Ukraine and Russia: Prelude to War

– Welcome to University Place Presents. I’m Norman Gilliland. A civil war, a war of secession, a culture war, or simply a war of aggression. By any name, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, a country that was independent, had been for some 30 years. What were the goals of the Russians? And in response to them, what was the goal of the Ukrainians, and how did it all come about? How avoidable were the tens of thousands of casualties, both military and civilian? With me is David McDonald, professor of history at the UW-Madison, and welcome back to University Place Presents.

– Thanks, Norman. Great to be back.

– One of the pictures we see most often in one form or another is the vast destruction in Ukraine. And what steps led up to this?

– Well, Norman, a lot of steps led up to it, depending on when you wanna start. But in the medium-term, I would say, if you wanna see when the fuse was lit, you might go to 2004 with the Orange Revolution so-called, that saw the sitting government or the elected government at the time obliged to initiate a reelection in a very hotly contested electoral campaign, in which the losing candidate at first ultimately won, and put in President Putin a certain apprehension about the spread of so-called color revolutions. There was a Rose Revolution in Georgia. There was a Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. There were various revolutions in the former Yugoslavia, violent overthrows of power, the same in Kyrgyzstan of all places. But Ukraine was particularly sensitive. And I think you can start tracing Putin’s specific thought towards Ukraine to those events in 2004.

– Quite a contrast though, between, let’s say, the planners of these two wars.

– Oh, very much so. We know, or we’ve got a pretty good idea that the Russians and the great, great many of us in the West and elsewhere around the world expected a pretty easy victory for Russian forces, which after all seemed to outnumber them, seemed to have much more ordinance at their disposal than the Ukrainian army. I think people did not take the Ukrainian armed forces very seriously. There were serious differences in access to air power and to certain types of defense. And then this column whose officers, the armored column going along the road from Kharkiv to Kyiv, from south of Kharkiv to Kyiv, they found themselves bogged down in what, in a version of what Russians called rasputitsa, the roads dissolved under the thaw and the rain in the late winter. And these forces whose officers had been told to pack their dress uniforms for the handover ceremony in Kyiv.

– Norman: Victory parade.

– And a victory play. All of a sudden found themselves stranded and actually targets for a pot shooting expedition by Ukrainian militias and regular forces.

– And if we just look at the planners themselves, the contrast there between, you know, the well-dressed, well-heeled.

– David: Absolutely.

– Norman: Military uniform on the one hand, and then Zelenskyy, whom we’ve never seen outside of basically fatigues.

– David: Fatigues, yes. Who’s also speaking to his countrymen every night. No, with the planners, again, since this initial stalemate in the conflict, we start seeing pot shots from both above and below at these planners. The head of the Wagner Group, this guy named Prigozhin, lavishes public criticism on the defense minister, Shoigu. There’s a lot of evidence that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself took sole charge of figuring out the strategy of the attack. And in Ukraine, they’ve tended to try and maximize what strategic or tactical superiorities they have, plus knowing the territory, knowing Soviet tactics or post-Soviet tactics, and having received a good deal of training from their NATO friends. So it’s an interesting contrast in capabilities and in resolve.

– Before we go back in time and look at kind of the development, let’s say, of Ukrainian national identity, a little bit about Zelenskyy.

– David: Yeah, sure.

– Native speaker of Ukrainian.

– Yeah, no, no, he’s from, there are large parts of Ukraine that are originally Russian-speaking. We know Donbas best, but if you go down the area immediately between south of that, between Donbas and the Crimea, it’s also, it’s called New Russia and it was settled by peasants, many whom identify as Russian and as orthodox. So even when you’re listening to NPR or BBC or CBC broadcasts of refugees from the area, you’ll often hear Russian-speaking locals who are swearing at Russian citizens and Russian soldiers for the, what the atrocities they say they’re committing. So no, there’s not a unitary Ukrainophone population in the borders of Ukraine. And yet thinking, what were they planning or what were they hoping for? I think there was a strong expectation in Moscow that these people would wrap, would embrace liberation from fellow members of what Putin has called the Russian world instead. And they saw a grievously divided country. They’ve all come together and under this figure, Zelenskyy, who most people know as the lead figure in a very popular TV series called Servant of the People. And he runs for, and he see, it’s sort of like the same reactions that Ronald Reagan got when he first ran for president. And he turns out, actually, people in audiences I’ve spoken to, who know more about these things or have paid a lot more attention than I have, I confess, to these things, they referred me to sources that demonstrate quite persuasively. This was a very capable businessman who ran quite well-developed business empire, entertainment empire, and he’s used to managing complex problems. And he’s shown himself remarkably adaptable to, and adept at the role he’s being asked to play. And he has done a very good job, very powerful job, mobilizing not only the Ukrainian population, despite its own divisions, less real in some aspects than might have seemed to President Putin. But he’s also persuaded Western powers to back his cause despite certain amounts of hesitation, whether it’s from parts of American political spectrum, Germans, who are very reluctant to reclaim a certain identity that is a stain upon their historical path. But to me, the most striking things are Finland and Sweden asking to join NATO, and Sweden, especially neutral, like, neutral at great cost since 1815. And Finland, which had been enjoined to neutrality by a treaty in 1955 to afford the Soviets a buffer.

– And of course, Finland did have a history with Russia.

– David: They had.

– An invasion in the ’30s.

