The War in Ukraine Today and Yesterday

The history of what is now Ukraine shows that it was divided between Russia and Poland. One year after the country’s struggle for survival against Russia’s aggression, it finds Poland among its strongest supporters. While Turkey pretends to be a mediator and tilts towards its historic enemy Russia. Geopolitics has the power to confuse history.

Geopolitics can be confused by history. Leaders latch onto their own versions of history to marshal in support of their aims—whether self-defense, conquest, or opportunism—although not every version withstands evidentiary scrutiny equally. Comparing competing histories gives you a better understanding of both the stakes and the limits of your power.

Consider Ukraine’s incorporation to the Russian Empire. It is often dated back to 1654. Is there a Ukrainian state, or was it a Cossack military unit on a portion of the territory that now makes up Ukraine? Hetman Bohdan Khamelnytsky, the Cossack leader and state, accepted Russia’s legalization of Moscow’s annexes. Or did he only seek to form a temporary military alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against which the Cossacks were fighting?

These questions are often answered by nationalism, which is projected onto an era before modern countries existed.

We know for certain that the 1654 agreement required the Hetman and other high-ranking officials and clergy to swear an oath to the tsar and that this sparked a larger war between Russia and Poland over these coveted lands. Multiyear hostilities ended in treaties whereby Poland ceded to Russia its claims to the Cossack Hetmanate, the eastern lands across the Dnipro River, and the mother city of Kyiv. Eastern Ukraine was under Russian rule while Western Ukraine developed under Polish control.

To erase what he deemed the centuries of Ukrainian divergence under Russian influence, the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, advised Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to obtain Russia’s capitulation in the very location—Pereyaslav—where the Cossack Hetman had signed the 1654 agreement with representatives of the Russian tsar. Russian president Vladimir Putin, for his part, included Zaporizhzhia—the homeland of the Cossack Hetman which Duda regretted losing out on—among the four regions of Ukraine that he declared eternally Russian territory.

We should also mention that on the 300th anniversary for Pereyaslav’s death, 1954, Nikita Khrushchev unilaterally transferred Crimea to the Soviet Ukraine from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Many people believed that he was trying his best to heal his injuries as the ex-commander of the Communist party in Kyiv.

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