Ukraine’s Complex Historical Background and The Contemporary Era
After World War II ended in May of 1945, on the basis of this earlier territorial agreement, time was provided for a sizeable transfer of people into these new boundaries [...]
Ukraine has a complex historical background and most people have little knowledge of this. The western part of Ukraine known as Galicia has an especially complex history. Going back for more than a thousand years, this region had been settled by Slavic tribes who formed the western extension of the Kievan Rus. To the west it had Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Austrian neighbours. And to its misfortune, these neighbours took turns attacking and subjugating these early Ukrainians. It was largely Poland and Austria that took turns suppressing and occupying the region, economically and culturally. Because of this, although Galicia’s population was almost totally Ukrainian, it had never been part of Ukraine until after World War II ended in 1945.
As a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the ensuing turmoil in this and adjoining regions, during 1919 Britain assigned their Foreign Secretary George Curzon to conduct a study to determine the ethnic distribution in these areas. As a result of these studies, he drew up a boundary line showing majority populations on each side of the line. This became known as the Curzon Line. However, Poland ignored this matter and in a subsequent war with Russian forces took over areas that were largely Ukrainian and Belorussian.
Following an agreement at the Tehran Conference, confirmed at the 1945 Yalta Conference (Feb. 6,1945), the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin issued a statement affirming the use of the Curzon Line, with some five-to-eight kilometre variations, as the border between Poland and the Soviet Union. At first Churchill opposed sections of the proposal and wanted to add parts of Galicia, including the city of Lviv to Poland’s territory. Stalin argued that, as determined by the British official Curzon, these areas had a Ukrainian majority and it would be unjust to allocate them to Poland. Churchill was swayed by this logic and withdrew his proposal. As compensation to Poland for losing about 20 percent of its pre-war borders, the Allies incorporated formerly German-held areas into Poland on its western border. As a result, the current border separating Poland from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania is an approximation of the Curzon Line.
After World War II ended in May of 1945, on the basis of this earlier territorial agreement, time was provided for a sizeable transfer of people into these new boundaries. Ukrainians still within the new boundaries of Poland were given the opportunity to move to Ukraine. Also Ukrainians living in Austria were given the opportunity to move to Ukraine. German people within the new boundaries of Poland on the west were repatriated to Germany. Polish people within Poland’s former eastern frontier were transferred to Poland, with most going to the newly acquired western area from Germany. This resulted in finally establishing boundaries for each of these countries in which there would now be no sizeable minority groups and that the majority of people would live within the boundaries of their own country. This was a significant development after World War II.
As a result of this, Ukrainians, for the first time in their history, now had the opportunity to live within the boundaries of their own country.
There is a further addendum to Ukraine’s boundaries. This involves the eastern border between Ukraine and the former USSR and now Russia. Shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution and the cessation of Western military intervention to try to reinstate the Tsar in the early 1920s, Lenin authorized a change to Ukraine’s eastern border.
He noted that at that period the bulk of Ukraine was mainly an agricultural area, with very little industry. To provide it with a better-balanced economy, Lenin’s government proceeded to allocate an adjoining part of traditional Russian territory to Ukraine. This is an area that had the potential for hydropower and it had major coal and iron ore deposits. This encompassed Krivoy-Rog with its iron ore and other minerals, and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with their coal deposits. Although only a minority of the population was Ukrainian, with the majority being Russian, the region was transferred to Ukraine because of economic reasons, i.e., to give Ukraine a better-balanced economy. The addition of this area enabled Ukraine to afterwards develop both an agricultural and industrial economy.
Unfortunately, somehow many Ukrainians at the present time are unaware of the fact that if it hadn’t been for these earlier initiative under the USSR, Ukraine would have never had the extent of territory and the boundaries it now has.
The CIA-engineered Maidan coup in February of 2014 overthrew the legally elected government in Ukraine and replaced it with a regime which encompassed a large number of the descendants of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborators based in western Ukraine. This resulted in an immediate referendum in Crimea whose predominant Russian population voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and rejoin the Russian Federation. As a result of this referendum, Russia accepted Crimea into its federation, but this was propagandized as a military takeover or an “annexation” which it definitely was not.
Also because the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, with their large Russian-speaking population, were opposed to the neo-Nazi takeover of Ukraine, they wanted to get a semi-autonomous status in the country. This was flatly refused and instead the Kiev regime launched a military attack on them. They fought back valiantly and defeated the attacking Ukraine army, but these battles killed thousands of people. Since then Kiev’s military units have never ceased shelling these two areas and they launch occasional sporadic attacks that are repulsed, with the result that the death toll is now more than 13,000. Also, because of objections to the new regime, about a million Ukrainians from various parts of the country fled as refugees to Russia.
