Ukraine: The History Behind the War

Outside the walls of the Kremlin has stood, since two thousand sixteen, a massive statue of a man holding a cross. It's Prince Vladimir, the ruler who brought Christianity to the Eastern Slavs. Moscow presents him as its own founder. But there's a problem with that story: when Vladimir was baptized, Moscow didn't exist yet. He ruled from a city eight hundred kilometers to the southwest, on the banks of the Dnipro. Its name was Kyiv.

This contradiction isn't just a historical detail. It's the first chapter of a story that will repeat itself, again and again, for the next thousand years: who has the right to speak for this land, and who gets to decide what it means to be a distinct people.

Kyiv was founded around eight eighty-two AD by Scandinavian warriors who united Slavic tribes along the Dnipro. It became the capital of a state its people called "Rus'" — the root from which three distinct peoples would later emerge: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Moscow appears in the sources only in eleven forty-seven, nearly three centuries later, as an insignificant settlement in a remote corner.

In twelve forty, the Mongols destroyed Kyiv completely. The old Rus' fell apart, and its lands split onto two different paths. The northeastern principalities, centered on Moscow, slowly rebuilt themselves under Mongol influence, and would eventually give rise to the Russian Empire. The western and central Ukrainian lands passed to Lithuania and then to Poland, where the Orthodox population came under Catholic religious pressure and serfdom.

Out of that pressure the Cossacks were born — free warriors who took refuge in the steppes of the lower Dnipro, organized into military communities where they elected their own leaders. In sixteen forty-eight, the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a major uprising against Polish rule. He won, but he couldn't hold onto that victory alone. He needed an ally.

In sixteen fifty-four, at Pereyaslav, Khmelnytsky placed his Cossack state under the protection of the Tsar of Moscow. He asked for an alliance with autonomy. What he got, in the end, was something very different — and here, for the first time, appears the pattern that will define the next thousand years: a promise of autonomy, eroded slowly, until it disappears completely.

That erosion wasn't slow and invisible — it had its own violent moment too. Fifty-five years after Pereyaslav, the Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa decided the alliance with Moscow had become submission, and secretly allied with Sweden against Peter the Great. He was defeated at the Battle of Poltava in seventeen oh-nine. Peter didn't just punish Mazepa himself — he had his name excommunicated from the Orthodox Church and used it for centuries as a synonym for betrayal. Today, in Ukraine, Mazepa is a national hero. Two opposite memories of the same man, depending on who's telling the story.

Within a hundred twenty years, that autonomy was dismantled completely. In seventeen seventy-five, Catherine the Great militarily dissolved the Cossack community itself. Ukrainian lands became mere provinces of the Russian Empire, without even their own name — the official designation was "Malorossiya," Little Russia, a word that made perfectly clear what people were supposed to believe: that there was no distinct people, only a regional variation of the Russian one.

In the nineteenth century, as national movements woke up across Europe, the same idea returned as official policy. In eighteen sixty-three, a tsarist minister publicly declared that a separate Ukrainian language "never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist." Ukrainian books were banned. In eighteen seventy-six, a new decree banned even Ukrainian theater and music. The poet Taras Shevchenko, a former serf who wrote in Ukrainian about freedom and dignity, was exiled with explicit orders never to write another word.

A few hundred kilometers to the west, though, in Galicia, which then belonged to Austria-Hungary, none of this applied. There, Ukrainians could print books, open schools, found parties in their own language. Lviv became the spiritual heart of a national movement that, in the rest of Ukraine, was illegal. Two different experiences, within the same generation, would go on to shape the map of political loyalties a century later.

In nineteen seventeen, the collapse of the Russian Empire suddenly opened a window. Kyiv declared independence. But the young Ukrainian People's Republic found itself fighting simultaneously against Bolsheviks, monarchist White Russians — who didn't recognize Ukrainian independence either — and Poles. Within four years of chaos, independence was lost again. In nineteen twenty-two, Ukraine entered the newly formed Soviet Union, nominally as an "independent" republic.

