Yves here. This article provides a useful complement to Putin’s many remarks about the history of Ukraine from a Russia perspective. It examines the forces that led to the formation of Ukraine as a “self-constructed identity” yet why it was left out until very late in the process of national formation along perceived or actual ethnic lines.
By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, Ex-University Professor, Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, Belgrade, Serbia
An imagined community
Ukraine is an Eastern European territory that was originally part of the western part of the Russian Empire and the eastern portion of the Polish Kingdom in the mid-17th century (the division according to the 1667 Peace Treaty of Andrusovo). That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity [see, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London‒New York: Verso, 1983]. Before 2014, Ukraine was home to some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent who declared themselves as Ukrainians.
Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or Belarusians/Belarus as “foreign” but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].
The process of self-constructing identity of the Ukrainians after 1991 is, basically, oriented vis-à-vis Ukraine’s two most powerful neighbors: Poland and Russia. In other words, the self-constructing Ukrainian identity (like the Montenegrin or Belarusian) is just able to claim so far that the Ukrainians are not either the Poles or the Russians, but, however, what they really are is under great debate, and still it is not clear. Therefore, the existence of an independent state of Ukraine, nominally a national state of the Ukrainians, is of very doubtful indeed from both perspectives: historical and ethnolinguistic.
National Self-Determination
The principle of the so-called “national self-determination” became popular in East-Central, Eastern, and South-eastern Europe with the proclamation of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” on January 8th, 1918. However, as a concept, the principle was alive since the French Revolution, if not even before. The French Revolution itself supported a principle of national self-determination, which was already used in practice since the American Revolution (started in 1776), followed by the American War of Independence (ended in 1783) against the United Kingdom as a colonial master. In short, the concept is based on a principle that the source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. Therefore, the idea of a plebiscite was introduced as the political support for either independence or annexation of certain territories. For instance, France organized a plebiscite in order to justify the territorial annexation of Avignon, Savoy, and Nice in the 1790s. The same principle was used for the Italian and German unifications in the second half of the 19th century or for the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in Europe by the Balkan states in 1912‒1913.
The new European political order after WWI was established according to the principle of national self-determination as the territories of East-Central and South-East Europe were fundamentally remapped. The new national states appeared, while some have been enlarged by the inclusion of their nationals from neighboring countries. Exactly using this principle, the four empires were destroyed: the German, the Ottoman, the Russian, and Austria-Hungary.
However, the same principle of national self-determination was not applied to all European nations for different reasons. One of them was that certain present-day known nations at that time were not recognized as such, at least not by the winning Entente powers. That was, in fact, the case of Ukrainians, or better to say, of those Ukrainians left behind the borders of the USSR. Those trans-Soviet Ukrainians were one of the losers of the Versailles System after 1918. While a large number of the smaller nations (compared to the Ukrainians), from Finland to the Balkans, were granted either state independence (for instance, the Baltic States) or inclusion into the united national state (for example, Greater Romania), Ukrainians were deprived of it.
Unlike many other European nations, there were several Ukrainian political entities (state or federal unit) established during the years of 1917‒1920, either by the Germans or Bolsheviks. The Germans created a formally independent Ukrainian state in 1918, while the Bolsheviks established not only one Soviet Ukraine as a political entity within the Bolshevik state (later the USSR).
To be honest, there were several focal reasons why the Western winners did not create an independent Ukraine after WWI: 1) It could be considered as a German political victory on the former Eastern Front; 2) The country could be run by the nationalists close to the German concept of Mittel Europa and, therefore, Ukraine can become a German client state; 3) Independent Ukraine would be anti-Polish and anti-Semitic; 4) Independent Ukraine could become inclined to the Soviet side for the matter of the creation of a Greater Ukraine; 5) Many Westerners did not recognize an independent Ukrainian nation as a separate ethnolinguistic group; and 6) Ukraine as a federal entity already existed within the Soviet state.
Therefore, for all of above mentioned crucial reasons, the victorious powers after WWI decided not the sponsor the creation of an independent Ukrainian state as a national state of the “Ukrainians” applying the principle of national self-determination. Moreover, applying the historical rights, in 1923, the Entente powers gave reborn Poland Galicia and some other lands considered by the Ukrainian nationalists to be “Western” Ukraine. The Ukrainians within Poland did not get any national autonomy (differently to the case of the Soviet Ukraine) for the very reason they have not been recognized as a separate nation, i.e., an ethnolinguistic group.
Ukraine?
The Slavonic term Ukraine, for instance, in the Serbo-Croat case Krajina, means in the English language a Borderland – a provincial territory situated on the border between at least two political entities: in this particular historical case, between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the Republic of Both Nations (1569−1795), on one hand, and the Russian Empire, on another. It has to be noticed that according to the 1569 Lublin Union between Poland and Lithuania, the former Lithuanian territory of Ukraine passed over to Poland.
