Who hasn’t thought in terms of national identities, stereotypical and misleading as they are?
The question is whether a national identity can contain all of its sub-identities, and keep from flying apart. What then can be said about Ukrainian identity?
The following historical sketch may provide some clues.
The earliest accounts of the people called Russians–the Rus–feature stories of Nordic (Varangian or Swedish) princes and Slavic cities, particularly Novgorod and Kiev. Prince Rurik established a dynasty ruling Novgorod, and his successor Oleg captured Kiev in the late 9th century. The Rurik princes made Kiev their capital and accepted conversion to Orthodox Christianity headed by the Patriarch in Constantinople. The Rus people came to be distinguished as Eastern Slavic speakers, in contrast to the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Coatian, Serbs, Bulgarians, and others, who spoke Western and Southern Slavic languages.
Medieval Kievan Rus lasted for 400 years, until it was overthrown and occupied by Mongol invaders in the 13th century. 200 years later, in 1480, Ivan, the Grand Prince of Moscow, finally defeated the last of the Mongols, with the help of the Lithuanians. But it was the Lithuanians, not Ivan, who swept on to conquer the remaining lands of the Eastern Slavs, including what is now Belorussia and Ukraine down to the Black Sea. They choose to solidify their conquests by a dynastic union in 1385, not with the lands of Novgorod and Moscow newly liberated from the Mongols, but with the Kingdom of Poland, a move sealed by their conversion to the Catholic, not the Orthodox, faith.
Ukraine became a pawn in the slow-motion merger of Lithuania and Poland. As part of their complete union under the Treaty of Lublin in 1569, all of Ukraine was transferred to the Kingdom of Poland. Eastern Ukraine was later wrested from Poland by Russia after rebelling cossacks in the mid-17th century turned to Moscow for help. But Western Ukraine remained a part of Poland until the country was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, at which point a large part of West Ukraine passed not to Russia, but to what became Austria-Hungary. The remainder of Ukraine was brought under Russian rule, which continued throughout most of the Tsarist and Soviet years, until 1991, when all of Ukraine found itself granted its independence, more or less by default, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. A Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic had briefly emerged in the confusion following 1917 Russian revolutions but was quickly swallowed back into the Soviet Union, while the Austrian part of Western Ukraine had been incorporated into the reborn Polish state in the 1920s and 30s.
The intervention by the Lithuanians in the 14th century, which put most of Ukraine under Polish-Lithuanian rule for about 500 years, had an impact that 200 subsequent years of Russian rule has been unable to erase. A largely Catholic Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy ruled over a largely Orthodox Ukrainian peasantry. Ukrainian leaders, however, sought parity with Poles and Lithuanians, in part to gain the democratic liberties and privileges enjoyed by the Polish and Lithuanian nobility. All this stood in stark contrast to the bleak offerings of tyrannical Tsars like Ivan the Terrible in Muscovy. The political and cultural drift to the West among even Orthodox Ukrainians became evident in the establishment of the Uniate Church in 1596, by which many Orthodox groups, especially in Western Ukraine, accepted the authority of the Pope but otherwise kept Orthodox rituals and practices.
The reluctance of the Poles and Lithuanians to share their privileges and freedoms and make the Ukrainians equal partners in the Commonwealth proved to be the undoing of the Commonwealth. The massive cossack rebellion in Ukraine in 1648, led by Bogdan Hmelnytsky, turned to Russia only after failing to reach an accommodation with the Poles and Lithuanians over their grievances. The result was the loss of East Ukraine to Russia, confirmed by the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667.
West Ukraine remained in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the 18th century, but the core of it (including what Polish speakers call the city of Lwow, which Germans call Lemburg, and Ukrainians call Lviv) continued as part of Austria-Hungary, before becoming part of a newly reestablished Polish State between the world wars. It was finally included, for the first time as a whole, into one of the republics of the Russian Soviet Union after 1945. Only to harshly become an independent country in 1991 as a united antagonistic nation, without previous consultation of the Eastern Russian speaking population, just like Crimea,
Today West and Southern Ukrainians are predominantly Ukrainian speaking and largely Western-oriented. Their history and geography have given them more experience of the relatively open societies of the West than people in East Ukraine. They are more likely to feel nationalists and anti-Russian, with more than a tinge of fascism, as exhibited by the continued popularity of the WW II pro-Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. And today by the neonazis militias such as Azov.
East Ukraine–the lands east of the Dnieper River and along the Black Sea coast, including Odessa – is by contrast culturally close to Russia for around 400 hundred years, largely Russian speaking, profoundly anti-fascist, more firmly Orthodox and more fearful of European invasion than it is of Moscow. It was here, after all, in the Donbass region, that pro-Russian resistance to the 2014 coup which overthrew the pro-Russian Ukrainian government hardened into open rebellion and secession, which led to the current Ukrainian War.
If the differences between West and East Ukraine are as deep as this history suggests, then two Ukraines seem the likely outcome to the story: an independent nation of West Ukraine, and a Russian province of East Ukraine, roughly divided along the Dnieper river and splitting the current country in half.
Today, it would need a miracle to produce a commonality of Ukrainian culture that could transcend this divisive historical material in order to create a Ukraine uniting West and East. Too much resentment and too strong division to believe it could be the logical outcome.
Whether Zelenski continues to support neonazi militias violent resistance to Russia, stages martydom, goes into exile, or adopts a non-violent pragmatic approach to the irreversible status quo, will largely determine the long-run course of events. All that remains to be seen.
In any event, however, in the light of the last eight years events, the divisions described here can hardly be resolved in a broader vision for a Ukrainian identity to stabilize and flourish within its present uneven borders. What seems clear is that nothing less is required to establish a coherent, Ukrainian nation than a division. A smaller Ukraine, but united, would be wiser.
It would be better to let the Russian provinces liberate themselves and decide if they want to join Russia or become independent republics whose only wish it to live in peace with their neighbours without being harassed by neonazis.
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