Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Mon, 04 Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian historian at Harvard University, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, and an author of many books on history of Eastern Europe, including his latest book The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/serhii-plokhy-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Serhii's X: https://x.com/splokhy Serhii's Website: https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/serhii-plokhii Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: https://huri.harvard.edu/ Serhii's Books: https://amzn.to/3OS2EqK 2006 - The Origins of the Slavic Nations 2010 - Yalta: The Price of Peace 2012 - The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires 2014 - The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union 2015 - The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 2016 - The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story 2017 - Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation 2018 - Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy 2021 - Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 2021 - The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present 2022 - Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disaster 2023 - The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (09:10) - Collapse of the Soviet Union (25:19) - Origins of Russia and Ukraine (38:22) - Ukrainian nationalism (46:04) - Stepan Bandera (1:15:05) - KGB (1:30:03) - War in Ukraine (2:06:19) - NATO and Russia (2:17:22) - Peace talks (2:31:09) - Ukrainian Army head Valerii Zaluzhnyi (2:37:46) - Power and War (2:48:37) - Holodomor (2:55:09) - Chernobyl (3:05:43) - Nuclear power (3:15:20) - Future of the world
The following is a conversation with Serhii Plohi, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine.
He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine. A book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.
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There are things to criticize about capitalism, but overall, it is one of the more beautiful things that humans have created. I do want to say that we tend to seem to want to criticize more than celebrate in this society. Social media, journalism seems to get clicks on the criticisms, and those are important, but it should probably be done in proportion to the full thing.
We should celebrate and criticize properly in proportion. Anyway, you can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's an all-in-one, delicious, healthy drink to support better health and peak performance.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Serhii Plohi. What are the major explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Maybe ones you agree with and ones you disagree with.
Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late 80s and early 90s. And the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union. All of these processes were interrelated, interconnected.
But when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that's where I disagree. Because ideological collapse happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether we are talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or St. Petersburg now, or Vladivostok. But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and St.
Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kyiv, Minsk, and Dushanbe ended in different countries. So the theories and explanations about how did that happen, for me, these are really very helpful theories for understanding the Soviet collapse. So the mobilization from below, the collapse of the center, against the background of economic collapse, against the background of ideological implosion.
That's how I look at the fall of the Soviet Union, and that's how I look at the theories that explain that collapse.
So it's a story of geography, ideology, economics. Which are the most important to understand of what made the collapse of the Soviet Union happen?
The Soviet collapse was unique, but not more unique than collapse of any other empire. So what we really witnessed, or the world witnessed back in 1991, and we continue to witness today with the Russian aggression against Ukraine, is a collapse of one of the largest world empires.
We talked about the Soviet Union and now talk about Russia as possessing plus minus one-sixth of the surface of the Earth. You don't get in possession of one-sixth of the Earth by being a nation-state. You get that sort of size as an empire.
The Soviet collapse is a continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology, and then came back in full force. in the late 80s and early 90s.
So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force. For the imperial or multi-ethnic, multinational state, as was Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or Estonian, for that matter.
Well, you said a lot of interesting stuff there. 1917, Bolsheviks, internationalists, how that plays with the idea of Russian empire and so on. But first, let me ask about U.S. influence on this. So one of the ideas is that, you know, through the Cold War, that mechanism, U.S. had major interest to weaken the Soviet Union.
And therefore, the collapse could be attributed to pressure and manipulation from the United States. Is there truth to that?
The pressure from the United States, this is part of the Cold War. And Cold War part of that story, but it doesn't explain the Soviet collapse. And the reason is quite simple. The United States of America didn't want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn't want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948, we now have the strategic documents,
They were concerned about that, they didn't want to do that, and certainly they didn't want to do that in the year 1990-1991. As late as August of 1991, the month of the coup in Moscow, President Bush, Judge H.W. Bush, travels from Moscow to Kyiv and gives famous or infamous speech called Chicken Kyiv Speech, basically warning Ukrainians against going for independence.
The Soviet collapse was a huge headache for the administration in the White House for a number of reasons. They liked to work with Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was emerging as a junior partner of the United States on the international arena. Collapse was destroying all of that. And on the top of that, there was a question of the nuclear weapons, unaccounted nuclear weapons.
So the United States was doing everything humanly possible to keep the Soviet Union together in one piece until really late November of 1991, when it became clear that it was a lost cause and they had to say goodbye to Gorbachev and to the project that he introduced.
A few months later, or a year later, there was a presidential campaign, and Bush was running for the second term and was looking for achievements. And there were many achievements. I basically treat him with great respect. But destruction of the Soviet Union was not one of those achievements. He was on the other side of that divide.
But the politics, the political campaign, of course, have their own rules. And they produce and give birth to mythology, which still, at least in this country, we live till now, till today.
So Gorbachev is an interesting figure in all of this. Is there a possible history where the Soviet Union did not collapse and some of the ideas that Gorbachev had for the future of the Soviet Union came to life?
Of course, history, on the one hand, there is a statement. It doesn't allow for what-ifs. On the other hand, in my opinion, history is full of what-ifs. That's what history is about. And certainly, there are scenarios how the Soviet Union would continue. Would continue beyond, let's say, Gorbachev's tenure. Mm-hmm.
And the argument has been made that the reforms that he introduced, that they were mismanaged and they could be managed differently, or there could be no reforms and there could be continuing stagnation. So that is all possible. What I think would happen one way or another is the Soviet collapse in a different form on somebody else's watch.
at some later period in time because we're dealing with not just processes that were happening in the Soviet Union, we're dealing with global processes and the 20th century turned out to be the century of the disintegration of the empires.