A German historical term for Ukraine would be a mark – a term for the state’s borderland which existed from the time of the Frankish Kingdom/Empire of Carl the Great. The term is mostly used from the time of the Treaty (Truce) of Andrusovo (Andrussovo) in 1667 between Poland-Lithuania and Russia. In other words, Ukraine and the Ukrainians as a natural objective-historical-cultural identity never existed, as it was considered only as a geographic-political territory between two other natural-historical entities (Poland [-Lithuania] and Russia). All (quasi)historiographical mentioning of this land and the people as Ukraine/Ukrainians referring to the period before the mid-17th century are quite scientifically incorrect, but in the majority of cases politically inspired and colored to present them as something crucially different from the historical process of ethnic genesis of the Russians [for instance: Alfredas Bumblauskas, Genutė Kirkienė, Feliksas Šabuldo (sudarytojai), Ukraina: Lietuvos epocha, 1320−1569, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2010].
The Role of the Vatican and the Union Act
It was the Roman Catholic Vatican that was behind the process of creation of the “imagined community” of the “Ukrainian” national identity for the very political purpose of separating the people from this borderland territory from the Orthodox Russian Empire. Absolutely the same was done by Vatican’s client Austria-Hungary in regard to the national identity of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian population when this province was administered by Vienna-Budapest from 1878 to 1918 as it was the Austro-Hungarian government created totally artificial and very new ethnolinguistic identity – the “Bosnians”, just not to be the (Orthodox) Serbs (who were at that time a strong majority of the provincial population) [Лазо М. Костић, Наука утврђује народност Б-Х муслимана, Србиње−Нови Сад: Добрица књига, 2000].
The creation of an ethnolinguistically artificial Ukrainian national identity and later on a separate nationality was part of a wider confessional-political project by the Vatican in the Roman Catholic historical struggle against Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the eastern “schism”) and its churches within the framework of the Pope’s traditional proselytizing policy of reconversion of the “infidels”. One of the most successful instruments of a soft-way reconversion used by the Vatican was to compel a part of the Orthodox population to sign with the Roman Catholic Church the Union Act recognizing in such a way a supreme power by the Pope and dogmatic filioque (“and from the Son” – the Holy Spirit proceeds and from the Father and the Son).
Therefore, the ex-Orthodox believers who now became the Uniate Brothers or the Greek Orthodox believers became, in great numbers, later pure Roman Catholics and also changed their original (from the Orthodox time) ethnolinguistic identity. It is, for instance, very clear in the case of the Orthodox Serbs in the Zhumberak area of Croatia, from the ethnic (Orthodox) Serbs to the Greek Orthodox believers, later the Roman Catholic believers, and finally today the ethnic (Roman Catholic) Croats. Something similar occurred in the case of Ukraine.
The 1596 Brest Union
On October 9th, 1596 it was announced by the Vatican a Brest Union with a part of the Orthodox population within the borders of the Roman Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth (today Ukraine) [Arūnas Gumuliauskas, Lietuvos istorija: Įvykiai ir datos, Šiauliai: Šiaures Lietuva, 2009, 44; Didysis istorijos atlasas mokyklai: Nuo pasaulio ir Lietuvos priešistorės iki naujausiųjų laikų, Vilnius: Leidykla Briedis, (without year of publishing) 108]. The crucial issue, nevertheless, in this matter is that today Ukraine’s Uniates and the Roman Catholics are most anti-Russian and of the Ukrainian national feelings. Basically, both the Ukrainianand the Belarus present-day ethnolinguistic and national identities are historically founded on the anti-Orthodox policy of the Vatican within the territory of the ex-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was in essence an anti-Russian political construction.
The Lithuanian historiography writing on the Church Union of Brest in 1596 clearly confirms that:
“… the Catholic Church more and more strongly penetrated the zone of the Orthodox Church, giving a new impetus to the idea, which had been cherished since the time of Jogaila and Vytautas and formulated in the principles of the Union of Florence in 1439, but never put into effect – the subordination of the GDL Orthodox Church to the Pope’s rule” [Zigmantas Kiaupa et al, The History of Lithuania Before 1795, Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000, 288].
In other words, the rulers of the Roman Catholic Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the GDL) from the very time of Lithuania’s baptism in 1387−1413 by the Vatican had a plan to Catholicize all Orthodox believers of the GDL, among whom the overwhelming majority were the Slavs. As a consequence, the relations with Moscow became very hostile as Russia accepted the role of the protector of the Orthodox believers and faith, and, therefore, the 1596 Church Union of Brest was seen as a criminal act by Rome and its client, the Republic of Two Nations (Poland-Lithuania).
