On February 23, 2022, Ukrainian tanks park near the front line with the self-declared pro-Russian breakaway state Donetsk People's Republic. • EYEPRESS NEWS/SHUTTERSTOCK/SIPA Ukraine shares a dual ethnic heritage with Russia, dating back to the interbreeding of Slavic and Varangian cultures, and religious, through the conversion to Christianity by Byzantium. However, this country also has an old national consciousness, and even predates its membership of the Russian Empire. The dynamics of this national spirit, from the Cossack Hetmanate (1649-1764) to present-day Ukraine, passing through the Ukrainian People's Republic of 1919, historically shows a growing desire for affirmation. At the end of Antiquity, the great plain of Eastern Europe saw many people pass through during the great migrations. The Slavs were among the last Indo-European groups to have entered Europe, coming from the original home of these populations, that is to say the north of the Caucasus and around the Caspian Sea. They settled in the northern half of present-day Ukraine from the VI e century. Vikings take kyiv From the VIII th century, the Vikings of Sweden – the Varangians – developed trade routes between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea by going up and down the Volga towards the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Dnieper and the Vistula towards the Byzantine Empire. The Varangians were thus led to found various towns and trading posts in Slavic territory. The first of these cities was Novgorod, meaning very classically "new city" and probably founded in the second half of the 9th th century by the Varangian Riourik. His relative and successor, Oleg the Wise, seized kyiv and made it his capital in 882, thus establishing, between the Baltic and the Dnieper valley, the rodslagen , or "land of the Varangian navigators", which in Old Slavonic was deformed into Rus', and which therefore remained in history as the Rus' of kyiv. Coming from Sweden by rivers, the Varangians settled in Slavic territory, where they founded in the 9th th century the mighty Rus' of kyiv. The population of the Rus'-dominated territory of kyiv was predominantly Slavic and indigenous, while the ruling elites, clustered in the cities, were predominantly Scandinavian. However, the cultural influence was strongly from popular culture to the aristocracy, which partly swapped Scandinavian paganism for the Slavic pantheon, and took Slavic names. The Kievan Rus', in its beginnings, had with the Byzantine Empire the usual relations of barbarian peoples with the great civilizations:first seeking to plunder and ransom, it then established regular relations through trade and served as a auxiliary to defeat the enemies of the Empire (Khazars, Bulgarians and Pechenegs). Destroying the power of the peoples of the northern Black Sea, Rus' extended its own domination there by founding new cities attached to kyiv by ties of vassalage to its grand prince. Facing the Mongol warriors The new proximity to Constantinople naturally favored the arrival of Byzantine missionaries, notably the famous Cyril, who gave the Slavic language its alphabet, and the conversion of Rus' under the reign of Sviatoslav's son, Vladimir I er (c. 980-1015). With religious influence came institutional influence, and Vladimir worked to give Rus' a state inspired by the imperial model, imitated in this by his son, Yaroslav the Wise. Under his reign (1019-1054), Rus' reached its territorial and cultural apogee. But his inability to resolve the question of inheritance left at his death the same situation he had found at the beginning of his reign:a territory split between competing principalities, and fratricidal wars. The division increased from generation to generation, as it had been three centuries earlier in the Carolingian Empire, and for the same reasons. During the twelfth th and XIII th centuries, the mode of operation of the Rus' was quite similar to that of the Holy Roman Empire:that of a rather loose feudal entity, within which however the throne of kyiv, equivalent to the imperial title, was subject to bitter struggles for prestige. The ruin of trade towards Byzantium, following the capture of Constantinople and the destruction of the empire by the Crusaders in 1204, accelerated the decline of the political entity of Rus' by putting an end to the conditions of its appearance, and the arrival of the Mongols finished it. Also read:The nomadic invasions that shaped Eurasia Indeed, the XIII th century was marked by the irruption of the formidable horsemen of the Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde, who broke into the great plain and pushed as far as Poland and Hungary, massacring in the process half of the population of Rus'. Only the Republic of Novgorod, which for a century had become autonomous from kyiv, escaped this devastation. Its prince, Alexander Nevsky, the famous winner of the Teutonic Knights in 1242, had the Mongols recognize his authority over the neighboring principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, on which the trading post of Moscow depended. His youngest son, Daniel, was entrusted with this outpost and set about expanding it into a strong self-governing principality. His own heir gained enough power and prestige to claim for himself the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. In 1328, under the authority of Ivan I st , grandson of Daniel, the whole became the Grand Principality of Moscow. This state increasingly took advantage of the weakening of the Mongols, until the victory of Kulikovo in 1380, which definitively freed it from their suzerainty. Then began the long expansion of the principality, which became tsarate under Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), then empire under Peter the Great (1682-1725). To the Black Sea At the