he was elected president with 73 percent of the vote on his pledge to tackle widespread corruption and end the war in the Donbas. Those plans had come to nothing three years later, putting his popularity at an all-time low of 23 percent. But from the first day of the invasion it skyrocketed.
Zelensky remained at his post in Kyiv, even though the Russians tried to assassinate him several times. With much pathos, he called on the West for help and developed into a world-class statesman. The Russian war crimes did the rest. After the horrors in Mariupol, Butsha and Kherson, the Ukrainians realized that they could not afford defeat. Since then they have been fighting for their country, which is more united than ever thanks to Putin.
#Russian #missile #hits #Ukrainian #unity #increases