You look at the globe, at the map of the world in 1914, and you compare it to the map at the end of the 20th century in 1991, 1992, and suddenly you realize that there are many candidates for being the most important event, the most important process in the 20th century. But the biggest global thing that happened was redrawing the map of the world and producing
dozens, if not hundreds, of new states. That's the outcome of the different processes of the 20th century. Look, Yugoslavia is falling apart around the same time. Czechoslovakia goes through what can be called a civilized divorce, a very rare occurrence in the fall of multinational states.
So, yeah, the writing was on the wall, whether it would happen under Gorbachev or later, whether it would happen as the result of reforms or as the result of no reforms. But I think that sooner or later that would happen.
Yeah, it's very possible hundreds of years from now the way the 20th century is written about as the century defined by the collapse of empires? You call the Soviet Union the last empire. The book is called The Last Empire. So is there something fundamental about the way the world is that means it's not conducive to the formation of empires?
The meaning that I was putting in the term the Soviet Union as the last empire was that the Soviet collapse was the collapse of the last major European empires, traditional empires. That was in the 18th century, 19th century, and through most of the 20th century. The Austria-Hungary died in the midst of World War I. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Brits were gone and left India.
The successor to the Russian Empire, called the Soviet Union, was still hanging on there. Then came 1991, and what we see even with today's Russia, it's a very different sort of policies. The Russian leadership tried to learn a lesson from 1991, so there is no national republics in the Russian Federation that would have more rights than the Russian administrative units.
So the structure is different. The nationality policies are different. The level of Russification is much higher. So it is, in many ways, already a post-imperial formation.
And you're right about that moment in 1991. The role that Ukraine played in that seems to be a very critical role. Can you describe... Just that? What role Ukraine played in the collapse of the Soviet Union?
History is many things, but it started in a very simple way of making notes on the yearly basis, what happened this year or that. So it's about chronology. Chronology in the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is very important. You have Ukrainian referendum on December 1st, 1991, and you have dissolution of the Soviet Union by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus one week later.
Mm-hmm. And the question is why. Ukrainian referendum is the answer, but Ukrainians didn't answer their referendum question of whether they want the Soviet Union to be dissolved or not. They answered very limited in terms of, it's been in question whether you support the decision of Verkhovna Rada, of your parliament. for Ukraine to go independent. The rest was not on the ballot.
So why then, one week later, the Soviet Union is gone? President Yeltsin explained to President Bush around that time the reason why Ukraine was so important. He said that, well, if Ukraine is gone, Russia is not interested in this Soviet project because Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. So there was a cultural element. But there was also another one.
Ukraine happened to be the second largest Soviet republic and then post-Soviet state. in terms of population, in terms of the economy, economic potential, and so on and so forth. And, as Yeltsin suggested, close culturally, linguistically, and otherwise to Russia. So, with the second largest republic gone, Russia didn't think that it was in Russia's interest to continue with the Soviet Union.
Around that time, Yegor Gaidar, who was the chief economic advisor of Yeltsin, was telling him, well, we just don't have money anymore to support other republics. We have to focus on Russia. We have to use oil and gas money within the Russian Federation. The state was bankrupt. Imperial projects, at least in the context of the late 20th century, they costed money.
It wasn't a money-making machine as it was back in the 18th or 19th century. And the combination of all these factors led to the processes in which Ukraine's decision to go independent spelled the end to the Soviet Union.
And if today anybody wants to restore not the Soviet Union, but some form of Russian control over the post-Soviet space, Ukraine is as important today as it was back in December of 1991.
Let me ask you about Vladimir Putin's statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the great tragedies of history. To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong?
His formulation was that this is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe or tragedy of the 20th century. I specifically went and looked at the text and put it in specific time when it was happening. It was interesting that the statement was made a few weeks before the May 9 parade and celebrations of the victory. a key part of the mythology of the current Russian state.
So why say things about the Soviet collapse being the largest geopolitical strategy, and not in that particular context, the Second World War? My explanation, at least, is that the World War II, the price was enormous, but the Soviet Union emerged as a great victor and captured half of Europe. 1991. in terms of the lives lost at that point, the price was actually very, very low.
But for Putin, what was important that the state was lost, and he in particular was concerned about the division of the Russian people, which he understood back then, like he understands now, in very, very broad terms. So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life. the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.
So at least this is my reading, this is my understanding of what is there, what is on the paper and what is between the lines.
So both the unity of the sort of, quote, Russian empire and the status of the superpower.
That's how I read it.
You wrote a book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations. So let's go back into history. What is the origin of Slavic nations?
We can look at that from different perspectives. And we are now making major breakthroughs in answering this question with the very interesting innovative linguistic analysis, the study of DNA. So that's really the new frontier. We are getting into... pre-historical period where there was no historical sources.
From what we can understand today, and that can, of course, change tomorrow with all these breakthroughs in sciences, is that the Slavs came into existence somewhere in the area of Pripyat marshes, northwestern part of Ukraine. southwestern part of Belarus, eastern part of Poland, and that is considered to be a historical homeland of Slavs, and then they spread.
And they spread all the way to the Adriatic, so we have Croats, we have Russians spreading all the way to the Pacific, we have Ukrainians, we have Belarusians, Poles, Once we had Czechoslovaks, now we have Czechs and Slovaks. So that's the story of starting with the 8th and 9th century.
Even a little bit earlier, we can already follow that story with the help of the written sources, mostly from Byzantine, then later from Western Europe. But what I was trying to do, not being a scientist, not being an expert in linguistics, an expert in DNA analysis, I was trying to see what was happening in the minds of those people and the elites in particular.
whom we call today not Slavs, but Eastern Slavs, which means Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, how they imagined themselves, how they imagined their world, and eventually I look at the so-called nation-building projects. So trying to answer the question of how we arrived
to the situation in which we are today, where there are not just three East Slavic nations, but there are also three East Slavic states, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. So this is the focus of my book. I end, admittedly, in that particular book, I end on the 18th century, before the era of nationalism.