same time, in the southwest, another state took advantage of the weakening of the Mongols and carved out an empire at their expense:the Grand Duchy of Lithuania which, from the second third of the 14 th > century, stretched from the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea, around present-day Odessa, and in 1569 united with Poland within the Republic of the Two Nations. Under these two forms, Lithuania and then Poland-Lithuania dominated two-thirds of the territory of present-day Ukraine until the middle of the 17th century. century, while the Crimea and the area around the Sea of Azov passed from the hands of the Mongols to those of the Ottoman Turks, before being conquered by Russia in the last quarter of the 18 th century. At the same time, the successive partitions of Poland enabled the Russian Empire to extend to almost all of the current Ukrainian territory, in particular through the gradual integration of the Cossack Hetmanate – the first modern attempt to create an autonomous Ukrainian state by emancipation from the Republic of the Two Nations, born of the revolt of the Cossacks of 1648, and which struggled for a century between Russian and Polish suzerainties, until the deposition by the Russians of the last hetman in 1764. Under the name of New Russia, Crimea and the northern shore of the Black Sea as far as the city of Dnepropetrovsk were colonized, mainly by settlers from Little Russia, that is to say from the northern half of the current Ukraine. Many cities were founded, which today are among the largest in southern Ukraine:Kherson, Odessa, Melitopol, not forgetting Sevastopol and Simferopol in Crimea. In 1764, the first modern attempt to create an autonomous Ukrainian state failed:the Cossack Hetmanate, founded in 1649, was definitively integrated into the Russian Empire. In the 19 th century, as Louis XIV had done in France with the eradication of Protestantism and as Bismarck was doing at the same time in Germany with the Kulturkampf , the imperial monarchy sought to unify the population culturally, with the policy of Russification and defense of Orthodoxy against Catholicism. Indeed, since the end of the XVI th century, in the Ukrainian territories of the Republic of the Two Nations, the Orthodox Church, under the influence of Catholic Poland, had made partial allegiance to Rome and had allowed Catholicism to progress in these regions. The Empire took the opposite direction by promoting Russian Orthodoxy, both the dominant religion of the Russian population and the source of the legitimacy of the power of the tsars, rulers of the "Third Rome" since the fall of Constantinople. This authoritarian cultural struggle was much broader than its Western European counterparts, due to greater gaps to be bridged:it involved a change of calendar and alphabet, closings of schools and universities, a specific imposition of Catholics, and the limitation of property rights and marital capacity. A Soviet Republic among others With the breakup of the Russian Empire following the 1917 Revolution and defeat in World War I, Ukraine briefly became independent between 1919 and 1921, while being the battleground between White Russian supporters of the tsars, Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists. The Bolshevik military victory dashed hopes of retaining the briefly won independence and brought the Ukrainian People's Republic back into the fold of the fledgling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, the Bolshevik concern to make political organization relatively coincide with ethnic affiliations maintained the existence of the Ukrainian Republic within the framework of the Soviet Federation. Also read:The Russian Revolution After the death of Lenin, a supporter of federalism between equal republics, Stalin returned to Russian imperialism:himself a Georgian having castigated "Great Russian chauvinism", he considered nationalism to be an expression of the bourgeois spirit and saw in Soviet standardization the way to overcome this reactionary reflex. The Russian being dominant in number and in power, russification was paradoxically to be the natural lever to extinguish these local particularisms hindering the advent of homo sovieticus . Ukrainian nationalism being one of the most powerful in the Soviet territory, and even though the Ukrainian peasantry was particularly reluctant to collectivization, the weapon of starvation was used to break this resistance in the genocidal experience of the Holodomor, which in 1933 caused between two and five million victims. In order to break a Ukrainian peasantry reluctant to collectivization, the Soviet power used starvation as a genocidal weapon, causing between two and five million victims in the years 1932-1933. The trauma of these persecutions made many Ukrainians see the arrival of the Germans in 1941 as a liberation:even before the penetration of German troops on the territory, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, Stepan Bandera, proclaimed the independence of the country. Ukraine in Lviv, but he was quickly stopped by the invaders. The Ukrainian nationalists therefore formed a guerrilla army, which fought both against the Wehrmacht, then after the war against the Soviet army, which it resisted until 1954. That year, to celebrate the tercentenary of the As a Cossack Hetmanate, Khrushchev attached the predominantly Russian-speaking Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which ten years later gave its only Ukrainian leader to the USSR:Leonid Brezhnev. The hope of democracy When the USSR broke up in 1991, the population of the Republic of Ukraine voted 92.3% for independence – including the Donbass oblasts more than 80%. Ukraine has since experienced the longest period of independence in its long history, however marked by the constant tension of its dual