Causes of the War in Ukraine

Note: this article I wrote in September. I have decided to post it here to see if it generates any discussion. I try to briefly outline the origins of Ukrainian nationality and the history of Ukraine's relationship with Russia, the West's relationship with Russia, and how this relates to the current war in Ukraine. 

The Causes of the War in Ukraine

N.B.: 

The war in the martyred land of Ukraine has been ongoing in its current form since the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation of Ukrainian territory in February, 2022. The war in Ukraine has however continued since 2014.

In this article I aim to outline the causes of this conflict. I wish to first state that I unequivocally condemn the actions of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. It is a crime, and on his hands is the blood of the innocent martyrs of Ukraine - women, children, soldiers, and others on both sides.

The Origins of Russians, Ukrainians, and Ukrainian National Consciousness


I would like first to start at the very beginning. Ukrainians and Russians are both Slavs. Slavs are the main ethno-linguistic group in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as North Asia. They speak very similar languages. Within the family of Slavic peoples are Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Czechs, and various others. Around 60% of Slavs are Orthodox Christians, and around 35% are Catholic. This is of some importance in the Ukraine conflict.

Russia is and always has been the largest of the Slavic nations. Russia has 140 million people, around 120 million of whom are Slavs - there are around 260 million Slavs in total. Ukrainians are also Slavs and number about 55 million worldwide - 30 million in Ukraine and 20 million in the diaspora.

Amongst the Slavic nations, the Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians) have always been very close. Traditionally, in Russian discourse, they form the “Triune Russian Nation”, which comprises “Great Russians” (Russians), “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), and “White Russians” (Belarusians). Until the early 1990s, when Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, the majority of Ukrainians were Russian-speakers who viewed themselves either as a subdivision of the Russian nation or a distinct but closely-related group to the Russians, so close as for the two nations to be “brother states”.

Today, around 40% of Ukrainians mostly speak Russian, and 60% mostly speak Ukrainian. In 2021, a survey taken of Ukrainians showed that the vast majority affirmed the statement “Russians and Ukrainians are brother nations”.

The history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine is very complicated. The first Russian state arose in what is now Ukraine in 988 AD, when Prince Vladimir of Kyiv converted his people to Byzantine Christianity. Gradually, the centre of the Kingdom of Rus’ moved north, first to the Vladimir and Novgorod, and then eventually to Moscow. The earliest Russian buildings, mostly churches and forts, still exist today in Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine.

Ukraine as a state did not emerged until after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. After a brief period of independence, it was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Modern Ukraine had always been divided between various powers. Most of Ukraine was ruled by Romanov Russia. This part of Ukraine remains the mostly heavily Russified, and most people from the part of Ukraine that was ruled by Russia before 1917 remain Russian speakers and Orthodox Christians.

The western part of Ukraine was ruled by Poland and then by the German-speaking Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary. This is part of the reason why western Ukraine today is majority Catholic and majority Ukrainian-speaking - originally, it was mostly Orthodox, but in Polish-ruled territories the Orthodox largely converted to Greek Catholicism. Western, Catholic Ukraine has always been culturally and linguistically different from the rest of Ukraine, which is historically Orthodox and Russian-speaking. Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk are worlds away from Russian-speaking, Orthodox Donetsk and Odessa in eastern and southern Ukraine. Many have described western Ukraine as being effectively a different country.

It was in Austrian-ruled western Ukraine, amongst the Catholic population, that Ukrainian national consciousness first arose in its modern form in the 19th century. Initially, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the dominant force amongst the western Ukrainian population, had a strong Russophile movement, but this gradually dissipated and by the time the First World War broke out was almost entirely consigned to the dustbins of history. Amongst the Greek Catholics of western Ukraine, nationalism had become the dominant force of society, and it was these Greek Catholics who led the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the latter stages of Austrian rule and during the Second World War.

