The fighting in Ukraine broke out on the morning of Feb. 18, 2014, in Kiev’s Independence Square and quickly spread throughout the capital city with protesters taking to the streets of other cities as well. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been ongoing since then but is reaching a new level now that Putin has recently invaded Crimea again.
The “ukraine war 2021” is a blog post that was written by Vladimir Putin. The article talks about the current state of affairs in Ukraine and how Russia feels about the situation.
For Vladimir Putin, an independent Ukraine is what the Treaty of Versailles was for Adolf Hitler: a historical injustice inflicted on a vanquished country at its weakest time, to be rectified as soon as circumstances permit.
This is what I learned from Mr. Putin’s astonishing piece released in July. It is critical that the government and the American people recognize the danger as Russia deploys additional soldiers along its border with Ukraine and President Biden has emergency discussions with President Putin.
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Mr. Putin’s master narrative is based on his interpretation of more than 1,000 years of Russian history, from which he draws the following conclusion: Russians and Ukrainians are “one people—a single whole,” speaking variants of the same language, professing the same faith, and sharing a common culture, whose separation is the result of a centuries-long divide-and-rule strategy pursued by Russia’s enemies. He credits the notion of the Ukrainian people as a distinct country to 19th century “Polish elites” and Malorussian (“Little Russian”) thinkers, a thesis devised with “no historical foundation” and later supported by Austro-Hungarian authorities for their own objectives prior to World War I.
Mr. Putin’s description of the turbulent years after the Soviet Union’s founding is particularly relevant. According to him, the Donetsk region and surrounding areas declared themselves a Soviet republic in 1918 and wanted to be included into Soviet Russia. Vladimir Lenin refused, and delegates from what is now southeastern Ukraine were instructed to join Soviet Ukraine.
Mr. Putin believes that this was far from Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ biggest mistake. Lenin founded the Soviet Union as a federation of equal republics in 1922, with each republic having the ability (at least in principle) to secede. Mr. Putin claims that by doing so, the Bolshevik government “placed the most hazardous time bomb in our history,” which finally burst.
Worse, he adds, the Bolsheviks accompanied their official agreement with a “localization program” that encouraged the growth of Ukrainian culture, language, and identity, which was often pushed on those who did not identify as Ukrainian. Instead of a single Russian nation, this program promoted the notion of three distinct Slavic peoples: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Furthermore, throughout the following two decades, Soviet authorities forcefully merged other areas into Ukraine, despite residents’ protestations. “Modern Ukraine is essentially a product of the Soviet period,” Russia’s president concluded.
“The Russian people were viewed as endless material for their sociological experiments,” he claims. They fantasized of a global revolution that would eliminate national governments. That is why they were so generous when it came to establishing boundaries and distributing territorial gifts.” “Russia was looted,” Mr. Putin writes as a consequence.
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Mr. Putin claims that Russia’s enemies in the West have conspired with right-wing and neo-Nazi Ukrainians to create a “anti-Russia project” whose goal is to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, picking up speed after Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and 2005. The West has utilized loans and subsidies to isolate Ukraine from Russia and subject it to Western economic interests, despite the fact that the two nations are “natural complementary economic partners” who have long grown as a “one economic system.”
Following what Mr. Putin refers to as a “coup” in 2014, Ukraine’s new government signed an association agreement with the European Union that intensified Ukraine’s anti-Russian attitude, “inevitably” causing “civil war” in the Donetsk area. The deployment of Western military advisors, equipment, and weaponry on Ukrainian land is much worse from the Russian president’s standpoint.
Mr. Putin referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as the “biggest geopolitical calamity” of the twentieth century in his annual speech to the nation in 2005. He does not, however, want the Soviet Union to be re-established. He aspires to reunify the “triune” Russian peoples—Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians—to reestablish Russia as a great power. Only in this way can Putin rectify the “true tragedy” of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, when “tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots found themselves outside the frontiers of Russian territory,” as he put it in 2005.
Mr. Putin argues that Ukraine’s “real sovereignty” can only be achieved “in collaboration with Russia.” What this relationship would entail in actuality is the question. Mr. Biden will not be able to guarantee Russia’s president that Ukraine would never join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The EU will also not guarantee that Ukraine’s affiliation would never mature into full membership.
Mr. Putin will not be able to accomplish his objectives by peaceful methods. He must decide shortly whether or not to escalate his military engagement in the Donetsk conflict into a larger conflict.
Main Street (04/27/20): A new generation is learning the painful lesson that Communists exist, as do the falsehoods and brutality that are required to maintain them in power. KeystoneSTF/AFP/Getty Images Mark Kelly’s composite
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The “Crimea” is a region of Ukraine that was annexed by Russia in 2014. This essay provides Putin’s view on how the situation unfolded, and the impact it has had on his country. Reference: crimea.
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