Russian and Polish-Lithuanian heritage, and more than ever a border between two worlds. Just as in Russia, the collapse of communism in Ukraine provoked economic disorder and, if not a rise in corruption, at least its privatization, with the appearance of oligarchs perpetuating in the new context the struggles that had once been fought within of the Soviet apparatus. If Russia remedied this problem by returning to a controlled form of corruption – if not its eradication – in an authoritarian state apparatus, Ukraine persevered in its democratic ambition, naturally weakened by this persistent phenomenon. The “Orange Revolution” of 2014 was largely driven by Ukrainian speakers intent on derussifying the country. The part of the population that felt closer to Russia saw it as an undemocratic coup and rose up. In 2004, Victor Yushchenko, supported by the West, won the presidential election after obtaining the annulment of the first election won by Viktor Yanukovych, during the "Orange Revolution". But the persistence of corruption problems, as well as the economic difficulties resulting from the 2008 crisis, caused its crushing defeat in the 2010 election, won this time by Yanukovych. Despite Western hostility to the fraudulent candidate of 2004, negotiations were initiated for a free trade agreement with the European Union, but Yanukovych ultimately decided not to sign the association agreement. This decision, which dampened the hopes of Ukrainians hoping for rapprochement with Europe, provoked demonstrations accusing Yanukovych of corruption and of governing in the interests of Russia. The crackdown only increased discontent and swelled protests in Kyiv and elsewhere in the country, culminating in the February 2014 revolution and Yanukovych's flight to Russia. However, since the revolution was largely the work of Ukrainian speakers anxious to de-Russify the country, the part of the population who felt closer to Russia and who had voted strongly for Yanukovych in 2010 saw it as an anti-democratic coup and s protested. Supported by Russia in the east, the separatist forces proclaimed the independence of the People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, starting point of a civil war against the authorities of kyiv, themselves convinced to carry out, in reality, a war of independence against Russia. Whether or not to join NATO Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the question of the subsequent extension of the conflict has arisen. Indeed, very few considered the invasion itself likely, and among these many thought that it would be limited to the Russian-speaking regions, or even to the Donbass alone, and would never go into the north or as far as kyiv. Many thought there was only one "Ukrainian question", not realizing that Ukraine fits, for Vladimir Putin's Russian power, into a much larger perspective of security on Russia's western flank. , and revengeful nostalgia following the Russian defeat in the Cold War. This was stated explicitly by the Russians in December 2021, in the midst of rising tensions and preparations for the invasion, when producing a list of demands where Ukraine had little part, and only on the same level as the other countries of the former Soviet space:Russia demanded, in this document, the guarantee of Ukraine's non-membership of NATO, but also the withdrawal of all the forces of the present in countries where they were not present in 1991 – that is to say, in practice, the same thing in both cases. As soon as the invasion of Ukraine is over, the question of the Baltic countries will arise, and even Finland, the only European country neighboring Russia to be, like Ukraine, a non-member of NATO. Believing that the cost of a war remained lower than that of not intervening, but also of letting Ukraine arm itself and become ever more powerful militarily, Russia was able to decide to act, because it does not benefit from any formal military alliance with anyone. Ukraine was therefore an isolated prey, which could both be taken without extension of the conflict, and against which the war would allow a show of force capable of staggering the Europeans, before resuming negotiations on the basis of the demands concerning the countries actually integrated into NATO. Indeed, Russia's concerns being security concerns and the Russians not wanting NATO forces in border countries, even a takeover of all of Ukraine would solve nothing. As soon as the invasion is over, the question of the Baltic countries will arise, and even of Finland, which is showing an increasing inclination to ask for its membership – it is in fact the only European country neighboring Russia to be in the same situation. than Ukraine, i.e. not a member of NATO. Would Putin be able, to go to the end of his logic, to attack the Baltic countries and to put himself de facto in a state of war against NATO, in defiance of the danger of nuclear escalation? The change in military practice that he is carrying out, by playing nuclear deterrence in an offensive way to cover a conventional offensive with his atomic umbrella, opens the door to such a movement. Find out more • Atlas of the wars to come. The conflicts of the future in 60 cards, P. Fabry, Godefroy editions, 2017. ChronologyVI e century Slavic populations settled in the great eastern plain of Europe.882 The Varangian Oleg the Wise seizes kyiv and makes it his capital in 882, founding Rus’.Middle of the 13th th century The arrival of the Mongols of the Golden Horde destroys Rus’.1380 The Muscovite victory at Kulikovo expelled the Mongols from Europe.1654 Birth of the Cossack Hetmanate, the first modern attempt to create an autonomous Ukrainian state.1919 Ukraine becomes an independent republic as part of the Revolution.December 1991 The Ukrainian population overwhelmingly votes for independence from the USSR.
