The War in Ukraine – A History: How the US Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

Thomas I Palley

The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has been driven by internal and external factors. Those factors constitute two blades of a scissors, and explaining the conflict requires taking account of both blades. The external factors centre on post-Cold War US geopolitical strategy and the concomitant US-sponsored eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). That expansion can only be understood by reference to the fractures (internal factors) created by the Soviet Union’s (SU’s) disintegration. The external factors reveal the role of the US, which is implicated to the point of provoking the conflict and obstructing peace.

The external and internal factors come into play at different moments and take time to work their full effect, which is why history is so important to understanding the conflict. The two sets of factors play out over a timeline involving three key events. The first is Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the SU in August 1991. The second is the Maidan coup in February 2014 that overthrew democratically elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who advocated Ukrainian autonomy and a nonaligned defence policy. The third is Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022. This timeline is dramatically revealing. The US and its NATO allies view the conflict as beginning in February 2022 (though sometimes saying it began when Russia first ‘invaded’ Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – an event following the coup), enabling them to ignore history. Russia views the conflict, more straightforwardly, as beginning with the February 2014 coup, which makes history and the onset of Civil War in Ukraine central to its political position. That fundamental difference in understanding hinders the possibility of a negotiated political settlement, and it is very hard to see how the difference can be reconciled, as accounting for history (namely the coup and the subsequent Civil War) yields a completely different narrative.

The US/NATO denial of history and penchant for explaining the conflict as simply an outgrowth of the February 2022 Russian ‘invasion’, confers a significant advantage in the accompanying propaganda war. Having the conflict begin with Russia’s military intervention is a simple, easily understood narrative. The Western public has little knowledge of or interest in history; this is especially true in the US, which is completely isolated from the conflict. Nor is Western media interested in history, which is difficult to explain and a commercial dud given a disinterested public. That configuration helps explain the resilience in the West of the US/NATO narrative. However, whereas denial of history works well for propaganda, it does not serve the cause of either truth or peace, as it denies the causes of the conflict which must be addressed if peace is to prevail.

Understanding the Ukraine Conflict: Internal and External Drivers

The Western/US/NATO account of the conflict is history-light. The little bit of history that has managed to surface acknowledges, and then dismisses, NATO’s post-1990 eastward expansion. A proper historical understanding begins with the breakup of the SU. That breakup is recounted by Vladislav Zubok in his book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. The collapse is critical because it created the terrain for conflict.¹

As noted above, the conflict can be understood via the metaphor of a scissors. One blade is the internal, conflict-prone environment created by the SU’s breakup. The other blade is the continuing intervention by the US, including the external eastward expansion of NATO. Both blades are necessary for understanding the causes of the conflict, its gradual escalation, and its political intractability.

The Internal Blade: The Breakup of the Soviet Union

The breakup of the SU had nothing to do with democratic revolution. Instead, according to Zubok, the seeds were already sprouting by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The centre was weakening and, sensing that lessening, the leaders of the various Soviet Republics began to cultivate a resentful nationalist political discourse that claimed each had been economically exploited by the system and the other republics. That discourse gave the leadership of the Soviet Republics legitimacy and sowed the seeds of secession, which explains the domino-like collapse. Once one republic left, all were quickly willing to leave. The existing leadership of the republics became the political inheritors of power, who were then able to entrench and enrich themselves.

A version of that pattern is visible in all the former republics, but it left behind three critical fractures: nascent nationalist animosities, stranded ethnic Russian populations, and contested territories. All three were especially prominent in Ukraine and key drivers of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Of the three, the most important is nascent nationalist animosities because they function as the pivot pin of the scissors, joining together the internal and external scissor blades of conflict.

Nationalist animosities have proven particularly acute in Ukraine, having a long historical root. Ukraine and the Don region were major battlegrounds in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922, as captured in Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novels And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea. Ukraine’s nationalist animosity was further fuelled by Joseph Stalin’s collectivisation of Ukrainian agriculture in the 1930s, which contributed to a famine that killed millions. Ukrainian nationalists have sought to politically exploit that famine to spur anti-Russian sentiments, claiming it was a ‘Holodomor’ genocide targeted against Ukraine. The reality is that there is no evidence the famine was the product of an ethnically targeted campaign against Ukraine. Instead, it was a product of the combination of bad harvests and the Stalin regime’s campaign against the entirety of the SU’s peasant ‘kulak’ class.²

In the 1930s and during WWII, there was a virulent underground Ukrainian fascist nationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera. Those forces fought side-by-side with Nazi Germany against the SU, and they enthusiastically participated in Ukraine’s Holocaust against its Jewish population.³ After WWII and into the early 1950s, they continued a low-level insurgency in Western Ukraine, aided by Britain’s MI6 secret service and, to a lesser degree, by the CIA.⁴

With the breakup of the SU, those fascist nationalist forces were revived and encouraged. They deepened significantly after the 2014 Maidan coup, and they have strengthened further since the 2022 Russian military intervention. Within Ukraine, Bandera is now a widely and officially celebrated figure who is especially popular in Western Ukraine. Streets are named after him, there are statues in his honour, his portrait is on a postage stamp, and he was declared a hero of the nation.⁵ Moreover, Bandera is celebrated by Ukraine’s military and has special standing within the Azov brigade, which is an elite and celebrated part thereof.⁶ That ugly reality was widely recognized in the US and the West prior to the 2022 Russian intervention, but it has now been largely suppressed as part of the propaganda effort on behalf of Ukraine and against Russia.⁷

In sum, revived nationalist animosities were especially severe and especially ugly in Ukraine. For purposes of understanding the war, the important point is those animosities created deep fissures that bled both inward and outward.