A Buffer Zone
Today, it is absolutely clear that the most pro-Western and Russofrenic part of Ukraine is exactly Western Ukraine – the lands that were historically under the rule of the Roman Catholic ex-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the former Habsburg Monarchy. It is obvious, for instance, from the presidential voting results in 2010 that the pro-Western regions voted for J. Tymoshenko while the pro-Russian regions voted for V. Yanukovych. It is a reflection of the post-Soviet Ukrainian identity dilemma between “Europe” and “Eurasia” – a dilemma that is common for all East-Central and Eastern European nations, who historically played the role of a buffer zone between the German Mittel Europa project and the Russian project of a pan-Slavonic unity and reciprocity.
In general, the western territories of present-day Ukraine are mainly populated by the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Uniates. This part of Ukraine is mostly nationalistic and pro-Western (in fact, pro-German) oriented. Contrary, Eastern Ukraine is, in essence, Russophone and subsequently “tends to look to closer relations with Russia” [John S. Dryzek, Leslie Templeman Holmes, Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses Across Thirteen Countries, Cambridge−New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 114].
Since WWI up to today, the Germans have been the principal sponsors of the creation of the national state of Ukrainians for different geopolitical as well as economic reasons. Subsequently, different kinds of Ukrainian nationalists were siding with the German authorities. For instance, whereas the victorious Entente powers after 1918, supported by Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, or Czechoslovakia, were executing the policy of preservation of the Versailles System, the Germans during the interwar period were opposing it and fighting against it. It is from this viewpoint that explains why the Ukrainian nationalists accepted the Nazi policy of a “New European Order” in which a Greater Ukraine could exist in some political form, in fact, as a buffer zone [Frank Golczewski, “The Nazi ‘New European Order’ and the Reactions of Ukrainians”, Henry Huttenbach and Francesco Privitera (eds.), Self-Determination: From Versailles to Dayton. Its Historical Legacy, Longo Editore Ravenna, 1999, 82‒83]. Finally, even today, the main Ukrainian supporter and sponsor in its conflict with Russia is exactly Germany. Nevetheless, we have to keep in mind that after 1991, Russia left at least 25 million ethnic Russian outside the borders of the Russian Federation, a huge number of them in the post-Soviet Ukraine [see more in, Ruth Petrie (ed.), The Fall of Communism and the Rise of Nationalism, The Index Reader, London‒Washington: Cassell, 1997].
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity, which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
© Vladislav B. Sotirović 2025
49 comments
Comments are closed.
I would strongly question the preconception in this OPed that “Ukraine and the Ukrainians as a natural objective-historical-cultural identity never existed,” by referring to Alexander Herzen’s own interesting description of Ukraine which clearly outlines his 19thC interpretation of their identity – even claiming it stronger than his own Russian character.
I don’t doubt Herzen’s sincerity, and have always found his analyses from his own Russian pre-socialist perspective both credible and illuminating, though he did tend to romanticise anti Tsarist movements, and was notably pro Cossack. He was no friend of Russian despotism, as is obvious, and always supported self determination and the underdog, hence his references to the Cossack leader Mazepa and then the Pugachev rebellion against Catherine.
“The wild and warlike, but republican and democratic independence of Ukraine lasted for centuries until Peter I.
The Ukrainians, incessantly tormented by the Poles, Turks and Muscovites, drawn into an endless war with the Crimean Tatars, never fell. Little Russia, voluntarily joining the Great, negotiated for itself significant rights.
Tsar Alexei swore to observe them. Peter I, under the pretext of Mazepa’s betrayal, left only a shadow of these privileges, and Elizabeth and Catherine introduced serfdom in it.
The poor country protested, but how could it resist the fatal avalanche that rolled from the north to the Black Sea and covered everything that bore the Russian name with the same shroud of the same chilling enslavement…
A century of serfdom could not erase everything that was independent and poetic in this glorious people. It has more individual development, more local colouring than with us; with us the ill-fated uniform indifferently covers the whole life of the people.
Our people do not know their history, while every village in the Ukraine has its own legend. The Russian people remember only Pugachev and the year 1812.”
Alexander Herzen 1846
Alexei Tsar from 1646-76
Peter I, Tsar from 1682 and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721-1725
Just as in the Levant and the Middle east, demarcating fixed boundary Westphalian nation states in ‘Little Russia’ is fraught.
Kiev has about same standing, outside the U.S. sphere, as Belgrade had to Yugoslavia.
To US-ophiles Stalin’s SSR is sacred as Tito’s.
No border in Europe is worth U.S. blood and treasure.
As George Washington said.
Given that we know 1840’s was a time of heated discussions of what Ukraine actually was, as the term had only recently appeared to mean the same as Little Russia or Southern Russia, it’s quite possible young Herzen merely consumed the fantastical ideas presented by many at the time.
And used this to formulate this claim that has been very prominent among Russian liberals, that the problem of Russia is the stupidity, herd mentality and serf-likeness of the Russian muzhik. The very image of the so called “self-hating” liberal in Russia. In other words, Herzen is not as much commenting on Ukraine, but lamenting for Russia.