– Well, not just the ’30s; they’d been a province. The Grand Duchy of Finland had been brought into– brought in is a very nice way of putting it, into the Russian empire by Alexander the First in 1809. And they’d been allowed to function under their own laws and under a governor-general until 1917, when the empire falls apart and they gradually win their independence. But even then, they had grown to know the Russians. The Finnish president had very friendly relations with Putin. And that’s all gone. Like I, that’s, you see, when. . . I’ve always jibbed at the idea of “the West” because I think it’s a sort of black box way of talking about an area that’s very diverse.

– Yes.

– But in this instance, it’s amazing how quickly a NATO that we once thought was fractured has pulled together and how to a surprisingly large extent, given the polarized state of American politics, how strong support still is for the assistance and considerable assistance being rendered Ukraine.

– One of the mileposts along the way, I’m guessing, as to how this war came to be: Putin’s miscalculations.

– It’s a continuation of a long history of miscalculations that I think from the Russian point of view, there’s been a way of looking at Ukraine, well, in a way that Vladimir Putin put it last summer, saying along with Belarus, Ukraine really is an indivisible part of Russian statehood and Russian identity. And the word in Russian you can use, there’s an old Russian word, adjective for the empire, and you see it in some Soviet titles as well, the Rossiisky as opposed to the Russky, which means an ethnic Russian. Rossiisky just refers to a citizen or subject of a Russian state or of a great Russian state. And Putin’s view, which actually echoes an argument, set of arguments made in a series of speeches by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he returned to Russia after 1991, is that Russia and Belarus and Ukraine share a thousand years of heritage, share a religious legacy, share all sorts of cultural touchstones, whether it’s Nikolai Gogol, or other authors that are part of the Russian literary canon, and that their differences are very minor. Now, Ukrainians will argue in turn that they’ve been arguing since before the 19th century, but with particular effect since the 19th century, that they constitute a discrete national culture that has certain affinities with the Russian culture, but is not the same. And we see this put forth by the great poet, Taras Shevchenko.

– Norman: Certain spokesman for that cause here that we’re seeing.

– Yeah, and just like a lot of societies in Eastern Europe, I can think of historians in what we now call the Czech Republic or in Slovakia or Yugoslavia. These guys, Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo Drahomanov and Hrushevsky argue that Ukraine has a separate tradition, its people have a separate consciousness, and implicitly, they deserve to form their own nation state, which they did momentarily under the chaotic conditions of the civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution. And then they disappear as a nation, as that kind of nation in the early ’20s.

– But along the way, presumably there were Russian, Soviet, if you want to call it that, efforts to Sovietize, Russify Ukraine.
– Oh, very much. We say under the Russian Empire, Alexander the Second issues an Ems decree, which bans the use of Ukrainian in certain settings and refuse to recognize Ukrainian as a language. In the late 1920s, as Stalin was establishing this control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there becomes great concern over incipient Ukrainian separatism or overemphasis on Ukrainian nationality at the cost of Soviet patriotism. And so they deukrainize the party, which is a euphemism for all sorts of other things. And we see the elevation of Russian speakers to high levels, high positions in the party. But for Ukrainians, they will focus on Holodomor and what they consider the systematic and genocidal starvation of Ukrainian peasants during the collectivization campaigns of the early 1930s at a cost of millions of lives and horrible, horrible incidents in the forced collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture.

– Was that collectivization under Stalin primarily?

– Yes; yeah, exclusively.

– And was that essentially an ethnic arrangement, or were Russians affected in great numbers also?

– I think in Ukraine, it was particularly focused, and then a lot of historians will argue it was ethnic. When I look at the. . . But there, elsewhere in the Soviet Union that they experienced similar deprivation or certain want, but not the same loss of life. But the North Caucasus, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan where there was a natural, certain natural conditions combined to bring famine to a nomadic population of the livestock on which they depended. But Ukraine, it resonated with particular force, certainly stronger than Kazakhstan. And a particular force sustained by a diaspora that coalesced after World War II to maintain and commemorate that, what they consider that atrocity.

– We’ll look at that diaspora a little bit later. How similar are the languages? Russian and Ukrainian, mutually intelligible?

– Mostly mutually intelligible. They all can. . . You’ll hear more Russian spoken in Ukraine simply because Russian was the language of education for generations in Ukraine. They used the word Russification before, another policy that dates to imperial times. Historians dispute what that actually means. But there is no question there was a strong consensus among Russian educated classes that Russian was the language of educated exchange, was the language of the academy. It was the only international language, despite evidence from various other diasporas in the Soviet population. But it certainly was the language of advancement in the party and all the other meaningful institutions. So it was pretty easy to think of Ukraine. . . You didn’t have to meet the problem of mutual intelligibility. I know when I took Russian at school in Canada in university, a lot of my friends were Ukrainians who went into it thinking it would be a doddle because they’re so close, and they found out how distant the two languages are. And so you get, well, so you get more of an overlap than English does with Dutch or German, but more like Spanish and French or

– Really? So it’s still pretty distant.

– Yeah, yeah.

– Let’s look at a map and that’ll give us some idea of how Ukraine as a current entity was pieced together. What are we looking at?