But then there are other books like Lost Kingdom, where I bring the story all the way up to today.
So what aspects of the 8th and 9th century, the East Slavic states, permeates to today that we should understand?
Well, the most important one is that the existence of the state of Kievan Rus'. back during the medieval period, created foundations for historical mythology, common historical mythology, and there are just wars and battles over who has the right or more right for Kievan Rus'. The legal code that was created at that time existed for a long period of time.
The acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium, that became a big issue that separated then Eastern Slavs from their Western neighbors, including Czechs and Poles, but united in that way to, let's say, Bulgarians or Serbs, and the beginning of the written literature. beginning in Kyiv. So all of that is considered to be part of heritage. All of that is being contested.
And these debates that were academic for a long period of time What we see now, tragically, are being continued on the battlefield.
What is Kyiv? What is Rus that you mentioned? What's the importance of these? You mentioned them as the sort of defining places and terms, labels at the beginning of all this. So what is Kyiv?
Kyiv became a capital or the outpost of the Vikings who were trying to establish control over the trade route between what is today's Western Russia and Belarus and Northern Ukraine, so the forest areas. And the biggest and the richest market in the world that existed at that time, which was in Constantinople, in Byzantium.
So the idea was to get whatever goods you can get in that part of Eastern Europe. And most of those goods were slaves. local population, put them on the ships in Kyiv, because Kyiv was on the border with the steppe zones. Steppe zones were controlled by other groups, Scythians, Sarmatians, Polovtians, Pechenegs, and so on, you name it. And then
staying on the river, being protected from attacks of the nomads to come to the Black Sea and sell these products in Constantinople. That was the idea. That was the model. Vikings tried to practice that sort of business model also in other parts of Europe. And like in other parts of Europe, they turned out to be, by default, creators of new polities, of new states.
That was the story of the first Kievan dynasty. Kiev, as the capital of that huge empire that was going from the Baltics to today's central Ukraine, and then was trying to get through the southern Ukraine to the Black Sea, that was a major, major European state, kingdom, if you want to call it, of medieval Europe.
with creating a lot of tradition in terms of dynasty, in terms of language, in terms of religion, in terms of, again, historical mythology. Kyiv is central for the nation-building myth of a number of groups in the region.
So in one perspective and narrative, Kiev is at the center of this Russian Empire. At which point does Moscow come to prominence as the center of the Russian Empire?
Well, the Russian Empire is a term and really creation of the 18th century. What we have for the Kievan, we call it Kievan Rus'. Again, this is a term of the 19th century. They call themselves Rus'. And there was metropolitanate of Rus', and there was Rus' principalities.
So, very important to keep in mind that Rus' is not Russia, because that was a self-name for all multiple groups on that territory. And Moscow doesn't exist at the time when Kiev emerges as the capital. The first reference to Moscow comes from the 12th century when it was founded by one of the Kievan princes.
Moscow comes to prominence really in a very different context and with a very different empire running the show in the region. The story of Moscow and the rise of Moscow, this is the story of the Mongol rule over former Rus lands and former Rus territories. The part of the former Rus eventually overthrows the Mongol control with the help of the small group of people called Lithuanians.
which had a young state and young dynasty and united these lands, which were mostly in today's terms Ukrainian and Belarusian. So they separate early. And what is today's Russia, mostly Western Russia, Central Russia, stays under the Mongol control up until late 15th century. That was the story when Moscow rises as the new capital of that realm, replacing the city of Vladimir as that capital.
For those who ever went to Russia, they're familiar with Vladimir as the place of the oldest architectural monuments. the so-called the Golden Ring of Russia and so on and so forth. Vladimir is central, and there are so many architectural monuments there because before there was Moscow, there was Vladimir.
Eventually, in this struggle over control of the territory, struggle for favors from the Mongols and the Tatar horde, Moscow emerges as the center of that particular realm under Mongols. after the Mongol rule is removed, Moscow embarks on the project that Russian historians of the 19th century called the Gathering of the Russian Lands.
Using Russian now for Rus', and trying to bring back the lands of former Kievan Rus', but also the lands of the former Mongol Empire. the Russians get to the Pacific before they get to Kiev, historically. And really, the quote-unquote gathering of the quote-unquote, Russian lands.
And it's only 1945 when the Soviet Union bullies the Czechoslovak government into turning what is today's Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Soviet Union. It is included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. So that's the moment when that destiny, the way how it was imagined, by the 19th century Russian historian was eventually fulfilled. Moscow was in control of all this lands.
So to what degree are the Slavic people one people, and this is a theme that will continue throughout, I think, versus a collection of multiple peoples, whether we're talking about the Kievan Rus' or we're talking about the 19th century Russian Empire conception?
Well, a number of ways to look at that. One, the most obvious, the most clear is language. And there is no question that Poles speak a separate language and they're Slavs. There is no question for anyone going to Ukraine and hearing Ukrainian, realizing that this is not Russian. The level of comprehension can be different. You can understand certain words, and you don't understand others.
The same would be with Polish, and the same would be with Czech. There is this linguistic history that is in common, but languages very clearly indicate that you're dealing with different peoples. We know that language is not everything. Americans speak a particular way of English.
Australians speak a particular variant of English, but for reasons of geography, history, we pretty much believe that despite linguistic unity, these are different nations and different peoples. Some parts of political tradition are in common, others are quite different.