It’s also roughly the time when Adomas Mickevicius (or is it Adam Mickewicz?) was writing “Lithuania, my homeland!” (Pan Tadeusz, 1834). During the era of Romantic nationalism, ideas like real borders, histories, identities, and sentiments of the actual people gave way to fanciful imagined stories concocted by the elites. I doubt Herzen thought of Ukraine any more than Mickewicz thought of “Lithuania,” or, I supposed, modern Poles think of Kashubia or Masovia (or the French of Bretagne or Anjou, or the English of Cornwall, I guess)
It’s not that Mickevičius wasn’t thinking of Lithuania. It’s that the idea of a nation-state was not part of the way people of his day thought. “Lithuania” was simply the lands of the Lithuanian people (identifiable by whatever cultural markers) Like Poland was the lands of the Poles.
And places where Lithuanians and Poles both made their homes? Could have legitimately been considered either or both without any inherent sense of contradiction.
Absolutely.
There is perennial weakness in how the rigid thinking behind the Westphalian nation state dominates political boundaries.
Divvying up territory and allocating it to one group or another has been disastrous for many overlapping peoples.
It is still evident in territorial claims in the Near and Middle East, and the western and northern fringes of the former Tsarist Empire, especially the steppes, where peoples like the Cossacks were mobile, and often semi-nomadic.
The modern boundaries of Karelia are a classic example, as are the Sápmi areas.
There are many people who thouhht themselves as belonging to multiple identities: Miskewicz/Mickevicius for one. He would have found, for example, the question to whom Vilnius/Wilno belonged (or, indeed, what the city should properly be called) bizarre. Yet, that dominated the relationship between Poland and Lithuania for the entirety of the interwar period. I would imagine that Mickewicz thought of “Lithuania” as part of a “Poland” that is not too overtly “Polish” (but I have no idea what he thought that would have meant–why not Poland as part of a “Russia” that’s not too overtly “Russian”? I know he opposed that.) Personally, I don’t have much sympathy for 19th century Romantic nationalists and their muddled thinking.
Up until the First World War “multicultural” was the norm in Europe.
My ancestors from my mothers side in the 19th century used Finnish at home, Swedish when dealing with officials, Russian when selling in St. Petersburg and German when buying in Vyborg.
And they rarely traveled further than 200 km from their farm.
It wasn’t the Westphalian Peace that created the patch work of nation states, it was the collapse of four European empires at the end of the WW1.
It is always astonishing to me that that era went away as quickly as it did, although some remnants persisted into the beginning of post World War 2 Europe (talking about the three Germans who founded ECSC–Adenauer, Schu8man, and Gasperi, of course.) i do wonder how “rooted: the people were in their multiculturlism, though.
I’m old enough to know that, in early 20th century, my grandparents, on my mother’s side, spoke Korean at home, spoke Japanese with the officials (because Koreans in Manchuria were “Japanese” legally, after all), and (Mandarin) Chinese with their “neighbors” (some distance away, in different villages, though, because actual villages were mono-ethnic.) People further northwest apparently added Mongolian to the mixture, or so I heard. But, once World War 2 ended, they all became Koreans and they always had been–my mother, who was 4 when she left China, still finds it astonishing at, as a very young child, she was trilingual at one time. Ian Buruma, writing about his experience visiting, IIRC, 1950s Korea, found that it very funny that the Koreans he ran into always inssted on how they hated the Japanese in all aspects, yet all spoke excellent Japanese and were very big fans of 30s and 40s Japanese pop culture–popular novels, music and the like.
Andrei Lankov, a Russian North Korea expert, mentioned some Korean historian (I think) who grew up under the Japanese and remembered a fanatical ultra-Japanese schoolteacher who assured everyone during WW2 that the Americans had no chance against the divine power of the Emperor. A few years later, he met the same man in the Soviet-occupied part of Korea and was surprised to find him 1) a Korean with a Korean name and 2) a Communist preaching about the inevitable triumph of the proletariat under the leadership of the Party and Comrade Stalin. Sadly, the man was killed by counter-revolutionary partisans during the Korean War before he could start talking up Kim Il Sung.
Herzen ploughed his own furrow.
He was historically and culturally literate. Definitely an opinion former rather than opinion absorber – hence his reputation as the father of Russian Socialism. He had his political adversaries, including Marx, but was no self hater.
He was actually an optimist in terms of his confidence in the Russian serf class, but was highly critical of the ruling Tsarist elite – which is why he was first exiled internally, but eventually had to leave Russia to avoid persecution.
Self-hater is this regard means believing that Russian serfs should be, by education, turned to French serfs and then Russia would be a paradise on earth. Even in the quote above he states what an embarrassment the Russian peasantry is.
Just like the modern day Russian liberals, in his early years he believed the solution was turning Russians into Frenchmen. And when that doesn’t actually work out, it’s only because the darn serfs are so stubborn and slavish.
I can find no expression of admiration for, or discussion of, the French peasantry in any of Herzen’s writings, nor in Isaiah Berlin’s biographical essays. I have most of his translated writings. Can you please source ?