– David: Well, what we now call Ukraine starts off as this, and a lot of this. . . Putin writes this essay in the summer of 2022. Well, Putin has people write it probably, and he wants to talk about the deep historical continuities between conjures of city-states we call Kyiv Rus’, because Kyiv was the capital. Rus’ was the name that the territory and the people acquire in the chronicle we use to understand what was going on then. But these, it was actually a string of towns that grew up on Dnieper or Dnipro River on what they call the road from the Varangians, Vikings in the north, to the Greeks, which is Byzantium, Constantinople. And they. . . And Viking mini-dynasties set themselves up in these towns at the quote, unquote, invitation of the populations that the chronicle insists. And they’re all mutually related, and it’s they who accept Christianity. And so we see the Orthodox Church establishes an extremely important part of East Slavic, we can say, culture. And then, after about 1200, 1300, well, we get the Mongol invasions in the 1230s. And it has incredible effect on the states in the areas. Kyiv falls in the edge, or Kiev falls on the edge of Mongol control, which is really focused on north central Russia. Now, Russian historians in the 19th century will tell us, well, we can tell by the appearance in the chronicle of all these new cities, there’s a huge northern migration out of the dangers of the prairie, the steppe, and into the protection of the forested area and the protection of these increasingly powerful princes. We do know that the old Silk Road, which used to go along the north shore of the Black Sea, and that tends to wither. Trade goes until the Mongols established strong control. And we see trade go on a maritime basis under South Asia and into the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, or goes north along the Volga route and into the Baltic.

And you see, but they posit this mass migration as that’s how Ukrainians become Russians. But there’s more and more evidence to suggest, no, it wasn’t like that, but the Southern Prairie becomes the playground for groups called Cossacks, who are freebooters, but also do farming and also have peasants. And what we think of as modern Ukraine starts taking shape among these bands who profess Orthodoxy, but also sell their services to the king of Poland as border guards or the Muscovite tsar as border guards, or make their own living plundering caravans as they go along the way in the hunting season.

– So really a very cosmopolitan hunk of geography that is. . .
– David: Oh, sure, yeah.

– . . . Ukraine today.

– Yeah, even at the time, those areas become borderlands. Those in your audience who’ve read Richard White on the borderlands area around the lake head of Lake Superior and all the cultures that overlap and intermix there. This is an original and very long-lived borders land that only starts to take different shape as Poland, Russia, Muscovite Russia, and the Ottoman Empire advance into this vacuum, doing what power does when it confronts a vacuum. But these Cossacks form a really important role in the crystallization of what comes to be remembered as Ukrainian distinctness. And so we get a series of hetman there. Hetman are their warlords. You get Bohdan Khmelnitskyi, who enjoys the rights of a Polish nobleman for selling his. . . And there’s a list of Cossack officers who get treated as noble in Polish law, but he leads a revolt against the Poles for many reasons, including the Polish want him to convert to Catholicism. And it’s in the 17th century, it’s the height of the counter, what we call the counter of the Catholic Reformation. And Khmelnitskyi’s not gonna do it, plus, the Cossacks prize their independence. And so Khmelnitskyi concludes, in order to get out from Polish pressure, Cossacks in Khmelnitskyi’s area, conclude an agreement with representatives of the Muscovite tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich, and they agree to accept his protection, but on the condition that they maintain their autonomy, they conduct their own foreign policy, they rule themselves by their own laws, but they will do the tsar’s bidding. Well, when you’re talking to an absolute ruler who’s divinely ordained. . .

– It’s hard to make a compromise.

– And drawing lines is hard, and getting people to accept agreements is hard. And it suits the Muscovites fine. Now, they’re not being cynical. I think it’s just a clash of mutual understandings and assumptions. The Cossacks are thinking like Polish noblemen and like Cossacks, and the Muscovites are thinking like Muscovites, because orthodoxy is key to them. So by the late 17th century, Muscovite, the Muscovy, soon to be Imperial Russia, has already abrogated a lot of these agreements in the eyes of the Cossacks. But in exchange has given the Cossacks in its service the same type of privilege that nobles elsewhere in Russia would enjoy. Not quite like Polish rights, but still. But there’s still a lot of ill feelings. So Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack leader and an intimate of Peter the Great’s, betrays Peter in the course of the Great Northern War against Sweden by switching to the side of the Swedish king, who has promised him the ability to create an independent state. And he loses out the epic Battle of Poltava, crosses into Poland, and there has his court publish a Codex Ruthe Norm, the Code of the Ruthenians, and it’s for a Ukrainian state.

– So that’s the really, the genesis of this concept of Ukraine.

– Certainly, many modern historians would say so. It’s hard to say because we. . . A lot of Ukrainians at the time, especially from Kyiv, which goes into the Russian Empire or the Muscovy in the late 17th century, we see a striking migration of senior clerics, Orthodox clerics from Kyiv. But unlike their Russian counterparts, they’ve been in contact with neighboring Polish Jesuits. Feofan Prokopovich has gone to study in Rome and has studied in a lot of German Protestant seminaries and comes to Russia, and under Peter, reforms the Orthodox Church, quite radically for the time, taking German Lutheran state churches as his model. There’s a memoir by a noble from the time who notes that. . . He’s a disgraced noble who’s writing his memoirs. And he notes that when he went to school in St. Petersburg, people made fun of his accent ’cause Ukrainians, even when they speak Russian, and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had the same accent, they have a lot of sounds that are like Ukrainian sounds. The way they say certain vowels, the way they pronounce “gya” as “ha,” and they would always call him Khokhol, which is the top knot that the Ukrainian Cossacks had. And so there is some sense of their difference as late as the 1760s. And the commission that Catherine the Great convenes, we see Cossack leaders who were good nobles and loyal nobles asking to be regranted the rights their grandfathers had enjoyed under the agreement of Pereyaslav. They want to recreate something, but it’s unclear whether they wanna be independent or whether they wanna be autonomous within Russian state.