So the same when it comes to language, the same when it comes to political tradition, to the loyalty to the political institution applies to Slavic nations. So that's, again, there is nothing particularly unique about the Slavs in that regard.
You wrote the book, The Cossack Myth, History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires. It tells the story of an anonymous manuscript called The History of the Rus'. It started being circulated in the 1820s. I would love it if you can tell the story of this. This is supposedly one of the most impactful texts in history, modern history. So what's the importance of this text? What did it contain?
How did it define the future of the region?
In the first decades of the 19th century, after Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious text emerged that was attributed to an Orthodox archbishop that was long dead, which was claiming that the Cossacks of Ukraine were, in fact, the original Rus' people. and that they had the right for a particular place, for a central place in the Russian Empire. And it tells the history of the Cossacks.
It's the era of romanticism, full of all sorts of drama. There are heroes, there are villains. And the text captivates the attention of some key figures in the Russian intellectual elite in St. Petersburg. people like Kondratiy Ryleyev, who was executed for his participation in the 1825 uprising, writes poetry on the basis of this text. Pushkin pays attention to it as well.
And then comes along the key figure in Ukrainian national revival of the 19th century, Ukrainian a national project, Taras Shevchenko, and reads it as well, and they all read it very differently. Eventually, by the beginning of the mid-20th century, some of the Russian mostly nationalist writers called this text the Koran of Ukrainian nationalism. So what is there?
The story, it's very important in a sense that what the authors, and that's what I claim in the book, what the authors of the text were trying to say, they were trying to say that the Kazakh elite should have the same rights as the Russian nobility. and brings the long historical record to prove how cool the Cossacks were over the period of time.
But at the beginning of the 19th century, they put this claim already, they used new arguments. And these arguments are about nation and nationalism. And they're saying that the Cossacks are a separate nation. And that's a big, big, big claim.
The Russian Empire, and this is a very, very good argument in historiography, that Russian Empire grew and acquired this one-sixth of the Earth by using one very specific way of integrating those lands. It integrated elites. was making deals with the elites, whether the elites were Muslim or the elites were Roman Catholic, as the case with the Poles.
The elites would be integrated, and the empire was based on the state loyalty and the state integration. But once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism and language, then once in a sudden, the whole model of the integration of the elites, irrespective of their language, religion, and culture, starts falling apart.
And the Poles were the first who really produced this sort of a challenge to the Russian Empire by two uprisings in the 19th century. And Ukrainians then followed in their footsteps. So the importance of the text is that it was making claim on the part of a particular state, the Kazakh officer class, which was that empire could survive.
But it turned it, given the conditions of the time, into the claim for the special role of... Cossacks as a nation, creating that this is a separate nation, a Rus' nation. That is the challenge of nationalism that no empire really survived, and the Russian Empire was not an exception.
There's a turning point when the discourse switches from loyalty based on the integration of the elites to the loyalty based on attachment to your nation, to your language, and to your culture, and to your history.
So that was like the initial spark, the flame that led to nationalist movements.
That was the beginning and the beginning that was building a bridge between the existence of the Kazakh state in the 17th and 18th century that was used as a foundation for the Kazakh mythology, Ukrainian national mythology, went into the Ukrainian national anthem.
And the new age and the new stage where the Cossacks were not there anymore, where there were professors, intellectuals, students, members of the national organizations. And it started, of course, with romantic poetry. It was started with collecting folklore and then later goes to the political stage and eventually the stage of mass politics.
So to you, even throughout the 20th century under Stalin, there was always a force within Ukraine that wanted to be independent.
There were five attempts for Ukraine to declare its independence and to maintain it in the 20th century. Only one succeeded in 1991, but there were four different attempts before. And you see the Ukrainian national identity manifesting itself in two different ways. In the form of national communism,
after the Bolshevik victory in Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine and in the form of radical nationalism in the parts of Ukraine that were controlled by Poland and Romania, and part of that was also controlled by Czechoslovakia and later Hungary. So in those parts outside of the Soviet Union, The key form of national mobilization became radical nationalism.
In Soviet Ukraine, it was national communism that came back in the 1960s and 1970s. And then in 1991, the majority of the members of the Ukrainian parliament who voted for independence were members of the Communist Party. So that spirit on a certain level never died.
So there's national communism and radical nationalism. Well, let me ask you about the radical nationalism because that is a topic that comes up in the discussion of the war in Ukraine today. Can you tell me about Stepan Bandera? Who was he, this controversial far-right Ukrainian revolutionary?
There are at least two Stepan Banderas. One is the real person, and another is mythology that really comes with this name. The real person was a young student, a journalistically-oriented student in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the part of Ukraine that was controlled by Poland.
who belonged to the generation who regretted that they were not born in time for the big struggles of the World War I and revolution at that time. They believed that their fathers lost opportunity for Ukraine to become independent and that a new ideology was needed. And that ideology was radical nationalism. And new tactics were needed.
So Bandera becomes the leader of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine at the young age and organizes a number of assassinations of the Polish officials or members of the Ukrainian community who these young people in their 17, 18, 19 considered to be collaborators.
He is arrested, put on trial, and that's where the myth of Pandera starts to emerge because he uses the trial to make statements about the Ukrainian nationalism, radical nationalism, and its goals. and suddenly becomes a hero among the Ukrainian youth at that time. He is sentenced for execution, for death. So when he delivers his speech, he knows that he probably would die soon.
And then the sentence was commuted to life sentence. to life in prison. Then World War II happens. The Polish state collapses under the pressure coming, of course, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Bandera walks away and presides over the act of the split of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists into two groups.
The most radical one you used to call revolutionary, they call themselves revolutionary, is led by Bandera. They worked together with the Nazi Germany at that time with the hope that Nazi Germany would deliver them independent Ukraine.