He only lived in Paris long after his formative period in Russia. Herzen was jailed at 22 and then exiled to Vyatka (Kirov) with two fellow anti Tsarist disruptors. Like Kropotkin in his period of internal exile, this is where he observed serfdom directly.
He advocated and campaigned for the emancipation of serfs and campaigned constantly against the punitive Tsarist government, which he despised with a vengeance.
If anything he over-romanticised Tsarist serfdom.
Herzen believed that Russian (and any others within the Tsarist empire) ) peasants were entirely capable of self-government, and could be a revolutionary force in overthrowing the nobility, then establishing socialism based on their autonomous rural communities.
At no time did Herzen prescribe or advocate any centrally imposed socialist model.
He did not much like the influence of some aspects of abstract German philosophy on political thinking, and often criticised that.
He actually opposed the Blanquists and French top-down socialism and strongly advocated self determinism.
He was a pluralist which is why Marx rubbished him, as Herzen supported self-organisation by the liberated serfs, with egalitarian land sharing, and not Marxian style centralisation.
He was aligned with Bakunin’s libertarianism and much closer to the Tolstoyan view.
The link to Center for Geostrategic Studies needs a bit of fixin’.
One quibble, living as I do in the Piedmont region of Italy, which was the nucleus of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Not correct: “For instance, France organized a plebiscite in order to justify the territorial annexation of Avignon, Savoy, and Nice in the 1790s.”
The annexation of Savoy and the County of Nice took place in 1860 as part of a deal to get the French to support creation of a united Italian kingdom in Northern Italy. The plebiscites were highly dubious: The results for Nice still look sketchy, and the result was that the majority of the Nizzardi (who had been part of Piedmont for 450 years) moved to Italy. Another irony is that Savoy was the original home of the Savoy family, Chambéry their original seat. And Garibaldi was mightily pissed off because he was born in Nizza.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contea_di_Nizza#La_cessione_del_Circondario_di_Nizza_alla_Francia_(1860)
I don’t see much of a parallel to the problems of Ukraine.
Yes, about 1860. But Nice previously had been annexed to France in 1793, reversed in 1814. But not following a plebiscite. The only referendum there in 1793 was national, on the new Constitution.
I think that the author makes many valuable points, even if we have started to debate them here in the comments.
First, the Popester looms too large. Because of the principle in much of northern and central Europe that the prince’s religion had to be the same / imposed on his subjects, much of the impetus for trying to get the Orthodox “Little Russians” to become Uniates is tied to the Polish/Lithuanian kingdom and Polish nationalism. (I will note that by the end of the Polish kingdom around 1790, the Polish elites were treating the Lithuanians as a bunch of baluba (as we say in Italian).)
The same process explains why Prussia and much of northern Germany was Protestant. It explains some of the peculiarities of Swedish Lutheranism, in which the king was willing to allow some Catholic customs like veneration of saints so long as the populace converted.
I read an article some years back that described the Slavic world as a place where differentiation of nations is still going on in a vivid way. I recently was doing some research and backed into information on the South Slavs. When Yugoslavia was established, Serbo-Croatian was chosen as an official lingua franca. The Slovenians had to make an effort to preserve Slovenian.
Likewise, much of the recent controversy over the status of Macedonia has to do with some debate over whether Macedonian is a separate language or a dialect of Bulgarian. Which is much like the knotty problem of Ukraine.
And then there was Czechoslovakia and its divorce: Think of the Czechs and the Slovaks. Are they truly that different? How does one become a “nation”?
Some clarifications:
1) Serbians and Croats (and Bosniaks) are the same people today, divided by religion (Orthodox/Catholic/Muslim). However, in the same time it is also true that Croatia and Serbia never really were part of the same country. Croatia was a separate kingdom quite early in the Middle Ages (first half of the 10th century the latest), and it also originated from a different Slavic tribe migrating south. Then it was part of Hungary and later of the Habsburg Empire/Austro-Hungary, and never united with Serbia. It is a miracle that the languages were so close in the 19th century when the unification project that was the Serbo-Croatian standard was launched (by a couple intellectuals on each side). Also note that how many Serbs lived on what is today’s official Croatian territory and where the borders should have been drawn (Croatians lost out elsewhere themselves) is a separate story.
2) Macedonia is the fakest of the several fake nations that were concocted in the late 19th and early 20th century, as it was in fact really put together only after WWII. But here the Russians/Soviets played a major role in creating it, and in effect their Ukraine problem today is a bit of a karmic payback for what they did there.
3) And in Moldova too — Moldova was created as a project to tear the territory off from Romania and make it part of Russia/the USSR, by concocting this separate ethnicity that was supposedly different from Romanians. They are the same people though (although the origin of the Romanians themselves is quite murky — you won’t find such a thing until quite late in history, it only really gets put together in the early Modern era). But in the same time there are other people there that are absolutely not Romanian — e.g. the Gagauz, the Bulgarian minority, plus, of course, the many Russians.
