Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the second case was the Revolution of Dignity 2013, with some of the same characters, including Yanukovych, who at that time was already president of Ukraine. And there the question was of the government promising the people for... one year at least, to sign an association agreement with the European Union, and then turning over almost overnight and saying that they were not going to do that.
That's how things started. But then when they became really massive, and why something that was called Euro-revolution became a revolution of dignity, was when the government police beat up students in downtown Kyiv, who, judging by the reports, were basically already almost ready to disperse, almost ready to go home. And that's when roughly half of Kyiv showed up on the streets.
That sort of the police behavior, that sort of was absolutely unacceptable in Ukraine. The stealing elections and falsification of elections was unacceptable. That's where, around that time, and around 2004, the president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kuchma, writes a book called Ukraine is Not Russia.
And apparently the term comes from his discussion with Putin when Putin was suggesting to him quite strongly to use force against people on the Maidan on the square in Kiev. And Kuchma allegedly said to him, you don't understand, Ukraine is not Russia. You can't do things like that. You get pushed back.
These two events, 2004 and then 2013, became a really crucial point in terms of the Ukraine direction, the survival of Ukrainian democracy, which is one of very few countries in the post-Soviet space where Democracy survived the original flirt between the government leaders and democracy of the 1990s. It was the old Soviet story.
In Russia, everywhere else, there was high democratic expectations, but they came to Pretty much by the end of the decade, Ukraine preserved the democracy. The orientation of Ukraine toward integration in some form into Western and European structures, that Ukrainian democracy plus Western orientation was something.
In Russia, we see the strengthening of the autocratic regime under Vladimir Putin. That, if you look deeper, these are the processes that put the two countries on the collision course.
The war started in February of 2014 with the Russian takeover of Crimea by military force, right? The so-called Green Man. And the big question is why? It's very important to go back to the year 2013 and the start of the protests and the story of the Ukraine signing an association agreement with the European Union. From what we understand today, the Ukrainian government under President Yanukovych
did this suicidal sharp turn after one year of promising association agreement saying that, okay, we changed our mind under pressure from Moscow. And Moscow applied that pressure for one reason, at least in my opinion. The Ukraine signing association agreement with European Union
would mean that Ukraine would not be able to sign association agreement with any Eurasian Union in any shape or form that was at that time in the process of making. And for Vladimir Putin, that was the beginning of his, or part of his third term. One of his agenda items for the third term was really consolidation of the post-Soviet space and Eurasian space.
And not membership in NATO, not membership in European Union. But association agreement with European Union meant that that post-Soviet space would have to exist under Moscow's control, but without Ukraine, the second largest post-Soviet republic. The republic on whose vote depended the continuing existence of the Soviet Union and whose vote ended, in many ways, the existence of the Soviet Union.
That is broadly background, but also there are, of course, personalities. There are also their beliefs. The readings of history and all of that became part of the story. But if you look at that geopolitically, the association agreement is putting Ukraine outside of the Russian sphere of influence.
The response was an attempt to topple the government in Kyiv that clearly was going to sign that agreement, to take over Crimea and to help to deal with a lot of issues within Russia itself and boost the economy. the popularity of the president, and it certainly worked in that way as well. Once Ukraine, still after Crimea, continued on its path, then the next step started
so-called hybrid warfare in Donbas. But again, unlike Crimea, from what I understand, Russia was not really looking forward to taking possession of Donbas. Donbas was viewed as the way how to influence Ukraine to stop it from drift toward the West.
I mentioned that nationalism and principle of nationalism is the principle of making the political borders to coincide with ethnic and cultural borders. And that's how the maps of many East European countries had been drawn in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On that principle, Donbas, where the majority constituted by the beginning of the 20th century were Ukrainians, was considered to be Ukrainian and was claimed in the middle of this revolution and revolutionary wars and civil wars by Ukrainian government.
But Donbas became one of the key sites in the Russian Empire of early industrialization, with its mining industry, with its metallurgical industry. So what that meant was that people from other parts of, not Ukraine, but other parts of the Russian Empire congregated there. That's where jobs were. That's how Khrushchev and his family came. came to Donbass.
The family of Brezhnev overshoot a little bit. They got to the industrial enterprises in the city of Kamensk near Dnipro, the city that was called Dnipropetrovsk. Those were Russian peasants moving into the area looking for their job. The population became quite mixed. Ukrainians still constituted the majority of the population, but not necessarily in the towns and in the cities.
And culturally, the place was becoming more and more Russian as the result of that moment. So, apart from the Crimea, Donbass was the part of Ukraine where the ethnic Russians were the biggest group. They were not the majority, but they were a very, very big and significant group. For example, in the city of Mariupol, that was all but destroyed in the course of the last two years.
The ethnic Russians constituted over 40% of the population, right? So that's not exactly part of Donbass, but that gives you a general idea. Now, the story of Donbass and what happened now is multidimensional, and this ethnic composition is just one part of the story. Another very important part of the story is economy.
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