In the West, with blatant anti-Russia propaganda, all this turmoil is blamed on Russia, with the allegation that Russia has sent in its own troops. However, at a time when satellite photos can be taken of licence plates, there has never a single photo taken of any Russian tanks, military vehicles or soldiers in this area. In fact, the chief of Ukraine’s General Military Staff Victor Muzhenko acknowledged that Russian army units were not involved in combat action in the troubled Donetsk and Luhansk region. Later when Russia, Germany and France negotiated the Minsk Agreement as a possible resolution to this conflict, and had Ukraine’s president Poroshenko and the leaders of Donetsk-Luhansk sign it, Ukraine violated the agreement by refusing to enact any part of it, till this day.
Most Ukrainians had not supported the 2014 coup regime, which gave an inordinate amount of power to the descendants of western Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators. The people gave vent to this in the April 1919 election when an independent candidate Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with 73% of the vote. Afterwards in the July 2019 parliamentary election, Zelensky’s political party, Servant of the People, won 60% of the party-list vote or 254 of the 424 seats.
Despite these progressive changes, Zelensky and the new parliament have somehow been hesitant to enact any meaningful progressive reforms. Aside from a prisoner exchange, no progress has been made in relations with Donetsk and Luhansk. It may be that they are intimidated by the fact that the previous governments since the 2014 coup allowed both the national army and its police forces to be infiltrated with neo-Nazis and their sympathizers. The army includes the Azov Battalion that gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes, as well as its neo-Nazi members and its usage of the logo featuring the Wolfsangel, the initial symbol of the Nazi party in Germany.
The dire situation in Ukraine was alarmingly exposed last year just before their election in a major article in The Nation, which included this account:
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
And so it still remains to be seen if the Zelinsky government can bring about much needed reforms in the country.
In the meantime, with the termination of trade with Russia, Ukraine’s economy has almost collapsed and the people are in dire economic straits.
Originally published on 2020-08-10
About the author: John Ryan, Ph.D. is a retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar at the University of Winnipeg. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the ...
"The West" is the nations that are essentially controlled, basically dictated-to, by America's approximately 600 billionaires, who control the U.S. Government, by coordinatedly funding (through their news-media and political donations, and also by their members-only private conferences) the careers of cooperative politicians, and who thereby defeat the politicians who act against increasing the percentage of the nation's wealth that these few people hold, and against increasing their extractions from everybody else. (Those non-compliant politicians are derisively called "socialists" and equated with the communist Joseph Stalin instead of with the democratic socialist FDR and the leaders of the democratic socialist Scandinavian ...
On February 2014, a United States-sponsored coup was initiated in the Ukraine in which President Viktor Yanukovych was illegally ousted from power. (1) Over three years later, the putsch has done nothing but plunge the Ukraine, a tortured country plundered throughout modern history (by the West), into another abyss. In a 2015 interview with CNN, then US president Barack Obama openly confessed that “we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine”.Around 10,000 people have been killed in the time since, with the conflict generating 2.5 million refugees who relocated to Russia. The putsch led to Crimea’s annexation a month after ...
Twenty-five years commemoration of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March−June 1999 once again opened the question of the Western foundation for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and its unilateral proclamation of a quasi-independence in February 2008. Kosovo became the first and only European state today that is ruled by the terroristic warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). This article aims to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in 1999 which has as an outcome the creation of the first terroristic state in Europe – the ...
IntroductionAfter the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by ...
The EU and NATO are evil institutions. These two institutions are mechanisms created by Washington in order to destroy the sovereignty of European peoples. These two institutions give Washington control over the Western world and serve both as cover and enabler of Washington’s aggression. Without the EU and NATO, Washington could not force Europe and the UK into conflict with Russia, and Washington could not have destroyed seven Muslim countries in 15 years without being isolated as a hated war criminal government, no member of whom could have travelled abroad without being arrested and put on trial.Clearly, the presstitute media ...
Louis XVI needed a revolution, Napoleon needed two historic military defeats, the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions, the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires needed World War I, Nazi Germany needed World War II, Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs, the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home, the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev … What will the American Empire need?I don’t believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ...