The nineteen-thirties brought the deepest trauma in this entire history. Stalin decided to finance Soviet industrialization by exporting grain, and imposed on the empire's most fertile region, Ukraine, quotas so high they left the farmers themselves without enough food. When the farmers resisted, the regime set up military blockades around entire villages, so residents couldn't even leave to search for food elsewhere.

The result was called the Holodomor — death by hunger. Within a few months, in nineteen thirty-two and thirty-three, somewhere between three and a half and five million Ukrainians died of starvation. More than twenty countries, Greece among them, recognize it today as genocide — not a natural disaster, but a deliberate political choice that targeted the Ukrainian rural world specifically, at the very moment it was crushing every trace of national resistance. It is the deepest wound in modern Ukrainian memory — as heavy, for this people, as the memory of a holocaust is for others.

Eight years later, the same land became a battlefield between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia — what historian Timothy Snyder would later call the "Bloodlands." At Babyn Yar, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Nazi units executed thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one Jews in just two days. Ukraine lost a total of six to eight million people in the war — among the heaviest loss rates anywhere in Europe.

After the war, Moscow continued what it had started a century earlier, but under a gentler pretext: not outright bans anymore, but slow replacement. Russian became the language of power and science. Ethnic Russians were systematically relocated into Ukrainian industrial cities, especially in Donbas — a demographic shift that would weigh decisively seventy years later. In nineteen fifty-four, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic — at the time a minor administrative detail within the same country, but a decision that would become explosive the moment that country stopped existing.

At dawn on April twenty-sixth, nineteen eighty-six, a reactor at Chernobyl exploded. In the nearby town of Pripyat, fifty thousand people woke up and went on with their day as if nothing had happened — children played outside, families went for walks, while radioactive dust already hung in the air above them. Soviet authorities knew from the very first hours. They said nothing. The evacuation of the town was delayed more than thirty-six hours, and when it finally came, residents were told to bring only what they'd need for three days — as if they'd be home again soon. They never were.

The first official Soviet announcement came two full days later, on state television, and lasted less than a minute: a dry line about "an accident" at Chernobyl, with no mention of radiation, casualties, or scale. The regime didn't speak because it chose to — it spoke because Swedish monitoring stations, hundreds of kilometers away, had already detected unusual radiation levels in their own atmosphere and were demanding answers. The truth came out because it could no longer be hidden, not because anyone decided the world had a right to know.

Closer still, in Kyiv itself, barely a hundred kilometers from the smoking reactor, the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party made a decision: the annual May Day parade would go ahead as planned, five days after the explosion. This wasn't an independent Ukrainian choice — it was the decision of a local official inside a strictly centralized system, where canceling so symbolic a celebration without Moscow's approval would have meant publicly admitting that something had gone badly wrong. The Politburo itself, not just Kyiv, had spent decades building a culture in which no local leader dared be the first to spoil the image sent upward. Thousands of families, with their children, stood for hours under a sky no one had told them was dangerous.

Gorbachev himself admitted years later that Chernobyl, perhaps more than anything else, convinced Soviet citizens just how false the system itself was: a state that, faced with a choice between its citizens' safety and its own image, systematically chose the image.

Five years later, that system no longer existed. In the referendum of December first, nineteen ninety-one, ninety point three percent of Ukrainians voted for independence. The most important detail isn't the percentage itself, but where it came from: even in Donbas, support exceeded eighty-three percent. Even in Crimea itself, with its Russian-majority population, it passed fifty-four percent. There was no ambiguity in that result.

Three years later, Ukraine found itself, suddenly, holding the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, inherited from the Soviet Union. It handed all of it over to Russia, under the Budapest Memorandum of nineteen ninety-four: in exchange, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed a written commitment to respect its borders and sovereignty. It was the same deal, rewritten in modern terms: autonomy and security, in exchange for something precious handed over. Sixteen fifty-four all over again, with nuclear weapons instead of an army.

In two thousand four, two candidates ran for president with completely opposite directions: Viktor Yanukovych, openly backed by Moscow, and Viktor Yushchenko, who wanted closer ties with Europe. Shortly before the election, Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin — he survived, but his face was permanently disfigured, and no one was ever officially held responsible. The election was rigged in Yanukovych's favor, and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Kyiv wearing orange, the color of Yushchenko's campaign. The "Orange Revolution" forced the results to be annulled and a rerun held, which Yushchenko ultimately won. It was the first time Ukrainian society showed, peacefully and in an organized way, that it would no longer accept being silently overruled.