– What is Little Russia?

– That’s certainly to a lot of Ukrainians and certainly to a lot of Ukrainians abroad, Little Russia is seen as a derogatory term that sort of scants any claim to any type of identity for Ukrainians. Part of me wants also to suggest that it’s a way of talking about, there’s Velikaya Rossiya, which is Great Russia, and Great Russians, Velikorossy, are people who live in Great Russia. It’s territorial. Belarus is White Russia; it’s just like lower New Jersey. [Norman laughs] No, not, I’m not saying it’s like, just saying it’s using a designation like that. And Malorussia, I think that a lot of people interpret it as just a Little Russia. It’s not like Little Korea or Little Scotland or whatever. It’s just a way of, it’s purely geographical, just like the area to the south, New Russia, which modern-day Russian nationalists and separatists have made great hay with. New Russia was itself just an area for, it’s like Nova Scotia, New Scotland, right? Or New Zealand. These are just territories that were seen as terras neues, and were settled by inhabitants from other parts of the empire as newly prized territory. So I think people overreact to Malorussia, but I’m not one of the people overreacting. They’re reacting so they might argue otherwise.

– As we get into the late 19th into the early 20th century, into the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War and all of that, how does Ukraine play?

– Well, there’s lots of Ukraines. Coming out of 1905 when the idea of Ukraine seems possible, there are those who just want greater national autonomy within the Russian Empire, but they’d like a constitutional democracy as well. There are others who are socialists and wanna lie with the Bolsheviki. There are others who see themselves as Mensheviks. There’s a large population that doesn’t really care; they just want to be able to eat. One of the striking features that I think we often lose sight of is that with a lot of these nationalisms under empire, we get conflicting visions of what it ought to be. Some visions of Ukrainianism are quite antisemitic. Others are very cosmopolitan, inclusive, and federalist. So, and we see a lot of that create the tensions that make Ukraine more vulnerable during the Civil War. But they do manage to gain recognitions from the German and Austro-Hungarian governments at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the fall of, in the spring of 1918. And. . .

– An attempt maybe to break off some of the Russian Empire?

– Partly that, partly ’cause they had a lot of food. They were

– Grain.

– Yeah, lots of grain. And the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians desperately needed it and were willing to. . . And there was possibility of getting territory, and there was possibility of getting access to the Black Sea. So there were a lot of strategic benefits that Ukraine offered. But with the ultimate defeat of the central powers by November 1918, or they would say their ceasefire, Ukraine becomes very vulnerable and very divided. You’ve got warlords in the south, you’ve got Cossack independent operators, you’ve got four different changes in government in a quick period of time, and huge vulnerability against a much larger and better equipped Red Army.

– Ukraine’s involvement in the war as part of the Soviet state, but under what terms did Ukraine actually become part of the Soviet Union?

– The Bolsheviks finally argue, and argue militarily and successfully that Ukraine, they’ll recognize Ukraine national identity, but socialists do not become bourgeois nationalists. So they want to be in solidarity with their neighboring socialists and right-thinking people.

– International movement.

– Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. And they find people in Ukrainian politics who agree with them. And so the Soviets, having conquered other parts of, or reintegrated, they would say, other parts of Russia and Sovietized them. Ukraine becomes also part of the Soviet Union, in the course of which, they find attached to them new provinces in the east, the Donbas and Kharkiv, which have tremendous economic advantages. The iron and steel industry, the coal mining industry. The map shows that we only see, interestingly, the most militant area source for Ukrainian nationalism as we’d recognize it was only part of Ukraine as of 1939 and ’45. They stay after as Galicia, Halychyna, which had been Austro-Hungarian province. So the city we call Lviv now or Lww in Polish or Lvov in Russian or Lemberg or Leopolis in German was really a province of Habsburg Poland, but was also an area where the Habsburg government encouraged Ukrainian nationalist writers to produce materials and send them into Russia. But Hrushevsky lives in Lviv, and there are a series of very famous intellectuals and writers in Lviv that gained big followings in Ukraine. They only joined in the Second World War as a result of the Nazi Soviet Pact in part.

And they become, under the Soviets, the biggest thorn in the Soviets’ side in terms of the Ukrainian nationalism. There’s a very good historian at the University of Georgia who has written on this and has become Lww under the, or Lviv under the Soviets has become a real source of interest among modern historians of Ukraine.

– So Ukrainians during World War II were not that invested in the Soviet cause?

– It depends who you’re asking ’cause there were many types of Ukrainians. Obviously, there was a large Ukrainian Jewish population, and they suffer enormously. They’re one of the most concentrated sites of Holocaust victims in the Jewish population of Europe. Others, and it’s become a bone of contention and a pretext in the current war, others side with the Nazis and form regiments to fight on the side of the Nazis or join the SS and enjoy a notorious roles as camp guards, and often particularly brutal. They defend themselves by saying the Nazis are awful, but they’re not as bad as Stalin.

– So there actually is an argument as we jump forward, just for a moment.

– Yes.

