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Ukraine sits in a pivotal location in Europe and has a long and bloody history of conquest and being conquered. Religions and armies have swept back and forth over Ukraine for a dozen centuries and its history and basic geography provide vital context for the current conflict.
The once powerful medieval state of Kievan Rus (9th century) was the first major Eastern Slavonic state but the Mongols ended that in the 13th Century. Poland annexed most of what is now western and northern Ukraine in the 14th Century (and don’t think they have forgotten!). A Turkic Khanate threw off the rule of the Mongols in Crimea and ruled most of what is now Southern Ukraine from 1441-1783.
Polish Catholicism spread to West Ukraine while Russian Orthodox Christianity remained in place across the rest, one of the many east/west fault lines of the nation.
Ukraine has been smashed between the tectonic plates of clashing empires oft and over. The Slavs, the Mongols, the Polish / Lithuanian axis, the Ottoman empire, Hapsburg Austria and of course the Russians. The Hapsburgs and the Russians ruled over all of Ukraine for over a century.
The Russian Revolution and the end of the Habsburg monarchy preceded The Soviet–Ukrainian War (1917–1921) in which the Bolshevik Red Army established control. Ukraine went on to become a founding republic of the USSR. A brutal Russification of Ukraine began in the 1930’s and millions of people in Ukraine, mostly peasants, starved to death in the Holodomor.
After Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland between them in 1939, the territory of the Ukrainian SSR expanded westwards. Some Ukrainian militias fought against both Russia and Germany while others fought alongside the Nazis, assisting them with the Holocaust. After WW2 the appointment of Khrushchev led to a resurgent Ukraine and the (internal) transfer of Crimea from Russia.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was defined territorially by the defunct Ukrainian SSR but divided as always between East and West in terms of religion, outlook, languages and economics.
That Ukraine lies on the fault line between East and West is a truth which cannot be wished away. To exist as a peaceful prosperous nation Ukraine must maintain a difficult balance and choosing belligerence against an empire that you share a 2300km border with has particular risks.
Western propaganda asserts that Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was brutal which is true (as all invasions are) and unprovoked – which is not true.
The U.S. and Germany repeatedly promised to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” after the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact, but plans for NATO expansion eastwards commenced well before Putin became Russia’s president.
The U.S. has clearly signalled its intention to further expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea. The U.S. also played a central role in the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian (and democratically elected) President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014 (which marks the true start of the war in Ukraine.)
The U.S. and Ukraine’s own leaders knew perfectly well that NATO enlargement would most likely lead to war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”
The U.S. has armed the Ukrainian army which was acting as de facto member of NATO long before the 2022 invasion.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts asked simply: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.”
In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality but the U.S., U.K., and France blocked that. The West doesn’t want peace in Ukraine because that would represent the frustration of plans in which Ukraine is pivotal. For centuries western invaders have marched through Ukraine en-route to Moscow as both sides know well.
Russia sees Ukraine joining NATO as an existential threat and the U.S. sees it as the missing piece of a nearly completed puzzle, thus Ukraine is mashed between two imperial powers once again, its brave soldiers sacrificed by the West with chilling abandon.
Some (many?) want to discard all the military and geopolitical contexts of Ukraine in favour of a morality play in which the heroic West rushes to the aid of an embattled victim, but this is childish nonsense.
The direct complicity of the West in Israel’s illegal invasion, occupation, apartheid and now genocide in Palestine tells us all we need to know about the vaunted ‘western values’ that supposedly fuel Western weapon transfers to Ukraine. The Western empire has no more interest in international law nor national sovereignty than Russia (or any empire) and has (thus far) regarded the destruction of Ukraine and the loss of a generation of their sons and fathers as a cheap price to pay to weaken a rival power.
It is time to talk sense about Ukraine. Talking sense does not make anyone a lover of Russia, a Putin apologist or a hater of the West. It just means that we put aside the propaganda of both sides and deal with reality – so here it is:
(1) This war will only end via guarantees to Russia about Ukrainian neutrality.
(2) Russia cannot be defeated from afar by putting U.S. weapons in the hands of proxies – nor can Russia be defeated by sanctions.
(3) A western military victory in Ukraine is unachievable and persisting in this fantasy will only extend the agony for Ukraine and risk WW3.
(4) Russia is winning the war and the longer the negotiations are left, the worse the final outcome will be for Ukraine.
No amount of hand waving about ‘rewarding Putin’ or raising the delusional spectre of a Russian invasion of all of Western Europe or abusing those who advocate for peace will change the above facts.
We cannot continue to live in a post-truth bubble in which clashing imperial powers both try to pretend they are on the side of the angels. Its time for some statecraft, diplomacy and negotiations. It is time for some grown ups to re-enter the building.
Understand what is at stake here, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction and the situation in Ukraine is at least as dangerous and probably more so.
As we have said many times, if we don’t start talking sense about Ukraine VERY SOON…then there may be no future for any of us.
Re. point 4 – The US/EU/UK do not care in the slightest what the costs of the war are for the Ukraine. They would be unperturbed if 100% of the population of the Ukraine died tomorrow. The whole point of the conflict is to damage Russia. That Russia (if you disregard the lives of Russian soldiers) is not being damaged but is in fact gaining in military experience, military power and industrial power is just an ignorable and ‘unfortunate’ by product of the war, and it must be ignored because to acknowledge this fact would expose them all as gullible incompetent clowns.