Ukraine Celebrates 32 Years of Independence

Ukrainians were formed in a melting pot of civilisations and cultures. The traditions of the ancient, largest agricultural settlements in Europe of the Trypillian culture are combined with the influences of Germanic tribes – travellers arriving via the Black Sea – and the warlike nomads of the Wild Fields. The special geographical location, the interaction with other cultures and the need to regularly repel attacks from "strangers" have crystallised unique abilities in Ukrainians: openness to new things, respect for other cultures, love of freedom and equality, flexibility in communication and exceptional courage to defend their own borders - physical or mental. Epoch after epoch, Ukraine has been at the centre of tectonic shifts.  

Kyivan Rus

Rus, Kyivan Rus or Ukraine-Rus was the first Ukrainian state with its centre in Kyiv, which was formed in the ninth century in the eastern part of the pan-European trade network: along the route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean – “from the Vikings to the Greeks”. Then, in 988, Kyiv and the entire vast territory after it adopted Christianity. This event incorporated princely Kyiv into the "spiritual" community of the European continent, united by religion, and opened up wide opportunities for close political, economic and cultural ties.

From an ordinary formation, typical of medieval Europe, the country became one of the main disseminators of the young European civilisation. An effective military doctrine, a far-sighted cultural strategy, and dynastic marriages made Ukraine-Rus a geopolitical centre of global proportions. The Kyivan prince Yaroslav the Wise is even called the “father-in-law of Europe”, as almost all influential royal families have blood ties to Kyiv.

For example, the prince's daughter Anastasia became Queen of Hungary, Elizabeth became Queen of Norway and then of Denmark, and Agatha became the wife of Edward the Exile, heir to the English throne. 33 French kings were descended from Anna Yaroslavna, the daughter of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise, as well as from the kings of Jerusalem, Naples, Sicily, Hungary, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To this day, the ruling house of Spain is descended from Anna Yaroslavna, as are most of the existing monarchs of Europe.

Cossack era 

The wave of bourgeois revolutions in Europe also reached Ukraine. After the uprisings of the mid-seventeenth century, the archaic feudal system (at that time landlords owned both land and people) was gradually transformed into “Cossack squatter’s holding”. This phenomenon is essentially nothing more than a primitive form of private property, on which the driving force of European civilisation - the market economy – is based. Thus, the foundations of the agricultural market were laid: private land ownership, hired labour, wholesale trade, as the Chumaks transported agricultural products to the West via Gdansk and Krakow.

Phenomenal military victories under the leadership of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky enabled the emergence of a Cossack state with foundations unique for the time. It was a European-style legal society that provided for the election of officials not typical of Eurasian despots: hetmans, atamans, colonels and centurions. Cities enjoyed the democratic European Magdeburg law, with mayors elected by vote. Judicial power was exercised by independent courts on the basis of the Lithuanian Statute, which was based on the law of Kyivan Rus.

In Cossack times, Ukraine set the tone for European education and culture. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the first higher education institution in Eastern Europe, was founded on the model of European universities. Latin, the language of science and international communication in Western Europe, was used among educated people.

Ukrainian People’s Republic 

On 25 October (7 November) 1917, the Provisional Government was overthrown in a coup d'état in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized power. In response to the usurpation of power in the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Central Rada in Kyiv proclaimed the formation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic on 7 (20) November. Activists from Ukrainian political, cultural and public organisations decided to create a body to represent Ukrainian interests. The famous historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky was elected its chairman.

Soon after, congresses of Ukrainian peasants, the military, trade unions and zemstvos were held, which expressed their support for the Central Rada and sent their representatives to it. The organisations of the national minorities also recognised the Central Rada and were given representation in it. Ships of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea hoisted Ukrainian flags.

The Bolsheviks, however, had no intention of negotiating, but wanted to take control not only of the territory of Ukraine but of the whole of Europe, proclaiming a ‘world revolution’. In February 1918, the UPR troops retreated from Kyiv and the Bolsheviks, led by commander Mikhail Muravyov, took over the city.

After a bitter struggle, the Ukrainian state never gained full independence, falling within the borders of the Soviet Union under the separate status of a republic. 

The defeat of Ukraine in its bid for statehood became one of the greatest security challenges facing the European continent. Instead of democratic, independent states, a totalitarian monster, the USSR, emerged from the ruins of the empire. Having established itself in a neo-imperial role, the Kremlin, in collusion with Hitler, started the Second World War and pursued a policy of mass murder and terror. It then kept the whole world on tenterhooks for years by threatening to use nuclear weapons, which remain its main political tool to this day.

Red Terror of the USSR

Immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks embarked on a course of political terror: legitimising violence as a way of gaining and maintaining power.