First days of the German Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the units formed on the basis of organization of Ukrainian nationalists march into the city of Lviv and declare Ukrainian independence. That was not sanctioned by the German authorities. That was not in German plans. So they arrest Bandera, members of his family, his brothers, leaders of the organization.
So his two brothers go to Auschwitz, die there. He was sent to Sachsenhausen for most duration of the war until 1944. refusing to revoke declaration of Ukrainian independence, which again contributes further to his mythology. After the war, he never comes back to Ukraine. He lives in exile in Munich.
So between 1930 and his death in 1959, he spent in Ukraine maybe up to two years, maybe a little bit more, but most of the time was either in the Polish prison or in the German concentration camp or in exile.
But the myth of Bandera lived, and all the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and then the Ukrainian Insurgent Army that fought against the Soviets all the way into the early 1950s, they were called Banderites. They were called band riots by the Soviet authorities. They were known also in that way to the local population.
So there was a faraway leader that barely was there on the spot, but whose name was attached to this movement for really liberation of Ukraine at that time. Again, the battle that failed.
The fact that he collaborated with the Nazis sticks. From one perspective, he's considered by many to be a hero of Ukraine for fighting for the independence of Ukraine. From another perspective, coupled with the fact that there's this radical revolutionary extremist flavor to the way he sees the world, that label just stays that he's a fascist, he's a Nazi.
To what degree is this true, to what degree is it not?
This label is certainly promoted first by the Soviet propaganda and then by Russian propaganda. It works very nicely. If you focus on the years of collaboration, those were the same years when Joseph Stalin collaborated with Hitler. We have the same reason to call Stalin a Nazi collaborator as we have the reason to call Bandera a Nazi collaborator. We look at the situation in the Pacific.
In Indonesia, in other places, the leaders who worked together with Japanese with the idea of promoting independence of their countries, after the Japanese collapse, become leaders of the empire. So the difference with Bandara is that he never becomes the leader of empire, and immunity that comes with that position certainly doesn't apply to him.
But there are other parts of his life which certainly put this whole thing in question. The fate of his family, his own time in the German concentration camp certainly don't fit the propaganda one-sided image of Bandera. In terms of him being a hero, that's a very, very interesting question because he is perceived in Ukraine today not by...
by all and probably not by the majority, but by many people in Ukraine as a symbol of fighting against the Soviet Union and by extension against Russia and Russian occupation. So his popularity grew after February 24th, 2022 as a symbol of that resistance.
Again, we are talking here about myth and mythology, because Bandera was not leading the fight against the Soviet occupation in Ukraine, because at that time he was just simply not in Ukraine. He was in Germany, and you can imagine that geography mattered at that time much more than it matters today.
There's a million questions to ask here. I think it's an important topic because it is at the center of the claimed reason that the war continues in Ukraine. So I would like to explore that from different angles. But just to clarify, was there a moment where Bandera chose Nazi Germany over the Red Army when the war already began?
So in the list of allegiances, is Ukraine's independence more important than fighting Nazi Germany, essentially?
The Ukrainian independence was their goal, and they were there to work with anybody who would support and in one way or at least allow Ukraine. The Ukrainian independence. So there is no question that they are just classic nationalists.
So the goal is, nationalism is the principle according to which the, or at least one definition is, according to which the cultural boundaries coincide with political boundaries.
So their goal was to create political boundaries that would coincide with the geographic boundaries in the conditions of the World War II and certainly making deals with whoever would either support, as I said, or tolerate that project of theirs.
So I would love to find the line between nationalism, even extreme nationalism, and fascism and Nazism. So for Bandera the myth and Bandera the person, to what degree, let's look at some of the ideology of Nazism, to which degree did he hate Jews? Was he anti-Semitic?
We know that basically in his circle there were people who were anti-Semites in a sense that, okay, we have the texts, right? We know that. We don't have that information about that sort of text or that sort of evidence with regard to Bandera himself.
In terms of fascism, there is very clear and there is research done that in particular Italian fascism had influence on the thinking of people in that organization, including people at the top. But it is also very important to keep in mind that they call themselves nationalists and revolutionaries. And despite the fact...
that in 1939, in 1940, in 1941, it was very beneficial for them to declare themselves to be Ukrainian fascists and establish this bond with not just with Italy, but with Nazi Germany. They refused to do that. And then they refused to recall their independence. So influences, yes, but clearly it's a different type of a political project.
So let me fast forward into the future and see to which degree the myth permeates. Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem?
My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine. And there are supporters of white supremacy theories. But also my understanding is that they are extremely marginal. And they are more marginal than the same sort of groups are in Central Europe, maybe in the US as well.
And for me, the question is not whether the Ukraine has it, but why even in the conditions of the war, the radical nationalism and extremism and white supremacist is such a marginal force, when in the countries that are not at the war, This is, you look at France, you look at, again, it's not exactly Nazism, but really right, radical right is becoming so important.
Why Ukraine in the conditions of the war is the country that manages relations between different ethnic groups and languages in the way that strengthens political nation. So for me as a scholar and a researcher, what I see is that in Ukraine, the influence of the far right in different variations is much lower than it is among some of Ukraine's neighbors and in Europe in general.
The question is why. I don't know. I have guesses. I don't know the answer, but that's the question that I think is interesting to answer. How Ukraine ended up to be the only country in the world outside of Israel who has a Jewish president who is, my understanding is, a The most popular president in history in terms of how long his popularity goes after the election.
So these are really, from my point of view, interesting questions. And again, we can certainly debate that.