4) Czechs and Slovaks had in fact never been part of the same independent country until 1918 except for the very brief period in the second half of the 9th century when Great Moravia flourished (but then quickly collapsed once the Hungarians invaded the Pannonian plane from the east). There were a lot of different Western Slav tribes in the post-Roman centuries, most of them disappeared, but Czechia was put together in the regions of Bohemia and Moravia (which were at various points in the Middle Ages independent kingdoms). Slovakia never existed as a separate thing but was inhabited by similar Western Slavic tribes. Bohemia and Moravia eventually ended up under German rule, while what is now Slovakia was Hungarian territory (and in fact the southern parts still have a lot of Hungarians, and were predominantly Hungarian before the partition of Hungary in 1918 and subsequent ethnic cleansing). This is how the separation developed — Czechs under German influence, Slovaks under Hungarian, plus major socioeconomic differences (Bohemia/Moravia became urban and industrialized while Slovakia was rural and agricultural). But yeah, it is really the same people and they should not have split. The problem was that because of the urban/rural split the Czechs looked down on the Slovakians and that caused resentment. Sufficiently much of it for the split. Plus, of course, the desire of local politicians to be rulers of a separate country rather than of mere provinces.
Also, between the wars Czechoslovakia included Transcarpathia too, which is now in Ukraine. And which had absolutely no business being in Czechoslovakia — it is not even Slovak, but inhabited by Hungarians in the lowlands and Rusyns (not Ukrainians) in the mountains.
5) Belarus and Ukraine are, of course, made up entities too. The difference is that the Belarusian project was half a century behind in the process and never achieved escape velocity, which is why today Belarus is what it is. While Ukraine can only exist as an anti-Russia, because if it ceases to be an anti-Russia, it will be quickly reabsorbed into its natural place as part of Russia.
Your comment reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s humorous take in his novel Scoop on how the powers that be go about delineating nations –
“As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.”
And in Moldova too — Moldova was created as a project to tear the territory off from Romania and make it part of Russia/the USSR, by concocting this separate ethnicity that was supposedly different from Romanians. They are the same people though (although the origin of the Romanians themselves is quite murky — you won’t find such a thing until quite late in history, it only really gets put together in the early Modern era).
The origins of Romanians are murky because everyone surrounding them, and especially Hungarians, try to deny them any historicity and claim to the land, that is Transylvania. Hungarians have denied their own chronics if there was any mention of blachos (gallawach, vlach – i.e. Roman). As a Romanian historian said, if one is to believe everyone else is saying about Romanians, the only conclusion would be that they fell from the sky.
As for Moldovans, there are 2x more “Moldovans” (people that call themselves after the historical region) in Romania than in R of Moldova. And those people are really indistinguishable from eachother. Myself, coming from Bihor county, Crisana (the territory of the three Cris rivers), I have a diffenet manner (not dialect) of speach and there are regional words that are not in use in other areas. But working throughout Romania, including Moldova, there isn’t really any difference. Never mind written language.
Of course the chronicles are full of mentions of vlachs, but you certainly don’t see “romanian” mentioned.
The part of Moldova between Dniester and Prut was “detached” in 1812 as a result of an early Balkan war between Russia and Ottomans, before Romania was created from two Vlah principalities with a new consensual name. The coastal part of Besarabia (lands between Dniester and Prut) was part of Crimean Khanate until then (and now, in Ukraine by a Communist decree), and the rest, in Moldova, an autonomous principality of Ottoman empire.
Attachment of Transdnistria to Moldova has even more convoluted reasons, it was never a part of historical Moldova and it never had Romanian/Vlah majority.
By the way of comparison, Belgium is a somewhat artificial nation stitched together by Austrians (more precisely, Hapsburgs).
Or, Norway. I came across a humorous Reddit post by a Swede whose non Scandanavian wife was amazed, on a visit to Oslo, that Norwegians spoke such good Swedish.
With thanks to the commenter who originally mentioned it on NC, I’d recommend a fairly recent book by Jacob Mikanowski: Goodbye, Eastern Europe. He covers the history of the region, beginning with Slavic legends and folklore. The flux and intermingling of populations is a principal theme, and he contends that the rise of nationalism brought only conflict and wars.
It’s quite fascinating. The author’s ancestors are from Eastern Europe, both Jewish and Christian, so he can draw on family lore as well as travel he undertook to see conditions for himself.
It’s not specifically about Ukraine, and, if memory serves, the last chapter is superficial and was evidently tacked on in haste to reflect current events.
One is almost tempted to think that nationalism was a deliberate ploy by shadowy elites to lord over everyone else in the modern era through classic divide-and-rule, which nationalism facilitates readily.
Today we take it as a given, but in fact the nation state and nationalism are a very recent phenomenon.