– For characterizing Ukraine almost any way you want from, you know, democracy-loving to Nazi-inclined.
– Absolutely. Well, you know, you were mentioning earlier how it had this crossroads aspect that goes back to the Middle Ages or late antiquity. And this might, one might argue this is a continuing reflection of it, that there are all sorts of currents, political, intellectual, religious, right? That aside from Judaism, there’s a small Muslim population. There’s a huge conflict, religious and institutional between what the newspapers call Greek Catholic. But where again, where I grew up in Canada, we would say Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian or Greek or Russian Orthodox churches, and it involves property, it involves liturgy, it involves allegiances, it involves identities. And yet, on one level they’ll all agree, yes, we’re Ukrainians, but then when it gets down to cases, then you see differences. And we see this most distinctly, one of the oldest monasteries in Orthodox Christianity in the East Slavs is the Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, and it turns out a lot of the monks there are pro-Russian and the state is trying to find ways to crack down on them.

– You mentioned earlier both Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

– David: Brezhnev, yeah.

– Being, were they ethnic Ukrainian or were they from the Russian part of Ukraine?

– They’re actually born in Russia, but from the 1880s on, the work is in the Don basin. And so, but then you get assimilated into local culture, and Khrushchev, he deeds Crimea to Ukraine because he feels a loyalty. He’d come up in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He spoke Ukrainian; that wasn’t his native language, but he was born in a Russian family. But he identified with. . . That’s where he’d spent World War II, which was a baptism by fire for a lot, those ones who had survived the purges, this was their baptism by fire. And so, and Brezhnev, it’s hard to say what Brezhnev felt, especially late in his life. I don’t even think he knew what he felt. But he certainly identifies with the area. It’s seen as one of the great cradles of the Bolshevik Party and its growth during the 1920s ’cause these are working class kids who made it big in the party.

– With Khrushchev deeding, I guess would be the word, Crimea to Ukraine.

– David: Yeah.

– Didn’t really matter, did it? If you go on the assumption that it’s all part of the Soviet Union.

– Precisely, precisely. And it’s one of the. . . This is another element in an argument that Putin uses. That why do we consider, you know, we all consider the communists, you Westerners and I both thought the communists were daft and illegitimate, but for some reason we take borders that they drew more seriously than the borders that should have existed. And why are you defending those borders? And that’s not a totally irrefutable argument, but it’s got its own opportunistic strain in it as well. But it’s not an unreasonable thing to at least draw to people’s attention.

On the Nazi charge, definitely. In some of the later demonstration, particularly in the Maidan in ’13 and ’14, we see brigades named after the collaborationist leaders in the Ukrainian underground during World War II, the pro-Nazi underground. But it’s very hard to believe there was more than 7% of the activists involved belonging to these brigades.

– Ukraine during the Cold War as part of the Soviet Union got nuclear weapons.

– Yes, they had them; they had weapons stationed on their territory. And as in the case of. . . It’s really hard to figure out what their national status was, except defacto; the finders, keepers will rule kick in, or possession is nine-tenths of the law. These stations were, these missiles were stationed on Ukrainian territory, as were some in Kazakhstani territory, another republic, former republics. And the Western allies, particularly the United Kingdom and Great Britain, joined with the post-Soviet Russian government to. . . In a so-called document called the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine will oblige itself to surrender its nuclear weapons in return for British and American insurances that they would defend their territory. Now, some people interpreted that as guarantee. I did, until I went back and looked at it more and more closely. There is no mechanism for the enforcement of the agreement or the violation of sovereignty that is mentioned in the agreement, the sanctity of sovereignty and territorial boundaries, and that Russia obliges itself to accept that. But there’s no mechanism for actions should Russia, in some case, decide to ignore that provision.

And at the time, you know, and I confronted this as a historian of Russia, giving a lot of public speeches to audiences in Wisconsin and around the country. And the one refrain would be, “Well, who cares about Russia anymore? Russia’s a done deal.”

– Norman: Yeah.

– And I think

– A little bit of a miscalculation there.

– Well, and I think Allied diplomats might have made a miscalculation. They didn’t appear on their actuarial chart as a possibility.

– Which side was it? Was it the Gorbachev side or was it the Western side that made that provision about giving up the nuclear weapons?

– This wasn’t even Gorbachev anymore. This was the Yeltsin government. And I think the West was concerned about rogue nukes with the, again, there were concerns about growing terrorism. There were huge concerns about all this nuclear ordinance lying around without, with very

– Norman: Little control.
– Control, and the knowledge of a growing underground black market in any kind of contraband weaponry. So I think there was serious concern. The concern was with the nukes, and Russia was seen as the custodian of them because they had the expertise and they had the facilities, and the Russian government acceded to an inspection, set of inspection protocols that were far more rigorous than anything that had been possible under the, during the Cold War. So I think the Allies took some solace in that. But you know, when we see what happens with Crimea or we see what happens with other areas, or Donbas after 2014, it makes the Budapest agreement look a little bit naive. Although the big result was undeniably that you eliminated a large part of a potential threat of nuclear spread, proliferation.

– Would Russia have invaded Ukraine if those nukes were still there?

– That’s a good question. The counterfactual like that, [chuckles] part of me wants to say Ukraine had so many other preoccupations during those years, they wouldn’t have had the time to maintain the weapons. They might’ve become non-functional. I don’t think. . . I don’t think that’s why Putin did or didn’t invade. I think it was more the type of society that Ukraine was becoming and how it clashed with his vision and what Russia should become in the context of a changing global security situation, so.

– Norman: I wanted to look at this headline though, because it did seem to be a real historical turning point, didn’t it?

