It's been a year
since Russia first occupied Crimea and nearly a year since
a full-blown separatist conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine
We in the West
tend to look at this conflict solely through the lens Russian aggression but
there's so much more to understand.
you need to understand Ukraine's history and in particular
how that history has left the country with deep politica,l
linguistic, economic, just fundamental national divisions.
So we can see this first of all by just looking at a pretty basic political map
of Ukraine.
If you look at the result in the election that brought Yanukovych to
power, you can see that
the eastern regions of the country were far more likely to support Yanukovych,
and the western regions were far more likely to support Tymochenko.
And the interesting thing about that is the that political divide that you see
comes up in a ton of different aspects of Ukrainian's history and geography.
So one area is the linguistic divide.
The divides the different regions of the country that are predominately
Russian-speaking
as opposed to predominantly Ukranian speaking really closely mirrored that
political divide.
Russia went through a series of policies to do what they called "Russification"
in the 1700s under Catherine the Great, so this goes back hundreds and hundreds of years
those policies involved everything from
settling ethnic Russians in those regions to
forbidding people from speaking the Ukrainian language.
It continued well into the 20th century.
Stalin essentially orchestrated this massive famine that
killed millions of people in Ukraine.
After that, they increase the resettlement of Russians into Ukraine.
You were left with a Ukraine that looked different. Parts of the country were much
more likely to speak Russian,
be culturally Russian, be ethnically Russian, and it's had a lasting impact
on the country as a whole. Fast-forward to modern Ukraine.
When Yanukovych was elected,
he was negotiating with the EU about a deal that would have brought closer EU ties.
So then when he abandoned that and took a bailout from Russia instead,
that was perceived as him really kinda turning away from the west
and turning towards Russia. And that was very controversial.
It prompted protests that were largely clustered in the western part of the
country and the capital city Kiev.
And eventually it forced Yanukovych out of office.
Point is that this is not just Russia invading Ukraine
The point is that there are Ukrainian separatists
who are actively trying to
achieved independence from Kiev.
Different parts of ukraine have a very different idea what kind of country
Ukraine should be. And that doesn't make it OK--that doesn't make it acceptable
as the matter of international law. It certainly doesn't justify
what Russia has been doing,
but it also shouldn't be something that you ignore.