Background
To understand this issue better, we need to go into Russia and Ukraine’s history. Most people begin at the year 1991. The year when the USSR or the Soviet Union broke up into 15 countries. The biggest of which was Russia. And Ukraine was also a part of the USSR. It got independent after 1991.
And you might conclude that joining Ukraine and Russia again wouldn’t be so wrong. But this isn’t a valid comparison. Because in 1921, Lenin’s Red Army had invaded Ukraine. After this Communist Russian Revolution, the USSR was established in 1922. The Union of 15 different Soviet Socialist Republic countries. One of the countries was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The question arises, What was Ukraine before this? Ukraine was an independent country. But it had gotten its independence a mere 3 years ago in 1918. Independence from whom? Independence from the Russian Empire. And as you know, the Russian Empire was overthrown in 1917 by the Russian Revolutionaries. So basically, Ukraine was a part of the Russian Empire then it got independence, and then the people that overthrew the Russian Empire went ahead and invaded Ukraine again.
If you talk about the era before the Russian Empire, then there were some instances when Russia and Ukraine were parts of the same Empire. And some instances, when Ukraine was part of the Lithuanian or Polish Empires. But we don’t need to go so deep into the details. The point remains that the spirit of Ukrainian nationalism, the distinct identity of Ukraine as a country, isn’t a feeling that developed after 1991. It has been in the Ukrainian people for a long time.