– David: It was, it was. It was surprising that I think a lot of Russians thought of Ukraine as true-blue. And then they have a referendum on whether or not Ukrainians want to be independent of the Soviet Union. Over 90% vote yes. So that means a lot of Russophone Ukrainians as well. And a lot of Russians would’ve thought that. . . They would’ve found it inconceivable that Soviet Union could collapse or even that Ukraine, that you’d need a passport to go see your relatives in Ukraine. And like, something like 20%, 25% of Russian Ukrainian families have relatives on the other side. During the war, we’ve heard instances of relatives and dear friends on either side of the border cutting each other off ’cause they were believing. . . The people living in Russia refused to believe that Ukraine had any legitimacy in the stance they were taking in the war.

– I imagine it has gotten a lot more since.

– Hard to say, very hard to say. I imagine a lot of rural Russia, yes, it’s gotten, it’s become almost irreversible. But in urban Russia, it’s hard to say. You don’t. . . People have reverted to older habits about public expression.

– I wanted to get back to this diaspora that you mentioned earlier. What role have they played in information or in this war in general?

– I think a neglected role. I think, first time I was in Kiev, first and only time I was in Kiev, as we would’ve said then, or Kyiv it is now, was in 1975. I was studying on an American program at Leningrad State University. And part of our curriculum involved a trip around the Soviet Union. We’d go to cities in the Baltic, but this trip, we went to Kiev and then went to Tbilisi, capital of Republic of Georgia. And, [chuckles] I was struck, I was the only Canadian in this group. And I’m walking down the street, and there’s a big main street in Kiev called the Khreshchatyk, and it’s being restored after World War II by the first secretary, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. And everywhere I’m looking, kids are wearing what we’d call toques or ski hats or beanies with the logo of the Winnipeg Jets. [Norman laughs] And I’m seen scarfs with Jets logos, and I’m seeing University of Winnipeg and University of Alberta sweatshirts on people. And this was all clothes, and well, the Winnipeg Jets weren’t even in the NHL yet. They were part of the WHA, the World Hockey Association. But there were close ties. The first Russian speakers I met in my hometown in Saskatchewan were Ukrainian and Jewish relatives come over on special passports for a quick visit with their relations in Canada.

So this diaspora, they maintained, they saw themselves as custodians of what they would call true Ukrainian culture and true Ukrainian values, and religiosity, and the rest of it, and language. In university institutes, certainly across Canada, in Pennsylvania, at Harvard, in areas of the Midwest and on the West Coast, but also in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and other areas of Western Central Europe. And I think they saw themselves as keepers of the fire. And then when things loosen up with the independence after ’91, we see a lot of them either return or go, do their own version of making Aliyah and get involved in Ukrainian life. And there’s been a lot of Ukrainian Canadians killed in the action in defense of the New Republic. But I also think, say, in things like the Orange Revolution in 2004, they provide tremendous support with money. And a lot of, there are a lot of political advisors. 2004 is really interesting because this is where we see just how mobilized Ukrainian civil society is. And throughout most of the old Soviet states, you get the odd demonstration. I do work in Kazakhstan, and there were a lot of demonstrations and violent protests there a year ago, January.

And they’re still resonating, but here, like, since 1991, this population has gone to the streets to ask for a government that is not corrupt. They’ve been very powerful voters. And yet, 2004 was over this contested election between Viktor Yushchenko and our friend, Yanukovych. There were police agents who oversaw poisoning of Iushchenko and he had to be hospitalized. You remember his face was disfigured?

– Norman: Yes.

– And he had lost, and people went to this Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, and demonstrated to the extent that the government and the president of Ukraine had to call a new election, that Yushchenko and his ally at the time, Tymoshenko, a woman, Tymoshenko, they won. And Yanukovych, who represented the party of the regions, which was seen as pro-Russian, makes his retreat. Well, the Yushchenko government goes down in disgrace and Yanukovych comes to power again in 2010, as I recall. And at the time, there’s a debate whether Ukraine’s gonna orient to the West.

– Norman: East or West, yeah.
– Or the West. Well, this is occurring in a different context as well. The Russian situation has become very complex with a series of incidents, terrorist challenges to Putin’s authority, that school massacre in Beslan, the hostage-taking, the Nord-Ost play in the Moscow theater. Hundreds of casualties in both, some would argue through a mishandling by Russian security forces.

But most notably in 2007, Vladimir Putin makes a speech. Now, let’s remember, Putin is the first foreign leader to contact President Bush, Bush the younger in 2001, after the Twin Towers attacks and the Pentagon and the plane in Pennsylvania, to say, “We know what you’re going through. We’ve been going through this for 10 years.” And there’s been several waves of Chechen. They believe Chechen initiated terrorist bombings in Moscow, St. Petersburg, major Russian cities. And so Putin and [chuckles] the then-President Bush said he could tell that Putin was a man of spirit and conviction because you could see it in his eyes, right? [Norman laughs]

– You could see his soul, yes.

– Yeah, yeah, and. . .

– Putin said, “What’s that?”

– Or, “I can see Paris from here.” [Norman laughs] But we see gradual chilling, right? Putin turns on a lot of the domestic oligarchs, most notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But then starts becoming itchy about territorial threats from the growing expansion of NATO, and makes a speech at this annual conference in Munich, saying, “You guys gotta quit. The U. S. is not the only great power in the world. You’ve got to quit acting so unilaterally. We are getting impatient. You’re not respecting our interest. You didn’t in the former Yugoslavia. There are areas of the map that we consider traditional spheres of interest, and you’re showing us no respect,” right?

– Interest and buffer zones, too.

