Pity the poor Ukrainians. Theirs is a vast country, fertile of soil and rich in minerals, wealthy in human capital and industrial resources, but forever caught at the crossroads between empires. Reading the Western media’s take on the recent political unrest, it is a Manichaean story of good versus evil: the freedom-loving Ukrainians versus the evil Soviet Russian puppets. The Russian media view it as the freedom-loving Ukrainians versus the evil fascist Western puppets. Neither is wrong.Ukraine, despite having only one government, isn’t really one nation. There is an ideal Ukrainian nation of Cossacks and
Taras Shevchenko, just as there is an idealized American nation of cowboys and George Washington, but Ukraine is at least two historical nations. The south and east are Russian-speaking and as far as I can tell have been part of Russia since the Cossack revolt from the
Polish-Lithuanian Empire in the 1600s. Western Ukraine has never been part of Russia. Before the
partition of Poland in the 1700s, it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. After that, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. West Ukraine’s city of Lviv used to be known as “Lemberg,” and it is as obviously an Austro-Hungarian city as Dallas is an American city.“Ukraine is at least two historical nations.”The people in the west of Ukraine used to be called “
Ruthenians.” Virtually all people in the west speak Ukrainian; in the far south and east, they mostly speak
Russian. The people in the west have different religions. While southern and eastern Ukraine are Orthodox under the
Moscow patriarchate, the west has pluralities of
Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the
two Orthodox
patriarchates which do not bow to Moscow.
During the Russian civil war, the west declared a nationalistic independent
republic, governed by the Rada in Kiev and allied with the Central Powers. The east almost immediately declared Soviet allied
socialist republics based in Karkov and
Donetsk. The
Polish-Ukrainian War put an end to the independence of western Ukraine in 1919, and the area west of Kiev remained Polish until Stalin and Hitler decided to carve up Poland in 1939. After the Nazi invasion of 1941, the heroic Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the west resisted the Nazis and the Soviets without any outside assistance right up to the
mid-1950s.
The “Orange Revolution” of 2004 followed this pattern. The porridge-faced hero of this “revolution,”
Yuschenko, is from a Ukrainian-speaking
region and is an ethnic Ukrainian, albeit one with a wife that worked for the US
State Department. The grim-faced Russian-favored villain
Yanukovych is from Donetsk in the east, the same city that declared for the Soviets in 1918. Yanukovych is not ethnically Ukrainian, being of Polish, Belarusian, and Russian ethnicities. Just to keep the history interesting, Yanukovych was appointed prime minister by Yuschenko in 2006 and later won a fair and democratic election in 2010, which is why he is in charge now, despite the Orange Revolution.
The present low-level civil war in Kiev is a continuation of battles that have gone on for centuries. The people freaking out in Kiev are predominantly Ukrainian-speaking and from the west. They wave
flags of the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army. The leaders of the people in the streets are from the west of Ukraine. Head of the
Tymoshenko party,
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is from
Chernivtsi in the southwest. Head of the nationalist
Svoboda party,
Oleh Tyahnybok, is from Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine. Gentleman boxer Vitali Klitschko is so Western-oriented, he lived in Germany until he got involved in Ukrainian politics and took up full-time residency in Kiev. The western cities of Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk have declared a general strike in favor of the protesters.
The people presently in charge of the country hail from the pro-Russian city of Donetsk. While the Donetsk bunch would prefer the nation remain nominally independent and would probably prefer to sign the EU trade agreement, they are spiritually Russian-oriented and rely on Moscow for political support. They have also been placed in an extremely difficult position. The Russians don’t want increased EU/American influence over Ukraine, seeing Ukraine as their “near abroad.” The EU wants glamorous jailbird
Yulia Tymoshenko out of the pokey as a precondition of the economic agreement, despite her being considered a criminal oligarch. While she obviously has her supporters, her former Orange Revolution ally Yuschenko not only testified against her in court, he’s also written
WSJ editorials denouncing her. The EU also wants complex legal reforms. The EU is offering Ukraine peanuts: 610 million euro of aid in return for taking on a 10-billion-euro loan, letting Tymoshenko out of jail, and radically transforming their legal system. The Russians are offering direct aid in the form of cheap gas, which is what the
EU loan would have been used for anyway.
Ukraine’s
GDP per capita is at $3,900/year. Influence is cheap in a country so poor. The Russians are obviously interfering in Ukraine’s political process. What is unsaid in the Western media is that so are the EU and the US State Department. The political system is so corrupt in Ukraine, nobody even bothers hiding it. The late pro-Western oligarch Boris Berezovsky
admitted to funding large parts of the “Orange Revolution” nine years ago.
Ukrainska Pravda, one of the bolder opposition newsletters, is
openly funded by the “National Endowment for Democracy,” a US-funded
NGO and instrument of the US State Department. The
Kyiv Post was founded by the American
FEMEN sugar daddy, Jed Sunden, and has been sold to British Ukrainian oligarch
Mohammad Zahoor. The US State Department actively solicits Ukrainian journalists who want to further American interests in Ukraine on their
website. Spooky
NGOs aren’t shy about it, either.
The choice between the EU and the Russians appears to be a choice between two sets of oligarchs, one of which also comes with the spectacle of gay parades and grouchy nekkid feminists. The country is divided as to whether it wants to be closer to Russia or the EU, with a plurality favoring the EU for now. If I were Ukrainian, I’d seriously consider “none of the above,” as 13% of those
polled did before the unpleasantness in Kiev.
nitter.net