Huh? It goes back to Greek city-states, which had their own militaries. IMHO the issue is scale, not the concept.
Not sure what you mean — Greek city states were all Greek and they had large slave populations much of which were often not Greek.
That sort of thing cannot be a nation-state in the modern sense of one people, one language, one territory.
They did not see it that way. Athens and Spartans saw themselves as Athenians and Spartans. Their cultures and modes of governing were very different.
The notion of the City and the Citizen, the Chief and his Tribe, the King and his Kingdom, the Emperor and his Empire and the idea of the State are all very different from the modern notion of nationalism which arose and erupted as a cultural, linguistic and extended tribal organising principle in the fetid bowels of the Enlightenment. England, this septic isle, was not seen as a nation but as a kingdom ruled by the Crown in Parliament and modern day English nationalism is best viewed as a reaction to post-war immigration.
Yves, your readers may find this related article of interest. It is by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a Welshman like me though much smarter. Ex merchant banker, London and NYC, so consequently very well connected. Today, I can confirm that the BAE Systems plant in Llanelli to which he refers in his opening paragraph is firing on all cylinders, so the locals tell me. I have always found his articles in the Daily Telegraph ‘on-the-money’. I hope you can agree with me on this one.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/19/for-all-the-noise-trump-is-ever-less-relevant-on-ukraine/
Well the Daily Telegraph lives in fantasyland as usual when it comes to Ukraine. This article has all the cliches, Russia has suffered horrendous losses, the Russian economy is on the verge of collapse, oil exports are tanking and the so-called shadow fleet has not much longer to operate etc., etc. Oh yes and it would take the Russians four years at the rate it is going to take the final bits of the east Putin wants the peace agreement to give him. Areas that are strongholds and Ukraine would be sure to hold onto them.
We shall see. Unfortunately, British and for that matter EU intelligence is all about wishful thinking rather than genuine analysis. I would not bet a rotten lingonberry on Europe emerging victorious, let alone the ranch.
And I omitted to add that no matter how much materiel the EU and Britain can produce, there is then the question of transporting munitions to Ukraine. A week or two ago, a cargo ship full of muntions hugging the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria and Romania en route to Ukraine was sunk by a Russian submarine. Weapons in storage in Ukraine have been targetted and destroyed, as have logistics routes towards the battle zones. The fantasy that Russia will look the other way if western boots do appear on the ground in Ukraine is incredibly naive. The west has no chance of achieving air supremacy either. All in all, no matter how shiny the tools and materials the west can produce, they will swiftly be tarnished beyond use or recognition were attempts made to ship them eastwards.
Are there any thoughts comparing Ukraine as a buffer zone with the role played by Korea between its two regional powers China and Japan?
No expert, so take what I write with a large grain of salt.
Certainly the Korean peninsula can be seen as a buffer zone, but culturally I guess in the three kingdom period there was some cultural sharing between the southern kingdoms and proto-Japan. But as China became centrally organized the kingdoms saw China as the regional power that had to be respected.
As the three kingdoms came under central authority known as Goryeo, the peninsula was thoroughly incorporated into a Chinese empire. The Mongol invasions did impact the peninsula but as the Mongols gradually assimilated the political apparatus of China to become Yuan, Goryeo remained culturally linked to China, not Japan.
Since then at least in popular history Japan is portrayed as “bandits” or the “enemy”. China OTOH often is portrayed as suppressing Korean nationalism.
Korea was never really a “buffer” zone. Japan was never a serious power until late 16th century, and event then, by early 17th century, they turned inward again. The possibility of a “buffer zone” didn’t become an issue until 1890s, at which point “Korea as buffer” should be a warning on how not to do stuff like this. I exaggerate somewhat, but I like to point out that anti-Japanese Korean factions basically wound up engineering the fall of two great empires by manipulating their gullible patrons into wars that did no one (not Koreans either) any good.
Ukrainian nationalists claim that Ukraine has a great history. However, this has little to do with the lives of ordinary citizens. Ironically, modern Ukraine resembles the former Russian Empire. Workers and farmers know that serving their homeland means sacrificing their lives for the benefit of a corrupt, privileged elite.
Ukrainian great history has little to do with anything, because it is made up (or just stolen from Russian history). Modern Ukraine does not resemble the former Russian Empire, but the reality of their dream, the American Dream. As they say, be careful what you wish for.
Historically “Ukraine” was rendered an empty quarter for half a millennium by a succession of Mongol, Tatar, and Ottoman conquests that killed and enslaved millions of people beginning in the 1200’s with the destruction of the Kievan Rus.
The region was only re-settled beginning in the late 18th century under Prussian-born Catherine the Great, mostly by Orthodox Russians and Catholic Austro-Germans (this is admittedly an over-generalization). Agree with our Reality Czar that the secession of “Ukraine” after the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the conflict between eastern and western confessions to the surface.