– Yeah, precisely.

– From attack from the West.

– David: Well, from the Russian point of view. Regardless of the fact that NATO is a defensive alliance.

– Well, yes.
– Action is only command, coordinated action only occurs in response to an attack on a member state.

– Norman: Right.

– And then 2008, this war with Georgia, there’s arguments both ways that are equally plausible. But in response to what he considers Georgian provocation, they invade and keep some of the territories they’ve occupied and declare them independent.

– We start to see this pattern then.

– Oh, this is the script for 2014.

– Yes, for taking back Crimea.

– And so Yanukovych government place after 2010 and deeply divided Ukraine, it would appear. And there’s been vague promises one way or the other that the EU has reached out to Ukraine and said, “Do you want most favored nation status? And we’ll support you in that.” And there’s a lot to be said for that because Ukraine’s got very heavy debts. They’ve got a very uneven economy.

– Norman: Yes.

– They’re worried about corruption, but the Russians and the Putin government says, and I think it’s the Medvedev government by this time, because they’re doing the castling maneuver.

– Norman: Yes.

– Putin had to step up.

– Swapping back and forth.

– That’s right. And the Russians say, “No, you stay with us. We’ll make it worth your while,” and they offer. . . And Yanukovych, well, “Should I go this way or that?” And he goes with the Russians. And there we see. . .

Now, 2004 occurred in a wave of colored revolutions, most of which rapidly subsided, not unlike the Arab Spring several years later.

– Norman: Right, right.

– Here, and it’s late 2013, we see people gather, many, many more than had been the case in 2004. And we see people gathering.

– Norman: When we look here, yes, this is giving you some idea of the magnitude of that gathering.
– David: And they just cover the whole Independence Place. And as things go on, they develop their own support infrastructure. And we see people from all over Ukraine and even the diaspora come in. We also see these different right-wing forces, militias that have been around. Once special police start firing on them, they turn on them, and it turns into a successful revolution that overthrows the Yanukovych government. And he’s replaced by subsequent elections. And Yanukovych flees the Rostov-on-Don, a big city southeast of where they are. And that becomes his place. He becomes a one-man government in exile. While we learn all about the lavish benefits he conferred on himself and his family and his friends while in power. Like, I’d like a three-hole golf course on my property. [Norman laughs] Fill those idle hours.

– You retired too early.

– Yeah. [both laughing] And then what, we sit through the Olympics, this is all going on. And the Sochi Olympics turned out to be an improbable success, especially if you’re a Canadian male hockey fan. But it seemed like everything was all evened up. And then all of a sudden, we see reports from Crimea of these quote, unquote, little green men that dress exactly like Russian soldiers, are very polite. And the fact is that Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula is largely Russian, or else Crimean Tatar, a descent of people who’d fought in the Mongol armies. And all the sudden, we see this creeping takeover.

And that map does a very good job of showing what’s going, how gradually it is. And then they have a referendum. And like many of these referenda, whether right wing or left wing, over the centuries, the winners want to overstate their victory. And my hunch would be, given all the naval veterans, like, the biggest naval base for the Soviet or Navy in the Black Sea was in Sevastopol, Sebastopol, a city on the Crimea that they leased from the Ukrainian government. And going back to Soviet times, right? ‘Cause this had been an epic battlefield in World War II and the defense of Sevastopol had been made.

– Yes.

– Well, and the Soviets had sunk billions of rubles, even inflated rubles, into this facility. That summer, I’m giving lectures on a cruise on the Volga. And it’s Wisconsin alumni, a couple other schools, a couple guys from the Naval Academy. And one of them gets up and says, “I don’t know what the big fuss is about. Like, how could you not think this was gonna happen? This is the strategic Soviet, post-Soviet naval base and you think they’re gonna give it up just because? And do you think they trust the Ukrainians to lease it to them? No. And they’re guarding an asset. And whatever you think of that. . .” But it does come at the cost of violating the sovereignty of a state that it formed part of, right?

– Yeah, even though that particular sovereignty was only about 30 years old.

– Well, [laughs] it’s actually 50, but yeah, yeah, but that’s numbers. Yeah, no. And one can make arguments both sides.

But the other thing is, we see this spring up, just like with these little green men. It’s little green men with worse tempers in the Donbas and start setting up people’s governments and flying red banners and that, and the same in Transnistria on the Moldovan border. We see it reassert; it had long been this outlaw Soviet or post-Soviet enclave. And we see action starting there. And then we see this sort of, it’s not the fake, what they call the, I mean, 1940, the False War that

– Norman: Phoney War.

– Phoney War. But it’s not phoney, and there’s certainly military action, but it’s a stalemate and it’s low-key. And we see growing divisions and hardening on both sides that in Ukraine, radical derussification, getting rid of all artifacts of Russian rule. They would say, not unlike what went on in the South with these statues of the Confederate. And we see Pushkin, Catherine oversaw the incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire.

– Norman: Pushkin, just a poet, but the Russian national poet.
– David: Yeah, precisely. And then Holodomor receives ever-greater emphasis, whereas on the Russian side, there’s almost an isomeric quality to it. Putin has a statue built of Vladimir, St. Volodymyr, as the Ukrainians would call him, who had brought Christianity, he would claim, to Russia.

– Norman: Common culture.