A second fracture concerned stranded ethnic Russian populations living in the former Soviet Republics. Once again, the problem was particularly acute in Ukraine, where the borders had been drawn under the SU to include large chunks of land that were linguistically and culturally Russian.8 The population problem was also significant in the former Baltic republics, especially Latvia and Estonia, and in Georgia. In 1989, ethnic Russians were 22.1 percent of Ukraine’s population of 51.5 million.9 As shown in Map 1, Russian-language speakers have been heavily concentrated in the east and south of the country, in lands that had historically been part of Russia. That pattern of concentrated numbers of Russian-language speakers meant that Ukraine was politically divided and, in a worst-case scenario, primed for civil war and secession.

Map 1. The Languages of Ukraine

Source: “Languages of Ukraine”, Reconsidering Russia and the Former SU blog, updated May 15, 2014, reconsideringrussia.org.

The stark political division is illustrated in Map 2, which shows the winning vote share by oblast (province) in the second round of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. The eastern half of the country voted solidly for Yanukovych; the western half solidly for nationalist Yulia Tymoshenko.

Map 2. Second-Round Results of the 2010 Presidential Election

Source: Central Election Commission of Ukraine: “Voting Results: Support for Leaders by Region”, updated January 17, 2010, cvk.gov.ua.

The stranded ethnic Russian population problem then intersected with the problem of national animosities as the newly independent republics pursued nationalist cultural cleansing policies that sought to erase the history and presence of Russian culture and language. Such cultural cleansing constitutes a form of political intimidation and discrimination. Once again, Ukraine was the worst on those counts, followed by the Baltic republics. Ukraine’s cultural cleansing is evident in a series of progressively more intolerant laws making Ukrainian the only official language and banning Russian. It is also evident in the outlawing and tearing down of monuments honouring Russian historical cultural and political figures, which has accelerated in the wake of Russia’s intervention.10

Lastly, the fate and treatment of the stranded populations was also of political concern to Russia for reasons of ethnic identification. These populations had been citizens of the SU, and they became politically separated from Russia owing to the USSR’s unexpected disintegration. Although they were not Russian citizens under the terms of the breakup, they were historically connected to Russia by language, culture and identity, and inclined to think of themselves as Russians. Consequently, the stranded Russian populations provided an opening for Russia to establish a degree of soft power within former republics. Moreover, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East and South had Russian as well as Ukrainian citizenship.11

The third fracture concerned contested territories. That fracture was initially the least important, but it has gradually risen to become a defining issue. Russia has always felt territorially shortchanged by the breakup of the SU. Additions in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine in 1922 and 1954, respectively, were made when Ukraine and Russia were joined at the hip via the SU and breakup was deemed unimaginable. Despite that, Russia initially accepted the new borders via the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum agreement with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. In return for border recognition, the three former republics returned all nuclear weapons and signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.12 Additionally, the problem of Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol was solved by a long-term lease arrangement signed in 1997 and extended in 2010 by the Kharkiv Pact.13

That fragile territorial equilibrium was shattered by the US-supported 2014 Maidan coup, which overthrew the elected president and installed an anti-Russian nationalist. The Russian response was to annex Crimea with strong Crimean support from its largely Russian-speaking population following a plebiscite. Civil war also erupted within Ukraine, with parts of the four eastern Donbass oblasts refusing to accept the legitimacy of the coup. That fused the territorial fracture with the issue of the stranded ethnic Russian population.

There then followed a second fragile equilibrium, in which Russia sought to work with NATO to resolve the Civil War via the Minsk peace process that was initiated in 2014. The process aimed to end conflict in the Donbass and find a political solution that granted the region a mutually acceptable degree of autonomy.14 That second equilibrium became increasingly frayed and finally collapsed with Russia’s 2022 military intervention and annexation of the Donbass oblasts. That annexation has elevated the contested territories fracture into a co-defining issue, along with Ukraine’s relationship to NATO.

The External Blade: The Geopolitical Drivers of Conflict

The other blade of the conflict scissors is the external drivers of conflict, of which there are four. They consist of the US-led eastward expansion of NATO, US internal intervention in Ukraine, US neoconservative geopolitical strategy (reinforced by the US military-industrial complex), and so-called democracy promotion. The US is the force behind all four external drivers, which is why it can be legitimately said that Washington has provoked and sustains the conflict.