So just for context, the most popular far-right party won 2.15% of the vote in 2019. This is before the war, so that's where things stood. It's unclear where they stand now. It'd be an interesting question whether it escalated and how much. What you're saying is that war in general...
can serve as a catalyst for expansion of extremist groups, of extremist nationalistic groups especially, like the far right. And it's interesting to see to what degree they have or have not risen to power in the shadows.
So no nationalist or nationalistic party actually crossed the barrier to get into the parliament. So Ukraine is the country where there is no right or far right in the parliament. We can't say that about Germany. We can't say that about France. So that's just one more way to stress this unique place of Ukraine in that sense. And the year 2018 is the year already of the war.
The war started in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea. The front line was near Donbas. All these groups were fighting there. So Ukraine, maybe not to a degree that it is now, was already on the war footing, and yet Yet, the right party couldn't get more than 2%. That's the question that I have in mind.
Yes, the war, historically, of course, puts forward and makes the more nationalist views and forces turn them from marginal forces into more central ones. We talked about Bandera, and we talked about Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. They were the most marginal group in the political spectrum in Ukraine in the 1930s that one can only imagine. But World War II comes.
And they become the most central group because they also were from the start go. They had the organization. The violence was basically one of their means. They knew how to fight. So historically, wars indeed produce those results. So we are looking at Ukraine. We are trying to see what is happening there.
So, Vladimir Putin, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, but many times before, said that the current goal for the war in Ukraine is denazification. That the purpose of the war is denazification. Can you explain this concept of denazification as Putin sees it?
Denazification is the trope that is accepted quite well by the by the former Soviet population and Russian population in particular. The most powerful Soviet mythology that then was basically passed as part of heritage to the Russian Federation was World War II, was fighting against fascism.
So once you use terms fascism and Nazi and denazification, suddenly people not just start listening, they just stop analyzing. As a propaganda tool, this is, of course, a very powerful tool. In terms of to what degree this is the real goal or not, we discussed the importance of the far right in Europe and in Ukraine.
If that's the real goal of the war, probably the war would have to start not against Ukraine, but probably against France or some other country if you take this at face value.
There's something really interesting here, as you mentioned. I've spoken to a lot of people in Russia, and you said analysis stops. In the West, people look at the word denazification and look at the things we've just discussed and kinda almost think this is absurd. But when you talk to people in Russia, maybe it's deep in there somewhere.
The history of World War II still reverberates through maybe the fears, maybe the pride, whatever the deep emotional history is there, it seems that the goal of denazification appears to be reasonable for people in Russia. They don't seem to see the absurdity or the complexity or even the need for analysis, I guess, in this kind of statement, word of denazification.
I would say this is broader. The war that started under the banner that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people and produces that sort of casualty really goes against also any sort of logical thinking. But Russia is a place where the free press doesn't exist already for a long period of time. Russia is the place where there is an echo chamber to a degree.
As war started first in 2014 and then all-out war in 2022, I came across a lot of people on the personal level but also in the media reporting that they really can't find common language with their close relatives in Russia. people who visited Ukraine who know that it is not taken over by nationalists and is not taken over by Nazis.
But the media around them, the neighbors around them, the people at their work basically say one and the same thing. And we as humans in general, whatever our background, we are very, very, our mind is really, it's relatively easy to manipulate it.
And to a degree that even family connections and even family ties don't sometimes help to maintain that ability to think and to analyze on your own, to look at the facts.
So Putin has alluded to the Yaroslav Hanka incident in the Canadian Parliament, September 2023. This man is a veteran of World War II on the Ukrainian side, and he got two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. But they later found out that he was part of the SS. So can you explain on this? What are your thoughts on this? This had a very big effect.
on the narrative propagated throughout the region.
Yes. What happened during World War II was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower, They created sort of foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they were created for fighting on the battleground. Because they were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted.
So they were put under the command of Henry Himmler, under command of SS, and became known as SS Waffen Units. And one of such unions was created in Ukraine with great difficulties because Nazis didn't consider Slavs to be generally worthy of even that sort of foreign legion formations.
But they made an exception because those people were coming from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary, which means part of Austria, which means somehow were open to the benevolent influence of the Germanic race, and called the division Galicia. Part of Ukrainian youth joined the division. One of the explanations was that they were looking at the experience of World War I.
and seeing that the Ukrainian units in the Austrian army then played a very important role in the fight for independence. That is one of the explanations. You can't just use one explanation to describe motivations of everyone and every single person who was joining there. They were sent to the front. They were defeated within a few short days by the Red Army.
And then were retreating through Slovakia, where they were used to fight with the partisan movement there, and eventually surrendered to the British. So that's the story. You can personally maybe understand what the good motivations were of this person or that person. But that is at the best one of the very tragic and unfortunate pages in Ukrainian history.
You can't justify that as a phenomenon. From that point of view, the celebration of that experience as opposed to looking at that, okay, that happened and we wish that those young men who were idealistic or joined the division for idealistic purposes had better understanding of things or made other choices. But you can certainly celebrate it.
And once that happened, that, of course, became a big propaganda item in the current war. We are talking about 10,000 to 20,000 people in the division. And we are talking about two to three million Ukrainians fighting in the Red Army. And again, it's not like Red Army is completely blameless in the way how it behaved in Prussia or in Germany and so on and so forth.
But it's basically, it's again, we are going back to the story of Bandera. So there is a period of collaboration and that's what propaganda tries to define him by. or there is a division, Galitsin, by 20,000 people, and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience of 2 to 3 million people.
I mean, just to clarify, I think there is just a blunder on the Canadian parliament side, the Canadian side, of not doing research. Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, they were just doing stupid, shallow political stuff. Let's applaud. When Zelensky shows up, let's have a Ukrainian veteran. Let's applaud a veteran of World War II.