– And this is a common culture that makes Russia and Ukraine and Belarus all indivisible. And then after Crimea, Putin had been sagging in the polls, he’d faced huge opposition in 2012 in demonstrations in Bolotnaya Square, and was already starting to become very alive to the possibility of coalescence of the opposition. And then, so we see a celebration of the annexation of Crimea and the proliferation of these quote, unquote George Crosses, service medals from World War II. This is a memory that always comes into play in backing Russia and supporting Russia. It’s the one moment that the people can claim is their history, at the same time

– A success story.
– The success story. And they would consider the only legitimate success story in World War II, since they saved the West that seemed to have forgotten the favor and pushed them back.

And so what we see over the next years is Putin seeing the accumulation of nested opportunities, I think the way you could put it. And just inviting him, right? There’s ongoing resistance in Donbas, Ukraine goes through a series of presidents, including Petro Poroshenko, who had made his money selling chocolate to Russian consumers, but showed surprising firmness, vis-a-vis Russia in relation to Crimea and Donbas. But he’s elected out of office because of perceptions of corruption by this Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jewish, Russian-speaking, comedian, an entertainer. And he takes, he says he’s gonna take a softer line. Putin underestimates him, and at least these attacks, and boom, and here we are, right? And what else gave Putin a sense of opportunities? Divisions in the EU, and then the period of the Trump administration in the United States, where now, the Obama administration didn’t shine. They called Russia a second-class power. You never call a former great power second-class. And that they’re. . . The ambassador at the time did not do them any favors, took active part in Russian politics. I don’t think that’s a diplomat’s job. Its job is to report and to lobby. And so there was a lot of upbraided nerves in Moscow to begin with. But then we see the divisions that set in in American politics and in British politics with Brexit.

– Looked like a big opportunity. The West was apparently falling apart.

– Yes. And so, [chuckles] there’s a joke I could say, but I won’t. But that, how could you not act, especially ’cause he could say there were Nazis in there, and so this was not a war; this was a tactical military operation to replace the Ukrainian government, which had permitted in its midst unforgivable presence of Nazi extremists. And here we are. We get destruction starting on really, a scale that had not occurred since World War II in Europe. Breadth, something like 20% of the population displaced, whether abroad in Canada, United States. – Norman: Like 44 million.

– Outta 44 million, exactly. Yeah, yeah, we’re talking an awfully large number of people. And you look in papers in Britain, you look in papers in parts of the States, certainly in my home area in Canada, it’s all stories about Ukrainian refugees.

– Norman: Sure.
– BBC’s doing features of them on the radio. And they have all united. The country that was terribly divided has united strongly behind Zelenskyy.

Again, as I said earlier, as has NATO, a NATO that is now bigger.

– Yes.

– Bigger by two formerly neutral countries. Switzerland has been contributing to support for weapons.

– Have they?

– Like, go figure. [both laughing] They won’t say where the funds are coming from, but. . . [Norman laughs]

– They have accounts.

– Yeah. [laughs] They’ve got friends in Zurich. But the United States has contributed enormous amounts. And so we see this spectacle, these different arts. One advantage, I think, the Ukrainians have had, they know Soviet war-making and post-Soviet war-making better than the Soviets know their war-making or the post-Soviets know their war-making.

– So it would seem.

– Yeah.

But the other thing is, we’re seeing the emergence of a new New World Order, where Putin and Xi Jinping, who had been increasingly mutually cooperative on economic and resource issues, especially natural gas and access to forestry and that, they seem to be forming a bloc, but a very edgy one and one with a lot of frictions in it, like Central Asia. Who knows how that’s gonna work?

– Norman: Sure.

– Because Putin has cast hungry eyes in certain, especially in northern Kazakhstan, that’s largely Russian-speaking, and then in East Asia. And then the U. S. is getting more and more involved, or Zelenskyy is getting more and more involved with the powers. In this slide, we see him with Rishi Sunak, who also needs a little bit of polishing of his image. Zelenskyy has spoken to every parliamentary assembly in the NATO constellation, and done so with great effectiveness and persuasiveness, and has served as a surprisingly effective president, certainly counter anybody’s expectations. And this alleged Nazi is also Jewish in a country that does not have the most attractive history for the treatment of its Jewish population. So.

– It’s turned a corner.
– It really has.

Now, the long-term prospects and what’s gonna happen, who knows? Right now, I don’t see any possibility for a peace that will be acceptable to either side. Any peace there’s gonna be, has to be guaranteed at least by China and the United States. And in some ways, these, you know, especially in the light of what we’ve seen with Secretary Blinken in the last couple of days, and we’re seeing signs of a thaw. I can’t help thinking there’s a reactivation of an old, what I call the Kissinger gambit; it’s the, if you can create a three-axis power arrangement, right? You can play both ends against the middle and it can shift, and it shifts contextually, you might find some sort of modus vivendi. But in terms of a peace, I can’t see any peace that isn’t by definition temporary and both sides filling up. The best I can see for Ukraine is that they might have to give up some territory, but they get to, they get entry into the EU and they get a guarantee of their territorial integrity post-bailing. But we can only hope. Right now, people are just too divided. And the tempers that flare, the anger is too high. Putin is still seeking revanche for the collapse of an empire that he’d grown up in, as is many, as are many in his generation and later gen. They’re trying to create it through education in Russian schools. And Ukrainians are unified, but what happens after the war with them?

– David McDonald, we have a good idea now how we got here.

– Yeah.

– And the miscalculations here and there, and the cultures and the history, shared and otherwise. And it’s been a pleasure.

– Always a pleasure, Norman. Thanks so much.

– I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around for University Place Presents.