The rest of Ukraine - in fact, virtually all of Ukraine east of Kyiv - did not really see itself as separate from Russia until the 1990s. Hence we can say that the idea of “Ukrainians” as something different from Russian identity arose amongst the Catholic Ukrainians under Austrian rule and gradually spread around the rest of Ukraine firstly during the Ukrainisation undertaken by Lenin in the 1920s, and secondly after Ukrainian independence in the 1990s. Of course, “Ukraine” did exist as a concept in Imperial Russia, but it was regarded merely as a region of Russia rather than a separate nation. Ukrainians were, as far as the Tsars were concerned, merely a type of Russian. It was only in Austrian-ruled western Ukraine that a different view prevailed.

In summary - western Ukraine has always been Catholic and Ukrainian-speaking. The rest of Ukraine has largely been Orthodox and Russian-speaking, and this continues to this day.

The Soviet Union

Ukraine in its entirety was incorporated into the Soviet Union by 1921. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) was proclaimed. It included most of modern Ukraine, excepting the Western Catholic regions, which would not be incorporated into the USSR until the Second World War, and Crimea, which was part of the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic.

Lenin supported the idea of Ukrainian nationalism. Although most of Ukraine was Russian-speaking and considered itself Russian, Lenin supported the Ukrainisation of all of Ukraine. The Ukrainian language and culture was promoted in regions of Ukraine where it was basically foreign. The policy was reversed by Stalin, beginning in the early-1930s. Stalin, though a Georgian (and thus neither a Russian nor even a Slav) believed basically in an All-Union policy of Russification.

The policy of Ukrainisation was reversed and the Ukrainian language, though co-official in the Soviet Union until the collapse of the Union in 1991, was marginalised. But the lasting legacy of Ukrainisation was that much of Soviet Ukraine regarded itself as inherently Ukrainian rather than Russian. When during the Second World War the Catholic regions of western Ukraine were incorporated into the Soviet Union, Russification accelerated as the Catholics were forced by the Soviet government to convert to Russian Orthodoxy and were encouraged to give up the Ukrainian language.

After 1931, aside from the 1953-1964 period when Nikita S. Khrushchev (a Ukrainian himself) ruled the USSR, although the Ukrainian Soviet Republic remained nominally autonomous, and there was an opportunity to learn and speak the Ukrainian language, a policy of absolute Russification was pursued. As in Russian Imperial times, the line between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” merged. Leonid I. Brezhnev, ruler of the Soviet Union from 1964-1982, was a Ukrainian and variously identified sometimes as Russian and at other times as a Ukrainian. This was completely normal in Soviet times. Ukrainian identity was considered part of a greater Russian ideal.

Putin’s claims, therefore, about modern Ukraine being created by the Soviet Union as quite true. Ukraine in its current borders is entirely the product of the Soviet Union. Lenin decided initially on the borders of Ukraine, Stalin added the western regions, and Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine (when it had been part of Russia for centuries) in the 1950s.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. It is worth bearing in mind that from 1953-1982, the Soviet Union was ruled by two successive Ukrainians (Khrushchev and Brezhnev), and that both Konstantin U. Chernenko (ruler of the USSR - 1984-1985) and Mikhail S. Gorbachev (the last ruler of the USSR) were part-Ukrainian.

This makes Ukrainian claims that the Soviet period was one of “Muscovite occupation” look even more stupid than a normal person would understand them to be. It is true that the western Catholic regions of Ukraine never wanted to be part of the USSR, but the other regions of Ukraine were just as willing a part of the Union and the communist experiment as Russia was, largely because they considered themselves Russian until Lenin decided to Ukrainise these regions.

Vladimir Putin was also correct in saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the 20th century. It put borders between peoples who had never before known them. 10 million Russians - that is the number of ethnic Russians in Ukraine - now found themselves to be citizens of Ukraine and not of the Soviet Union.

