President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched a “specialised military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. He vowed, during a 28-minute-long address to the Russian nation from the Kremlin, “to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the regime in Kyiv for eight years” and to pursue the demilitarisation and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. From whatever perspective you view the unfolding crisis in Ukraine, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the nation holds a special place in the Russian public psyche, with shared cultural, economic, political, and religious ties from the past, as demonstrated by rising support for Putin in recent public opinion polls. Russia’s leadership appears determined to ensure that Ukraine does not stray too far from the Russian sphere of influence, enticed by the prospects of joining the EU and NATO, and to reverse the westward-looking direction that Ukraine has taken after the “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Of the three Slavic states that once formed part of the Soviet Union, Russia and Belarus can be considered to have remained roughly on the same page, just as Ukraine has continued to drift westward.
The Republic of Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe and previously the second-largest of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, declared its independence on 24 August 1991, making it a sovereign nation-state for the very first time in its history. It occupies the south-western corner of the Russian Plain (East European Plain), at the south-eastern edge of Europe and along the frontier between Europe and Eurasia, in a location of great symbolic and strategic importance to Russia. Ukraine’s crucial location is also important to European energy security as its pipelines transport up to 80 per cent of the EU’s natural gas supplies from Russia (40 per cent of total EU consumption). Its name is appropriately derived from Ukraina, a word that dates back to at least 1187 and means ‘borderland’.
Ukraine’s longest international border, with Russia, is 1,426 miles long, while the Belarus border runs for 620 miles. The other borders are with Poland and Slovakia to the west, and Hungary, Romania, and Moldova to the south. The country’s southern coastline runs along the Black Sea, with Ukraine’s main port of Odessa, and the Sea of Azov, with the ports of Berdyansk and Mariupol. The Crimean Peninsula separates the two seas. Around 70 per cent of Ukraine’s trade is seaborne. The Sea of Azov provides an outlet for exports from eastern Ukraine, and is also the route by which Russia sends supplies to Crimea. Russia controls the Kerch Strait, which connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, thereby exerting a stranglehold on the eastern Ukrainian ports.
Ukraine’s flat and low-lying landscape is dominated by plains and plateaus (including the steppe), with its fertile black earth (chernozem) making it a “breadbasket” of productive agriculture for Europe and a leading shipper of grain. Forests can be found to the north, while coal, manganese, and iron ore deposits have encouraged the industrialisation of the southeast. There are no natural barriers, except for the Carpathian Mountains in the west, making Ukraine a passing place for successive hordes of invaders in the past. Ukraine is also a land of great rivers that run from north to south and empty into the Black Sea, including the Dnieper (a major source of hydroelectric power), on which the capital city of Kyiv sits, the Southern Buh, and the Dnister. In the east, the Donets, which gives its name to the Donets Basin (Donbas) flows into the Sea of Azov via the Don River.
Ethnic Ukrainians form the majority of the population, while the Russian minority, of around eight million, is concentrated in the industrial and mining regions of southeast Ukraine, including the Donbas. The Crimean Peninsula to the south has an ethnic Russian majority. Russian intervention in Ukraine has been driven by a perceived duty to protect the rights of ethnic Russians outside Russia and to advance the concept of a “Greater Russia”. It is fortuitous that Crimea once belonged to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), between 1920 and 1954, before being transferred to Ukraine in 1954, only to be re-annexed by Russia in March 2014. The annexation of Crimea consolidated Russia presence in the south, what with its Black Sea Fleet being based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Also in 2014, pro-Russian separatist rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of eastern Ukraine declared People’s Republics in their territories, in a replay of the proclamation of “breakaway” Russian-dominated republics in Georgia (South Ossetia, Abkhazia) and Moldova (Transnistria).
Left to its own devices, Ukraine poses no threat to Russia’s overwhelming military might. Its defences are no match for Russia’s firepower when you compare numbers of active military personnel, and inventories of ammunition, armoured vehicles, missile systems, attack aircraft, and naval vessels, among others. For example, Ukraine has 69 fighter jets against Russia’s 772, while its 38 naval vessels are but a fraction of Russia’s 605. Furthermore, Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union, was handed over to Russia to be dismantled, under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
Ukraine has had a bumpy ride since independence, marked by internal discord, a fragile democracy, pervasive corruption, economic instability, widespread poverty, and a growing dependence on foreign aid, particularly from the US. There seems little reason to spend time pondering over the possible outcome of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which is best left to the army of pundits busy gathering their thoughts, nor over the effects of the rather limited economics sanctions being imposed by Western powers on Russian billionaires, corporations, and financial institutions. Events will speak for themselves, hopefully leaving us wiser in their aftermath.
Ashis Banerjee