Figuring out the Ukraine crisis

Sam Smith – One problem with something like the Ukraine crisis is that all parties in the dispute like to lie making it harder for the average citizen to figure things out. To get some sense of the actual complexity of the problem, here’s from a piece from NPR back in 2014:

NPR, 2014 - Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, says the two countries "are joined at the hip": They share language; Russian media are popular in Ukraine; there are family ties; many Ukrainians work in Russia; and Russians have billions of dollars invested in Ukraine. "Their relationship is like the U.S.-U.K. special relationship," Rojansky says.

Historically, those ties date back to before the Soviet Union — and even before the days of the Russian empire that began in the 18th century.

Many consider Ukraine to be the birthplace of the region's Orthodox Christianity. Ukraine then became part of the Russian empire, and later part of the Soviet Union, where Ukrainian men were pivotal in the Soviet defeat of the German army in World War II. (Ukraine was perhaps the most important Soviet republic after Russia).

Linguistically…  most Ukrainians speak both Ukrainian and Russian. But it's the eastern and southern parts of the country where Russian speakers dominate, and where Russia still holds influence.

Take Crimea, for instance. More than half of its 2 million people are Russian, and Russia still maintains a naval base there. In fact, the region was part of Russia until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a present. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine.

Millions of Ukrainians work in Russia, and according to the EU-funded Migration Policy Centre, the Russia-Ukraine border is the second-largest migration corridor in the world. (The U.S.-Mexico border is the largest.) The center says that in 2011, more than one-third of all Ukrainian migration was to Russia…

The crisis in Ukraine is, in many ways, a conflict about the former Soviet republic's future direction: Should it look westward toward the EU or maintain close ties with Russia?

Until recently, this wasn't an either/or question, says Stephen Sestanovich, a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University.

"For 20-odd years, it has been possible for the Ukrainians to kind of have it both ways," Sestanovich told NPR's Siegel. "What is now the troubling issue on the agenda is the perception of a lot of people that you do have to choose, and that is producing violence across Ukraine."

There are historical reasons for some of the antipathy — especially in the western part of Ukraine that borders Poland, where the protests against Yanukovych have been the loudest. This area was once part of Poland and Austro-Hungary, and became part of Ukraine only when World War II began.

Ukraine was the victim of the 1932-33 famine induced by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Later, it was among the Soviet republics that bore the brunt of the Chernobyl disaster.

Those events undoubtedly resonated in the public memory for years: Ukraine was one of the first Soviet republics to vote for independence from the USSR. It did so overwhelmingly in 1991. The Soviet Union fell apart soon after that.

If this isn’t complicated enough for you, check out Wikipedia’s summary of Ukraine’s history.

Now ask yourself: what is America’s best role in all of this? One parallel is the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago when the US deployment of missiles in Italy and Turkey brought a similar operation in Cuba by the Soviet Union. And while the crisis was short lived it is still considered one of the tensest moments of the Cold War.  

The argument is that we are treating Ukraine the way the Soviets treated Cuba.  In a perfect world neither the US or the Soviets would have been so imperious, but that has not been the story of our lives.

What can we do about it? One possibility would be drop Ukraine as a potential member of NATO. After all, this plan is one big reason we’re in this crisis now. Another possibility would be to let the separatist parts of Ukraine decide their own future. In any case, admitting that this is a far more complicated matter than either Biden or Putin would have us believe would be a good place to start.