Tribune. Russia attacked Ukraine militarily. This invasion is part of the logic of the discourse of February 21 of Vladimir Putin, who speaks of Ukraine as an “American colony” and who denies the Ukrainians the ability to govern themselves. However, the Ukrainian people have existed for longer than its state. Like other European peoples, a movement of Ukrainian national renaissance appears from the half of the nineteenth century in the Russian empire. But the Russian authorities see the manipulation of the Poles. National circles (Hromady) are liquidated and the prohibition of printing in Ukrainian is proclaimed. The Ukrainians are then considered “small-russians”, a subdivision of the Russian people. The home of Ukrainian culture moves to Austrian Galicia.
The independence of Ukraine approved by referendum to more than 92% of the votes in 1991 is conducting a national and state construction process for a long time prevented from the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. To answer the doubts about the existence of his country including his neighbor’s neighbor, the second Ukrainian president and former communist manager, Leonid Kuchma, publishes in 2003 a book in Russian language entitled Ukraine is not the Russia. This title today resonates in the Ukrainian nation that expresses its fright and claims its unity against the Russian striker.
For thirty years, the Ukrainian population lives in a national imagination distinct from that of Russia with its own media, museums, national festivals and history manuals. His opinion with regard to his neighbor’s neighbor has tinged with animosity when, in 2014, she observes, in shock, the annexation of Crimea and Russian support against Kiev, to separatism in the East of the country leading to a war that has already done more than 14,000 dead. The accession of Ukraine to the European Union, boasted for its democratic values, at the time of the Revolution of Maïdan, in 2013-2014, is claimed as the only possible protection of the Ukrainian state in parallel with integration into the NATO.
Millennium History
In 1922, the USSR, created in 1922, gave Ukraine its current state contours and contributed to the emergence of a national feeling through the use of nationality (ethnicity) in administrative documents or creation. national structures (union of writers, Academy of Sciences, Communist Party …). The Bolsheviks had sought, in particular, to give wages to the Ukrainians as oppressed people in the Russian Empire, to adhere to the communist cause. But independence, although proclaimed in 1918, was a perspective that disappeared a few months later in a deadly civil war.
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