It’s been more than eight months since the Russians invaded Ukraine, and the conflict is currently in yet another pause. This is an opportune time to try and take stock of what has happened over the course of this war so far, and this essay will focus specifically on Ukraine itself.
I think I should re-state my view that this war is a tragedy, one that I do not like at all, but one that was on the menu due to inevitable historical processes. I don’t harbour any ill will towards the peoples directly involved in this conflict on the ground, especially considering my closeness to West Ukrainians, a group that I sympathize with greatly. I am not fond of Ukraine’s political leadership, for the simple reason that I view their entire strategy as misguided at best, disastrous as worst. At the same time, I understand why they are doing what they are doing.
This conflict was inevitable because all nations seek to distance themselves from their former masters and/or occupiers in order to be able to stand on their own two feet, and to solidify their own unique identity by way of political and national independence. This is why I do not criticize the attitudes of Poles, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and others towards the Russians. They are all undergoing a natural process where historical wounds can only be healed with time.
Some Necessary Historical Background
(those of you who are well-versed in the details of this conflict can freely skip this portion -ed.)
One of the things that makes Ukraine somewhat unique is that it rests on a civilizational fault line, as per Samuel Huntington in ‘Clash of Civilizations’:
The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of
Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires.1
The inclusion of Galicia and Transcarpathia into the Ukrainian SSR ensured that, come independence, that tug westwards would be felt. It is no coincidence that the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism is in the former Habsburg Galicia, where proper Ukrainian is spoken, and where the Byzantine Catholic Church is strongest. It is here where the differences between Ukrainians and Russians are most easily perceived and felt.