I’m also convinced that under the post-war Dniepropetrovsk Mafia rule of Khruschev, Brezhnev, and Andropov the privileged inhabitants of “Ukraine” became convinced that they were “special” and deserved western consumerism, turning their backs on the Russian motherland when the USSR fell.
The West has been so obsessed with kicking the Russians off of the Black Sea littoral for 200 years that people no longer even question why. The post-Soviet oligarchs of “Ukraine” had an easy time convincing morons like Johnson, Truss, Biden, and Blinken that they weren’t Russians — when in fact people from their region had been running the USSR during the era between Stalin and Gorbachev.
The ethnic Texans.
My friends from Texas point out that that’s very much the thing. They certainly ain’t the Yankees, no sir!
Give it time (and new borders).
My ancestry on both sides is Ukrainian–but one pair of grandparents went by a German last name, and the other, a Polish one. They spoke Ukrainian and Russian as primary languages, but also some combination of German, Lithuanian, and Polish. They were Ukrainian, but acknowledged that their nation bounced around between larger and more powerful neighbors for a long time. My mother’s father, who was something of a self-trained scholar, said they had as much right to be Ukrainians as all “those other peoples” had to become part of a greater Germany. Except, of course, that those other peoples were subjugated into it, via Prussia. Ukrainians were, by his reckoning, subjugated everywhere except into Ukrainia.
As I mentioned here before, when my mother’s parents came to the US, my grandmother joined a Ukrainian women’s choir in NYC. They sang both Russian and Ukrainian songs over a local ethnic radio station. There was no coercion involved, to hear her tell it. It was just *their* music.
So I distantly resonate with Putin’s remarks about the various ethnic Eastern Slavs being more or less “brothers.” It’s not a myth, as the Atlantic Council has it–or if it was, it was a myth that became a reality for a lot of people over the years.
Personally, I sympathise with the common (but precisely how common I don’t think anyone can know – certainly others existed too) 19th century view that Ukrainians/Little Russians (I suspect, by the way, that the latter term sounds more disparaging in English than it does in Russian, where it simply means “people from the smaller Russia”; compare with Asia Minor), Belarusians, Great Russians (“people from the bigger Russia”) and Rusyns are all distinct Russian peoples speaking their own Russian languages. After all, that is historically correct – we are all descendants of the old Rus’. I also remember reading that at some point (around the 16th century?) it was common for each branch was to consider itself Russian and all others something else. And, of course, we can argue about who retained the most of that shared cultural heritage. Certainly linguistically, Ukrainian is more Slavic, though part of that is through Polish borrowings; they don’t get as much from the Germanic languages as we did. Perhaps the Rusyns are the “purest”, though that is only a guess.
But at some point in the 19th-20th centuries, “Russianness” became attached to us Great Russians, and the entire family was reclassified as “East Slavs” instead. That serves to slightly obscure the obvious historical and cultural connections. Yet what are “East Slavs” if not the descendants of those Slavs who lived in the “Ruskaya zemlya” of our chronciles?
Per what I read from the Swede in that Reddit post, shouldn’t Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Icelanders be the same people? Even today, early modern history (17-19th centuries) seems to hit a lot of berserk buttons for them, even if they act chummy most other time.
I think their case is a bit different in that Denmark, Norway and Sweden were perceived as distinct political entities during the Middle Ages, even if then and later they often happened to be united under one head. Meanwhile, the Russian Land was understood to be one, even when it was divided between many principalities. A lasting division on the level of identity only started to arrive at some point after the Lithuanian conquests. There is more justification for Norwegians than for Ukrainians or “Russians” (in the more limited modern sense) to be considered a wholly distinct people throughout their written history – for whatever that is worth.
I do think there is some overlapping Scandinavian identity as well, though. Certainly there have been some proposals for a Scandinavian Union since at least the 19th century.
The complete history of European countries is a mess, and Balkan and East Europe is a special mess even for European standards.
This is from TV series “Velo Misto” (Big Town) which was very popular back in ’80 in former Yugoslavia. Similar story can be applied to many other places in Europe.
You fall asleep in one country and wake up in another….
And I can tell you and brag that I’ve been to many countries. I’ve been to Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, and now I’m in Italy and I haven’t left this store…
How can it be that Split is in Italy and Brač island is in Croatia?
And my wife is from Brač island… And I’m telling her last night: we’ve been married for 50 years and I didn’t know I married a foreigner.
Note: Brač island is 2 nautical miles from city of Split.
You can change the King; you can change the state; and, with a bit of imagination, you can change the nation; you can’t change the place or the people except by migration, inter-marriage, ethnic cleansing or genocide – the way of the Americans, Albanian Kosovans, Galicians and the Zionazis.
That mess is intentional. Divide et impera. There are always idiots willing to betray their own kind for a handfull of dollars, or even just a promise coming from a foreign empire.
There are also those who, for whatever reason, genuinely do not feel that “their own kind” is after all their own kind.