Since the Fall of the Soviet Union

Ukraine’s post-1991 history is a history of a constant struggle between the Russophile vision of Ukraine as a state that is part of the Russian sphere and nation, and the Ukrainian nationalist vision of Ukraine as a separate state and nation from Russia.

In 1991, newly independent Ukraine had over 50 million people - around 17% ethnic Russians, the rest largely ethnic Ukrainians. Its industry was larger than that of China. Newly independent Ukraine was largely Russian-speaking, with Ukrainian speakers dominating only in the West of the country.

The majority of Ukrainians initially wanted to be an independent state with close ties to Russia. The majority of Ukrainian believers were members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a part of the wider Russian Orthodox Church, whilst the western Ukrainians returned to the Greek Catholic Church that was forbidden in the Soviet era.

In Ukraine, the majority of those in eastern and southern Ukraine wanted to be very close to Russia and viewed themselves as culturally and ethnically a part of the “Russian World”. Parts of eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea remained majority ethnically Russian.

Until 2010, most Ukrainian Presidents tried to maintain good relations with both Russia and the West to appease the two sides. In 2010, Viktor F. Yanukovych, a Russian-speaker from eastern Ukraine, won the Presidential elections and gradually transformed Ukraine back into a state that was heavily dependent on Russia. Yanukovych, with the support of most Ukrainians, tried to make Ukraine a part of the Russian “World”. Ukraine, it seemed, with most of its believers under the Moscow Patriarchate, a pro-Russian President and populace, and a majority Russian-speaking population, was heading the way of Belarus.

However, in 2013 - 2014, this all changed as pro-Western Ukrainians toppled the democratically elected government in a coup supported by (possibly organised by) the CIA. The President of Ukraine was forced to flee to exile in Russia. A nationalist government, with an anti-Russian agenda, came to power in Ukraine. Putin, believing he was protecting ethnic Russians in Crimea and Donbass, invaded and took Crimea and nurtured pro-Russian separatists in Donbass.

The United States had for years been obsessed with the idea of influencing Ukraine - for so long aligned with the Russian World - into becoming a vassal of the United States in an effort to split Russia and make Russia less powerful. This has been the goal for 30 years.

When the opportunity arose to split the brotherly nations of Russia and Ukraine, the United States and its willing allies took it. Victoria Nuland, an official at the US State Department, is known to have tried to select the post-Yanukovych Ukrainian government. The Obama Administration was behind so much of this.

From the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USA has constantly tried to humiliate and weaken Russia. It lorded it over Russia, saying “we won the Cold War” in the 1990s as most Russians were living in abject poverty as a result of the capitalist shock therapy which Boris N. Yeltsin imposed on post-Soviet Russia with Western support. The USA and the West trampled all over Russia when it most needed help. The West told Russia it was now merely a “middle power” and just as Russia was getting back on its feet in the early-2000s after over ten years of the West trying to arrogantly turn Russia into a weak client state, the West started to constantly criticise Putin and the Russian government for doing things far less severe than what Western nations were doing.

It is also well-known that NATO is not a defensive alliance. It is an anti-Russian alliance. The West uses it to send a message to Russia. As soon as Putin, who raised Russia up from its knees, started to assert an independent foreign policy, the West turned on Russia, and it became again the “enemy of the free world”, though we can hardly call the West free, for it now knows no God and no morality.

Therefore, we can say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has very complicated causes; it did not occur in a vacuum. It is true that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a sin, a terrible sin. We cannot deny it. What is happening in Ukraine defies all our conceptions of the post-communist order of the world. How Vladimir Vladimirovich can go to church and cross himself, chanting “Christ is Risen” whilst also bombing and killing civilians, I know not.

But I do know this: despite the fact this evil invasion was unleashed by Putin, and despite the fact that Putin and his friends bear the blame for this, we should not be deceived into thinking that the West shares no blame in this. On the contrary, everything the West has been doing has intentionally provoked Russia. I would not be surprised if getting Russia to invade Ukraine was the plan in Washington all along. I cannot say this, but I suspect it.