The reaction to the Syrian gassing incident shows that the U.S. ship-of-state is being piloted by fools.Fool-in-Chief is President Donald Trump, who has duly followed the Neocon script by leaping to the conclusion that President al-Assad’s Syrian government is responsible when in fact there is no evidence of an intentional attack. Even if Syrian planes hit a munitions warehouse, the gas had been stored there by anti-government rebels /terrorists. It would be impossible and contrary to common sense that the Syrian government could have done this on purpose, if they did it at all.Fool-at-the-Podium is Sean Spicer, helplessly trying to ...
No matter where you grew up in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the rebel flag as part of the dress code. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t know much about it, now is the time to be informed. That’s because this flag has a particularly controversial place in US history.“People find the flag offensive because they ...
The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.”The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate ...
This article was first published on October 19, 2014This week marks the three-year anniversary of the Western-backed assassination of Libya’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi, and the fall of one of Africa’s greatest nations.In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.After NATO’s intervention in 2011, Libya is now a failed state and its economy is in shambles. As ...
North Korea cheered this month when a man with a knife and a history of violent behavior slashed the face of Mark Lippert, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. The attack in Seoul was “a knife shower of justice,” North Korea said, praising it as “deserved punishment for warmonger United States.”If that sounds mean-spirited, consider this: For years, North Korea has taught schoolchildren to bayonet effigies of U.S. soldiers. Under its young dictator, Kim Jong Un, the government has suggested it was prepared to nuke Washington, Austin and Southern California. More than 40 years ago, Kim Il Sung, the “Great ...
The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”Part IIntroductionAs the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as a historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the ...
The Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The new Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by ...
On the eve of President Obama's April 2016 visit to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Congress began debating the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), that would, inter alia, allow the families of victims of the September 11 attacks to sue the Saudi government for damages. Also in April 2016, the New York Times published that a 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks had found that Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot. The commission's conclusions, said the paper, were specified in a report that has not been released publicly.[1] ...
The US marines in the mission of democratization of the Afghan Talibans.An authentic video clip.No comment, except: Can you imagine reaction by the CNN in the case of the Russian marines are doing the same in Syria with the fighters of the ISIL?Enjoy 38 sec. of the documentary clip on democratization of Afghanistan.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to ...
General Draza Mihailovich with the people during WWII. Contrary to General Mihailovich, Communist leader "Marshall" Josip Broz Tito posses no one photograph with the people of Yugoslavia from the wartime In 1971, the movie Klopka za generala, A Trap for the General, was released in Yugoslavia directed by Miomir “Miki” Stamenkovic starring Rade Markovic, Ljuba Tadic, and Bekim Fehmiu. The screenplay was by Dragan Markovic and Luka Pavlovic. The film was produced by the Sarajevo-based company Bosna Film of Yugoslavia and featured a cast made up of Serbian, Bosnian Muslim, and Albanian Muslim actors. The film was released in Serbian ...
Clinton/NATO Intervention In Balkans Revealed As Half-Witted DhimmitudeFebruary 26, 2007- San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Twelve years after the alleged Srebrenica massacre, the International Court of Justice [ICJ] has found that charges alleging that a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serb government was used against the Bosnian Muslims are baseless, yet the court adamantly maintains a belief in the myth of Srebrenica, much in the way that Islamists worldwide hold on to the Jenin hoax because both serve to stoke anti-Western, anti-Israel sentiment.From the beginning it should have been clear that the Clinton administration's decision to ...
Author’s Introduction and UpdateFirst published by GR on June 14, 2014, updated in August 2014, this article reveals how the US and its allies facilitated the incursion of Islamic State (ISIS) convoys into Iraq in June 2014 prior to the onset of the counter-terrorism bombing campaign launched by Obama in August 2014. It is worth recalling the history of the initial incursion of ISIS forces (Summer 2014) and the timeline extending from the occupation of Mosul in Summer of 2014 which was covertly supported by the US, to the “Liberation” of Mosul three years later which was also supported by ...
…When did Congress authorize Bill Clinton to go to war againsta Yugoslav army that has never attacked Americans?…This week, NATO conducted air exercises over Albania as a warning to Belgrade that its crackdown in Kosovo must end now.NATO’s demands? Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic must call off his offensive by June 16, allow monitors unimpeded access to the rebellious province, let the refugees return home, and resume talks with the Kosovan resistance. If Milosevic balks, NATO is preparing attacks on his forces and, says The New York Times, “possible air strikes against strategic military targets in Serbia.”France contends that NATO needs ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