The first and most important external driver is the US-led eastward expansion of NATO. That expansion is detailed in Map 3, which shows NATO accession dates by country.15 The expansion agenda emerged out of Washington and was officially greenlit by the Bill Clinton administration in 1994.16

Map 3. NATO Enlargement since 1949

Source: Congressional Research Service, “NATO Enlargement to Sweden and Finland”, updated March 22, 2024.

 Notes:

1. Vladislav Zubok: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2021). Branko Milanovic provides a concise review drawing parallels with Yugoslavia’s disintegration. See Branko Milanović: “Collapse – The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M Zubok”, Brave New Europe, February 16, 2024.
2. The famine was the product of the bad harvests of 1931 and 1932, combined with the Stalin regime’s policy of collectivisation of agriculture. The regime believed collectivisation was the way to secure increased food supplies to support industrialisation and increased defence production. The greatest number of deaths in Ukraine was owing to the centrality of agriculture therein, but contemporary Ukrainian claims of 7-10 million Ukrainian deaths are overstated by a factor of between two and three. See R W Davies and Stephen G Wheatcroft: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (Industrialisation of Soviet Russia) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 [2009]).
3. See “Ukraine: Historical Background during the Holocaust”, Yad Vashem, yadvashem.org; G. Rossoliński-Liebe: “Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews”, German Yearbook of Contemporary History, vol. 1 (Lincoln, Nebraska: Nebraska University Press, 2016, 107-43); and Ivan Katchanovski: “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine”, paper presented at the Conference on Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, December 5-7, 2013, Vienna, Austria. As part of rehabilitating Ukraine in the eyes of Western public opinion, some historians are trying to downplay Ukraine’s responsibility in the Holocaust. A leading figure in this revisionist history is Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who writes: “The majority, probably the vast majority of people who collaborated with the German occupation were not politically motivated. They were collaborating with an occupation that was there, and which is a German responsibility” (Timothy Snyder: “Germans Must Remember the Truth about Ukraine – For Their Own Sake”, Eurozine, July 7, 2017). Balanced against that, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre reports Ukraine has never investigated a local Nazi war criminal or prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator (see “Nazi Hunters Give Low Grades to 13 Countries, Including Ukraine”, Associated Press, January 12, 2011).
4. Casey Michel: “The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA”, Politico, November 11, 2022; Phil Miller: “When MI6 Betrayed Ukraine’s Resistance to Russia”, Declassified UK, March 16, 2023.
5. Daniel Lazare: “Who Was Stepan Bandera?” Jacobin, September 24, 2015; Ido Vock: “Ukraine’s Problematic Nationalist Heroes”, New Statesman, January 5, 2023.
6. “Who Are Ukraine’s Far-Right Azov Regiment?” Al Jazeera, March 1, 2022, updated June 12, 2024.
7. Josh Cohen: “Dear Ukraine: Please Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot”, Foreign Affairs, April 27, 2015; Keith Darden and Lucan Way: “Who Are the Protesters in Ukraine?” Washington Post, February 12, 2014; Anthony Faiola: “A Ghost of World War II History Haunts Ukraine’s Stand-off with Russia”, Washington Post, March 25, 2014.
8. The territorial entity that is Ukraine is a product of the SU. It was created under the 1922 treaty that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Ukraine did not formally exist in Tsarist Russia, which was divided into guberniyas (governates) that had minimal correspondence with what became the republics.
9. State Statistics Committee of Ukraine: “All-Ukrainian Population Census 2001: General Results of Census”, n.d.
10. Regarding language policy, see Roman Huba: “Why Ukraine’s New Language Law Will Have Long-Term Consequences”, Open Democracy, May 28, 2019, opendemocracy.net. See also Agnes Dinyes: “Caught in the Crossfire: Minority Languages in Ukraine”, Minority Rights Group, October 11, 2023, minorityrights.org. On the destruction of monuments, see Helen Parish: “Soviet Monuments Are Being Toppled – This Gives the Spaces They Occupied a New Meaning”, The Conversation, September 5, 2022; and Sophia Kishkovsky: “Huge Soviet-Era Monument in Kyiv Taken Down as Ukraine Continues ‘Derussification’”, Art Newspaper, May 3, 2024.
11. Öncel Sencerman: “Russian Diaspora as a Means of Russian Foreign Policy”, Military Review: The Professional Journal of the U.S. Army (March-April 2018): 41-49.
12. “Ukraine: The Budapest Memorandum of 1994”, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, policymemos.hks.harvard.edu.
13. Luke Harding: “Ukraine Extends Lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet”, Guardian, April 21, 2010.
14. “What Are the Minsk Agreements on the Ukraine Conflict?”, Reuters, February 21, 2022.
15. NATO expansion was US-led, as the US is the overwhelmingly dominant force in NATO and nothing happens without its affirmative consent.
16. The White House: “Strengthening NATO and European Security”, Clinton White House Archives, n.d.

(To be continued)