Yanukovych didn't disappear politically — he returned and was legitimately elected president in two thousand ten. Three years later, in two thousand thirteen, he faced a critical decision: Ukraine was set to sign an association agreement with the European Union, a step that would bring it closer to the West. Under heavy Russian pressure, Yanukovych refused at the last moment to sign it.

The reaction was immediate: thousands of protesters gathered in Kyiv's Maidan Square, demanding the country's European path be honored. Police responded with force, the protests dragged on for months, and more than a hundred protesters were killed in clashes in February two thousand fourteen. Yanukovych abandoned the country and fled to Russia. Within days, unmarked armed men seized key sites across Crimea — Russian soldiers, as later confirmed, though Moscow denied it at first. A referendum followed under military occupation, recognized by almost no other country, and formal annexation. The Budapest Memorandum, twenty years after it was signed, had just been openly violated.

That same spring, pro-Russian separatists, backed by heavy Russian military support that Moscow officially denied, seized parts of Donbas — precisely the region whose demographics had been deliberately altered decades earlier. The war that followed lasted eight years, with nearly fourteen thousand dead, before what we now call "the full-scale invasion" even began.

In July two thousand twenty-one, Vladimir Putin published a long essay titled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." Its argument was, in essence, the very same argument a tsarist minister had officially made one hundred fifty-eight years earlier: that no truly distinct Ukrainian people actually exists. Seven months later, on February twenty-fourth, two thousand twenty-two, Russian troops invaded Ukraine on multiple fronts.

The man who had to stand against this invasion wasn't a soldier — he was a former comedian who, until just a few years earlier, had been making people laugh. Volodymyr Zelensky had been elected president in two thousand nineteen, known mainly for having played, on television, a random teacher who accidentally becomes president — an irony no one imagined would turn out to be so real. On the first night of the invasion, with Russian forces closing in on Kyiv and death a real possibility, the United States offered him safe passage out. According to a US official who spoke to the Associated Press at the time, his response was something like: "I need ammunition, not a ride" — a line that instantly went around the world, even though its exact wording has never been officially confirmed.

What isn't in question, though, is the choice itself: Zelensky stayed. Every night since, he has stood in front of a camera and spoken to his people — the same habit of an actor who once played a president, now carrying the weight of a reality no one would have chosen.

The plan for a lightning takeover collapsed. The Russian army never managed to enter Kyiv, and when it finally withdrew from the northern suburbs, it left behind the evidence of what it had done: in the streets and gardens of Bucha, the bodies of civilians were found, many with their hands tied behind their backs. The war continues to this day — hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, millions of people driven from what was once their home, families scattered across three continents, not knowing when — or if — they'll return.

If you look back across this whole journey, you'll see the same shape repeating, again and again, like a scar that reopens every few generations: a promise of autonomy that erodes, a language someone decides isn't worth letting exist, a truth hidden so as not to disturb the order, a border someone promises to respect and then doesn't. It isn't the same person each time — Tsars, commissars, presidents, separated from each other by centuries. It's the same shape of power, returning in every generation wearing a new face, hunting down the same people all over again to erase them.

Ukraine's national anthem doesn't open with triumph. It opens with a denial, almost an oath clenched between the teeth: "Ukraine has not yet perished." It was written in eighteen sixty-two, inside the very empire that, a few years later, would officially ban the word "Ukraine" from even being printed in a book. A hundred sixty years later, that same line is being sung again — not at a concert, not at an official ceremony, but underground, in metro stations turned into shelters, among blankets and flashlights, with children singing it in trembling voices beside adults who don't know if their home will still be standing by morning.

It's no coincidence that the same phrase returns in every generation. It's the very meaning history refuses to let be forgotten: every time someone decided, with total certainty, that this people no longer exists, that people turned up there again, in the dark, singing — however quietly it had to, however much its voice trembled — the same unbroken refusal to disappear.