The legacy of the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union is one of the crucial factors for an understanding and an explanation of current affairs in the post-Soviet space. This is especially true for Ukraine and for Russian–Ukrainian relations. Russia regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit, while many Ukrainians want to liberate themselves from the Russian hegemony, and advocate a closer cooperation with the European Union.
Historical perspective
Both Russians and Ukrainians share the same ancestry dating back over a millennium, especially Kiev/Kyiv (‘Kiev’ will be used further in article), the current capital for Ukraine, is the historic home to the first eastern Slavic state in history. ‘Rus’ is a Slavic term used to refer to red-haired Scandinavians who arrived as ‘Vikings’ to conquer the indigenous Slavic population who swept down from the north in 9th century and established this medieval empire making Kiev its capital.
The birthplace of both modern nation-state – Russia and Ukraine – traces their roots back to the first Slavic state, Kievan Rus, which stretched from Baltic to the Black Sea from the 9th century to the mid-13th century.
The pagan prince of Novgorod and grand prince of Kiev, Vladimir I, accepted the Orthodox Christian faith, and was baptized in the Crimean city of Chersonesus. Thus, the Eastern Orthodox Christianity became the official state religion of the Kievan Rus that was officially adopted in A.D. 998 by laying the foundation of modern Russian Church. From that moment on, Russian leader Vladimir Putin recently declared, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole.” Putin wrote an article last year titled, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, and he argues that “Russian and Ukraine are one people” and calls them “essentially the same historical and spiritual space”. It is on this conflict-ridden land that people from both the nations built their national identities as such Kiev holds a colossal significance.
In the 13th century, Kiev was attacked and devasted by Mongol invaders from the east which resulted in the power shift north to a small Rus trading outpost called Moscow. Again, in the 16th century, Polish and Lithuanian armies invaded from the west. In the following century, war between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tsardom of Russia brought lands to the east of the Dnieper River under Russian imperial control. Hence, the east became known as "Left Bank" Ukraine; lands to the west of the Dnieper, or "Right Bank," were ruled by Poland.
In the year 1793, right bank (western bank) Ukraine was further annexed by Russian Tsarist Empire which introduced coercive policies to subvert the Ukrainian culture, identity, history and language. The use and study of the Ukrainian language was banned in schools under the policy known as ‘Russification’, and further people were pressured to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith. The czars referred to their dominion as "little Russia" and tried to crush surging Ukrainian nationalism in the 1840s. The geography of Ukraine has repeatedly been carved up by competing powers from over the past 10 centuries, consequently, changing the narratives of history of Ukraine whose dire consequences are visible in today’s war-torn country.
Post-Russian Revolution
Following the collapse of the Tsarist Russian Empire and Austro-Hungarian empires during the World War I, the state of Ukraine declared independence in Kiev in 1917. The communist revolution in Russia in the same year had severe consequences for independent-Ukraine as new country was invaded by Poland and fought with the forces loyal to the Moscow’s new Bolshevik government in the brutal civil war.
By the time Ukraine again incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1922, the Ukrainian economy was in tatters with its populace starving. This was further aggravated by the Joseph Stalin’s orchestrated mass executions and man-made famine that killed up to 10 million Ukrainians in 1930s popularly known as Holodomor or terror-famine. Afterward, Stalin imported large numbers of Russians and other Soviet citizens — many with no ability to speak Ukrainian and with few ties to the region — to help repopulate the coal and iron-ore rich east.
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Post-Cold War
Ukraine became an independent nation again with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, along with the other Union republics. The remaining centre was reduced to the territory of the former Russian Federal Soviet Republic, whose territory corresponded roughly to the Muscovite state in the middle of the 17th century.
To maintain the hegemony of Kremlin over the free republics, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established, but the Russian society and the Russian politicians were shocked when they realised that CIS did not become, as expected, the successor of the Soviet Union headed by Russia.
For Russian political class, it was hard to digest the Ukrainian independence as their imagination does not allow them to accept the fact that Ukraine can be a separate nation. The Ukrainian government, representing people, aimed at the maintenance and extension of state's sovereignty and at relations with Russia on the basis of equality.
"The biggest divide after all these factors is between those who view the Russian imperial and Soviet rule more sympathetically versus those who see them as a tragedy," says Adrian Karatnycky, a Ukraine expert and former fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States. These fissures were laid bare during the 2004 Orange Revolution, in which thousands of Ukrainians marched to support greater integration with Europe.
On ecological maps, you can even see the divide between the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine — known as the steppes — with their fertile farming soil and the northern and western regions, which are more forested, says Serhii Plokhii, a history professor at Harvard and director of its Ukrainian Research Institute. He says a map depicting the demarcations between the steppe and the forest, a diagonal line between east and west, bears a "striking resemblance" to political maps of Ukrainian presidential elections in 2004 and 2010.
These legacies of history created lasting fault lines because eastern Ukraine came under Russian rule much earlier than western Ukraine. People in the east have stronger ties to Russia, and have been more likely to support Russian-leaning leaders. Western Ukraine, by contrast, spent centuries under the shifting control of European powers such as Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire — one reason Ukrainians in the west have tended to support more Western-leaning politicians. The eastern population tends to be more Russian-speaking and Orthodox, while parts of the west are more Ukrainian-speaking and Catholic.
The question of the approximately 8 million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine (17% of its population), and of the about 50% of Ukrainian citizens with Russian as their first language is a major bone of contention between Putin and Ukraine.
The Russian speaking population is concentrated in the cities of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, that too, due to forced migration in the Stalin-era. About 3 million Ukrainians live in Russia, being the second largest ethnic minority after the Tatars. The Russian government tried to instrumentalise the ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians for political purposes, while the Ukrainian government rarely mentions the Ukrainian minority in Russia.
Conclusion
Many Russians, and especially the political elites, are suffering from the lost status as a great power. There is a wide-spread nostalgia for the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, even for the totalitarian Stalinist regime. These tendencies became stronger under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. So, one main goal of Russia's foreign policy is keeping the regions of the former empire under its hegemony. Russia tries to control the post-Soviet space, designated as “near abroad”, and to restrict the sovereignty of the former Soviet republics by interfering into their inner affairs. Russia had to recognise that the Baltic States were lost, but Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Belarus, and Ukraine are regarded as parts of the Russian orbit.
Again, Ukraine is the most important and disputed region. Russia fears a complete separation of Ukraine from Russia and its entrance into the European Union and the NATO. As already in tsarist Russia, this is regarded as a threat for Russia's position as a great power, and a threat for the Russian nation imagined again as an Orthodox “all-Russian” nation.
So, the asymmetry of the relationship persists until today. Russia exerts considerable economic and political pressure to keep Ukraine in its imperial strategic realm and tries to prevent the integration of Ukraine to EU and NATO. As already mentioned, this problem is on today’s political agenda.