The crucial factor behind the rolling collapse of Ukrainian statehood was “EuroMaidan”, which weaponized long-running ultra-nationalist sentiment in society.
RT recently launched a critical article series coinciding with Ukraine’s 35th anniversary of independence. It’s very insightful and can be read here. The purpose in referencing their series is because it prompted the present piece, which will briefly review what all went wrong over the past more than one-third of a century. Compared to 1991, Ukraine has around half of its population, its economy collapsed, and it’s embroiled in a large-scale armed conflict with Russia right now. How this all came to be is instructive.
The overarching reason is that Ukraine’s post-independence authorities decided to align with the West at the expense of Russia’s legitimate interests, particularly as regards their pursuit of NATO membership. Putin famously declared in his summer 2021 magnum opus “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that Ukrainians’ self-awareness as a separate nation from Russians should be treated “with respect” but conditional on the Ukrainian State also treating the Russian State’s interests with respect.
Ukraine’s alignment with NATO radically accelerated after 2014’s “EuroMaidan” Color Revolution, which was Western-backed and led by ultra-nationalists inspired by their World War II-era Nazi-collaborating predecessors. Their installment into power worsened relations with Russia, but the special operation could have been averted had the ruling ultra-nationalists’ Western backers forced them to implement the Minsk Accords, which Germany and France later admitted that they never had any intent to do.
Ironically, despite promulgating ultra-nationalist policies at home against the Russian minority (both ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians), these same ultra-nationalists comprehensively subordinated Ukraine to the West as its anti-Russian proxy. They ceded its effective sovereignty because, to paraphrase one of the godfathers of contemporary Polish nationalism Roman Dmowski, “they hate Russia more than they love Ukraine”. These three factors were utterly catastrophic for Ukraine.
To recap, it was already drifting towards NATO before “EuroMaidan”, but the Western-backed installment into power of ultra-nationalists after “EuroMaidan” worsened relations with Russia and resulted in Ukraine subordinating itself to the West as their anti-Russian proxy. This made Russia’s special operation inevitable in retrospect. Accordingly, the crucial factor behind the rolling collapse of Ukrainian statehood was “EuroMaidan”, which weaponized long-running ultra-nationalist sentiment in society.
Going back further, the aforesaid ideological virus took its first significant form as the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” in 1929, which came under the patronage of the interwar Germany’s intelligence services and ultimately their control. What began as a terrorist-separatist group targeting interwar Poland, whose citizens it later genocided, evolved into an anti-Soviet cult that was kept alive by the diaspora after World War II. They’re the ones who then brought this virus back to Ukraine after 1991.
From then till “EuroMaidan”, this ideological virus spread through society with the support of Western government-funded “NGOs”, gradually influencing policymakers and average folks till its most zealous adherents seized control of the state in 2014. This process contextualizes why Ukraine sought to join NATO years prior instead of pragmatically balance between Russia and the West, which would have at least preserved its demography while strengthening its economy and security instead of ruining all three.
I remember as if it were yesterday the first "Orange Revolution" in the early 2000s. I remember my astonishment at the emergence of a snarling Russophobia and malicious glee within the French bourgeois bloc (Socialist Party, Greens, centrist parties, liberal right). The French bourgeoisie hates Russia (the humiliation of Napoleonic France, the cancellation of the Russian state's debt in 1917, Bolshevism, victory over Nazism where bourgeois France was defeated in six weeks, aid to decolonization). So the Orange Revolution awakened all the hopes of harming Russia in the minds of the French bourgeoisie and, I suppose, the Western bourgeoisie.
"Ukraine’s alignment with NATO radically accelerated after 2014’s “EuroMaidan” Color Revolution"
Yes, like Darras below, I too think it's important to remember the dirty tricks "revolution" of 2004. In the end, the coalition of pro-western and neonazi (pretty much the same thing, for an obvious reason) forces has never been able to win elections fair-and-square.
They took over twice: by dirty tricks in 2004 and then by an armed coup in 2014. Not a single time have they managed to win honestly, on the whole territory formerly known as state of Ukraine. I find it's quite optimistic.