Why Ukraine Wants So Badly To Be Independent Of Russia

When Vladimir Putin has been asked to justify his war for control over Ukraine, his answer is typically that Ukraine and Russia have always been one country.  And there is some truth to that.  The Russian state traces its roots back to something called the Kievan Rus in the 9th century, with its capital at Kyiv.  In the period prior to the 20th century, there were times when parts of today’s Ukraine were controlled by other states (like Poland or Lithuania), but never a time when Ukraine was a fully independent country separate from Russia.  

And yet somehow a tremendous desire for independence from Russia seems to have arisen among the Ukrainians.  In December 1991, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up, a referendum was conducted throughout Ukraine asking the people whether they wanted to join with Russia or become an independent country.  A huge supermajority of Ukrainians — 90.32% overall — voted for independence.  When the vote is broken down by province, every single province supported independence, most by well over 90%.  The vote was close only in Crimea, but even there 54% supported independence.  Other from Crimea, all the provinces gave more than 80% support to independence, with percentages under 85% found found only in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.  Here is a map of Ukraine showing the 1991 vote in favor of independence by province:   

So what had happened to turn the Ukrainians so thoroughly and near-unanimously against Russia?  I’ve long had a general sense that Ukraine was treated rather poorly by the Russians during the Communist era, but I only had a vague understanding of any details.  Then recently I picked up the book Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum.  Applebaum is a historian, perhaps best known for writing for the Atlantic.  She is by no means a conservative.  The book was published in 2017, which is after Putin had annexed Crimea (2014) but before the current Ukraine war began in 2022.

The heart of the book covers the period of about 1929 to 1933, during which the Soviet state, headed by Stalin, built up to and then conducted an intentionally-imposed famine on the Ukrainian people, killing multiple millions.  The background to those events was a Ukrainian independence movement, that had begun growing during czarist times in the 19th century, and then broke out more seriously during the chaos at the end of World War I.  In the early 1920s, the bolsheviks crushed the independence movement as part of their consolidation of power throughout the Soviet Union.  By the end of that civil war, the Soviet state controlled an unhappy and untrusted Ukraine.