On 5 September 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars of Bolshevik Russia (RSFSR) adopted a decree “On the Red Terror”, which stated that “...the securing of the home front by means of terror is an immediate necessity; it is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; all persons belonging to White Guard organisations, rebellions and insurrections are subject to execution”. Ukrainians were among the main targets of persecution.

In addition to numerous robberies, searches and murders, Moscow deliberately organised separate genocidal campaigns aimed at exterminating Ukrainians. First, there was the so-called ‘dekulakisation’: wealthy, educated peasants who owned private farms were targeted for mass extermination or deportation to special concentration camps in northern Russia.

This was followed by an artificial famine on the territory of Ukraine – the Holodomor of 1932-1933, when food was ‘expropriated’ on the orders of the Kremlin in areas where Ukrainians were densely populated. All food supplies, including grain, vegetables, cereals and livestock, were confiscated from families, and travel out of the settlements was blocked. According to various estimates, between 4 and 7 million Ukrainians died as a result of the famine and related causes.

In less than 10 years, those Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were mobilised en masse to the front lines of the Second World War. Mostly as ordinary soldiers, deprived of the basic means of warfare. During the years of the USSR, Ukrainian artists, scientists, doctors, teachers... were subjected to repression and terror. Tens of thousands of people were tortured, shot or sent to concentration camps as ‘class enemies’.

Collapse of the USSR

Ukraine played a key role in the collapse of the USSR. In the autumn of 1989, the congress of the Ukrainian People’s Movement for Perestroika (Rukh) took place in the conference hall of Kyiv Polytechnic, uniting Ukrainians around the idea of independence.

In the same year, Ukrainians secured the reburial in Kyiv of the remains of political prisoners of the Soviet regime: Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn and Oleksa Tykhyi. The event turned into a rally of thousands of people condemning the Soviet system, held under the yellow and blue flags that were banned at the time. The very fact that the KGB of the USSR gave permission to exhume the bodies of dissidents, victims of the totalitarian regime, showed that the Kremlin's power was shaking.

Then, on 21 January 1990, on the 71st anniversary of the unification of the two Ukrainian republics – centred on Kyiv (Ukrainian People’s Republic) and Lviv (West Ukrainian People’s Republic) – millions of people took part in a human chain to unite the regions of Ukraine, from Lviv to Donetsk and Kharkiv, holding hands. The length of the ‘chain’ exceeded 770 kilometres. According to unofficial figures, up to 5 million people took part.

On 16 July 1990, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine: 355 votes in favour, four against. That same year, students went on a “hunger strike on granite”, demanding the democratisation of social and political processes and the dissolution of the Union Treaty.

And on 24 August 1991, the Verkhovna Rada of the then Ukrainian SSR adopted the Act of Independence of Ukraine by an overwhelming majority: “Proceeding from the mortal danger that hung over Ukraine in connection with the coup d'état in the USSR on August 19, 1991 (GKChP, putsch – ed.), continuing the thousand-year tradition of state-building in Ukraine, based on the right to self-determination provided for by the OOH Charter and other international legal documents, implementing the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly proclaims the independence of Ukraine and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state – Ukraine.”

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After gaining independence, Ukraine became the owner of the world's third largest nuclear force, which could guarantee its security against aggression on its territory.

176 intercontinental ballistic missiles: 130 liquid-fuelled SS-19 (six warheads each) and 46 solid-fuel SS-24s (ten warheads each),

Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers (30 to 43);

1514 to 2156 nuclear warheads for strategic weapons;

2,800 to 4,200 tactical nuclear warheads.

However, under the influence of the international community, Ukraine gave up its nuclear umbrella. The so-called Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 by Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, was supposed to guarantee Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Twenty years later, in 2014, Russia invaded the territory of Ukraine's Crimea, and eight years later, in February 2022, it launched a full-scale war with the intention of destroying Ukrainian statehood as such.

The civilisational approach to human history, one of the latest fundamental principles of modern geopolitics, founded by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, envisages a kind of competition between European and Eurasian civilisations. The collapse of the USSR was essentially the collapse of Eurasian civilisation, which could not withstand competition from the more efficient European socio-economic model based on democracy and respect for human rights.

Ukraine has had two revolutions in the last 32 years. In 2004, the Orange Maidan stopped an attempt to falsify elections, and in 2014, the Revolution of Dignity united Ukrainians against the government’s brutal attempt to abandon its Eurocentric development strategy. Today, Ukraine is forced to fight for its civilisation and basic right to exist in a war with one of the largest armies in the world.

Each of these examples of exceptional courage and boldness in defending values is a vivid reminder to the world that the civilisational struggle continues, that the status quo is not a constant, and that some people must give their lives every day for the right of others to live in safety.