And then all of a sudden you realize, well, there's actually complexities to wars. We can talk about For example, a lot of dark aspects on all sides of World War II. The mass rape at the end of World War II by the Red Army when they say Marshall was German. There's a lot of really dark complexity on all sides.
That could be an opportunity to explore the dark complexity that some of the Ukrainians were in the SS or Bandera, the complexities there. But I think they were doing not a complex thing. They were doing a very shallow applaud. And we should applaud veterans, of course. But in that case, they were doing it for show, for Zelensky and so on. So we should clarify that the applause wasn't
knowing it wasn't for the SS. It was for World War II veterans, but the propaganda, or at least an interpretation from the Russian side, from whatever side, is that they were applauding the full person standing before them, which wasn't just a Ukrainian veteran, but a Ukrainian veteran that fought for the SS.
I don't have any particular insights, but I would be very much surprised if even one person in the parliament, I mean, the members of the parliament actually knew the whole story. I would be very surprised.
Yeah, the whole story of this person, and frankly, the whole story of Ukraine and Russia in World War II, period.
Yes, yes.
Nevertheless, it had a lot of power and really reverberated in support of the narrative that there is a neo-Nazi, a Nazi problem in Ukraine.
This is the narrative that is out there. And it's especially powerful in Russia. It's especially powerful in Russia given that there are really the atmosphere that is created really is not conducive to any independent analysis.
Well, I wonder what is the most effective way to respond to that particular claim. Because there could be a discussion about nationalism and extreme nationalism and the fight for independence and whether it isn't, like Putin wrote, one people. But the question of are there Nazis in Ukraine seems to be a question that could be analyzed rigorously with data.
That is being done on the academic level, but in terms of the public response and public discourse, the only response that I see is not to focus on the questions raised and put by the propaganda, because you already become victim of that propaganda by definition, but talk about that much broadly. and talk about different aspects of, if it is World War II, about different aspects of World War II.
If it's about issue of the far right in Ukraine, let's talk about US, let's talk about Russia, let's talk about France, let's compare. That's the only way how you deal with propaganda because propaganda is not necessarily something that is an outright lie. can be just one factor that's taken out of the context and is blown out of proportion. And that is good enough.
And the way to defend against that is to bring in the context. Let us move gracefully throughout, back and forth through history, back to Bandera. You wrote a book on the KGB spy Bogdan Stashinsky. Can you tell his story?
This is a story of the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Bandera as well, already after the end of the Second World War. Because what you got after the Second World War, so imagine May of 1945, the red banner is all over Riksdag.
The Red Army is in control of half of Europe, but the units of the Red Army are still fighting the war, and not just behind the Soviet lines, but within the borders of the Soviet Union. This war continues all the way into the early 1950s, almost up to Stalin's death.
the war is conducted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which have a Ukrainian insurgent army, and the government tries to crush that resistance. So what it does is basically recruits local people to spy on the partisans on the underground. Bohdan Stashinsky is one of those people. His family is supporting the resistance. They provide food.
His sister is engaged with one of the local commanders of this underground unit. And they know everything about Stashinsky's family and they know everything about him because he is also collecting funds for the underground. So they have a conversation with him saying that, okay, that's what we got. And you and your family can go to prison or you help us a little bit.
We're interested in the fiancé of your sister, and we want to get him. And Stashinsky says yes. And once they round up the fiancé, he basically betrayed a member, almost a member of his family. He is done. He can't go back to his village. He can't go back to his study. He was studying in Lviv at that time. So he becomes, as I write in my book, the secret police becomes his family.
And he is sent to Kiev. He is trained for two years. sent to East Germany, into Berlin, and becomes an assassin. They sent him across the border to Western Germany, to Munich, which was the headquarter of Different organizations, anti-Soviet organizations, Ukrainian and Russian and Georgian and so on and so forth. And he kills two leaders of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists.
one editor of the newspaper, and eventually he kills Bandera. He does that with the new weapon, a spray pistol, that eventually makes it into the Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. And that whole episode is a little bit reshaped, but it is not in the film, but it is in the novel itself. And Dan later has a change of mind under the influence of his German fiancée and then wife.
They decide to escape to the West. While they're doing that, they discover that their apartment was bugged, and probably the KGB knows all of that. A long story short, his son dies in Berlin. The KGB doesn't allow him to go there, but his wife has a nervous breakdown, so they allow him to go there to just calm her so that there would be no scandal.
And two of them, one day before their son's burial, because after that they would be sent to Moscow, they jumped the ship and go to West Berlin. two hours before the Berlin Wall was being built. So if they would stay for the funeral, probably the KGB would not let them go. But also if they would stay, the border would be there.
And he goes to the American intelligence and says, okay, that's who I am, and that's what I did. And they look at him and they say, I don't trust you. We don't know who you are. You have documents in five names. You say you killed Bandera. Oh, we have a different information. He was poisoned and probably by someone in his close circle. A spray pistol? Did you reach too much Ian Fleming?
Where does this come from? He insists. They say, okay, you insist. If you committed all those crimes, we're giving you to the German police, and German police will be investigating you. And then the trial comes, and if he says, if he takes back his testimony, The whole case against him collapses. He can go free.
But he knows that if he goes free, he is a target of his colleagues from the same department. So his task at the trial is to prove that he is guilty, that he has did that. And then he disappears.
Nobody knows where he goes, and there are all sorts of cover stories, and I was lucky to interview a commander, former chief of the South African police, who confirmed to me that Stashinsky was in South Africa.
He fled.
The West German intelligence thought that it was too dangerous for him to stay in Germany. They sent him under a different name to South Africa. So that's the story of Stashinsky himself. But going back to Bandera, of course, the fact that he confessed and it became known that KGB assassinated Bandera, that added to the image and to general mythology about Bandera.
What a fascinating story of a village boy becoming an assassin who killed one of the most influential revolutionaries of the region in the 20th century. So what, just zooming out broadly on the KGB, how powerful was the KGB? What role did it play in this whole story of the Soviet Union?
It depends on the period. At the time that we just described, late 50s and early 60s, they were not powerful at all. And the reasons for that was that people like Khrushchev were really concerned about the secret police becoming too powerful. It became too powerful in their mind under Stalin, under Beria,
And it was concern about Beria's power as a secret police chief that led to the coup against Beria. And Khrushchev came into power and Beria was arrested and executed. And what Khrushchev was trying to do after that was trying to put, since 54, the name was already KGB, KGB under his control.
So he was appointing the former Komsomol leaders as the heads of the KGB, so the people who really owned everything to him, that sort of position. And the heads of the KGB were not members of Politburo. It changed in the 70s with Andropov, where KGB... started to play, again, a very important role in the Soviet history.
Let's say decisions on Afghanistan and the Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan were made, apart from Brezhnev, by the trio of the People who would be called today Sylviki, maybe, or not all of them were Sylviki, but one, of course, was on the drop of the head of the KGB.
Another was the Minister of Defense, and then there was Secretary in Charge of the Military-Industrial Complex, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. But the head of the KGB became really not just the member of Politburo, but the the member of that inner circle.
And then the fact that Andropov succeeds Brezhnev is also a manifestation of the power that KGB acquired really after Khrushchev in the 1970s and then going into the 1980s.
Who was more powerful, the KGB or the CIA during the Soviet Union?
The CIA, it's the organization that is charged with the information gathering and all sorts of operations, including assassinations in the 50s and 60s abroad. The KGB was the organization that really had both the surveillance over the population within the Soviet Union and also the operations abroad. And its members, its leaders were members of the inner circle for making decisions.
Again, from what I understand about the way how how politics and decisions work and decisions are made in the United States, the CIA, the chief of the CIA is not one of the decision-making group providing information. So I would say it's not day and night, but their power, political influence, political significance, very different.
Is it understood how big the KGB was? How widespread it was, given its secretive and distributed nature?
Certain things we know, others we don't, because the Stasi archives are open and most of the KGB, especially in Moscow, they're not. But we know that the KGB combined not only the internal... secret police functions at home and counterintelligence branch and intelligence branch abroad, but also the border troops, for example. Really, institutionally, it was a huge, huge mammoth.
Another thing that we know, we can sort of extrapolate from what we know from the Stasi archives, that the surveillance at home was really massive. The guess is the Soviets were not as effective and as meticulous and as scrupulous and as methodical as probably as Germans were, but that gives you a basic idea of how penetrated the entire society was.
What do you think is important to understand about the KGB if we want to also understand Vladimir Putin, since he was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years?
From my research, including on the Stashinsky, what I understand is that in KGB, and it was a powerful organization, again, less powerful in the 50s and 60s, but still a very powerful organization. There was, on the one hand, the understanding of the situation in the country and abroad that probably other organizations didn't have. They had also first peak in terms of the selecting cadres.
The work in the KGB was well paid and considered to be very prestigious. That was part to a degree of the Soviet elite in terms of whom they recruited. They had a resentment toward the party leadership. They didn't allow them to do James Bond kind of things that they would want to do because there were political risks.
After this scandal with Stashinsky, at least on many levels, the KGB stopped the practice of the assassinations, political assassinations abroad, because it was considered politically to be extremely dangerous. The person who was in charge of the KGB at the time of Bandera assassination, Shalepin, was one of the candidates to replace Khrushchev.
Brezhnev used against him that scandal abroad, eventually to remove him from Politburo. The KGB was really looking at the party leadership as to a degree ineffective, corrupt, and who was on their way. From what I understand, that's exactly the attitudes. that people like Putin and people of his circle brought to power in Kremlin.
So the methods that KGB use, they can use now, and there is no party or no other institution actually stopping them from doing that. And they think about, my understanding, the operations abroad, about foreign policy in general in terms of the KGB mindset of planning operations and executing particular operations and so on and so forth.
I think a lot of culture that came into existence in the Soviet KGB now became part of the culture of the Russian establishment.
You wrote the book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, that gives the full context leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022. So can you take me through the key moments in history that led up to this war? So we'll mention... the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We could probably go much farther back, but the collapse of the Soviet Union, mentioned 2014, maybe you can highlight key moments that led up to 2022.
The key moments would be first the year 2004, known for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and then the year 2013, known as the Revolution of Dignity. Both were the revolts against something that, by a significant part of the Ukrainian population, was considered to be completely unacceptable actions on the part of the government and people in the government at that time.
So the Orange Revolution of 2004 was a protest against falsified presidential elections. and rejection of a candidate that was supported by Russia, publicly supported by Russia. I remember being in Moscow at that time and couldn't believe my eyes when in the center of Russia I saw a billboard with Yanukovych.
The trick was that there were a lot of Ukrainians in Russia and in Moscow in particular, and they had the right to vote. It led to the election of, as Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who put on the agenda the issue of Ukraine's membership in NATO. So it was very clear pro-Western orientation.
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.
So there's a division, a push and pull inside Ukraine on identity of whether they're part of Russia or part of Europe. And you highlighted two moments in Ukrainian history that there's a big flare-up where the statement was first, Ukraine is not Russia, and essentially Ukraine is part of Europe. But there's other moments.
Mm-hmm.
What were the defining moments that began an actual war? And then don't pass.
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.