A not-so-happy anniversary — Ukraine turns 34 in the midst of a brutal war

On Sunday, 24 August 2025, Ukraine marked 34 years of independence from a dying Soviet Union. Since 1921, this new country — albeit a society and land with a long, complex history — had been the second-largest constituent republic of the old USSR.

That had followed a brief, independent existence after the collapse of Tsarist Russia in the final years of World War 1. Much of the terrible fighting on the Eastern Front in that conflict and the subsequent Russian civil war took place on Ukrainian territory. That violence — and worse — was repeated two decades later in World War 2.

After Ukraine was forcibly reintegrated into the new Soviet Union in 1922, in the early 1930s, during Joseph Stalin’s rule, efforts to forcibly extract agricultural resources from Ukrainian peasant farmers to feed the USSR’s hungry cities produced a human-made famine, the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of at least three million people. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians have not forgotten — or forgiven — that bitter experience.

Much further back in history, the vast, open, fertile grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe, which later became known as Ukraine, had been the home turf of the nomadic Scythians (creators of those magnificent golden artefacts now in museums around the world).

This land eventually hosted Greek and Roman trading colonies, and much later, Genoa’s entrepôt settlements along the northern Black Sea littoral. Those colonies traded for furs, slaves, amber, gold and other commodities.

Vikings

By the ninth century AD, Varangians, or Vikings as they were known in their westward raids around Western Europe, had moved through the region’s river systems from their homelands on the Baltic Sea, through the steppes and on to the Black Sea.

These raiders/traders were central in turning a small settlement into the fortified trading settlement of Kyivan Rus. For Ukrainians, that settlement signals the beginnings of the Ukrainian polity, even as Russians claim the same Kyivan Rus marks the effective origins of what became Muscovy/Russia.

The impact of this historical moment is either, in Russian thinking, something that united two peoples, or, in Ukrainian eyes, an origin story that bolsters Ukraine’s sense of uniqueness, separate from any developments further north.

This unity of the two peoples, however, has been reiterated in speeches by Russian President Vladimir Putin and is prevalent in the writings of the historians and philosophers he embraces. For them, Kyivan Rus is a key element of the belief that the essential unity of Ukrainians and Russians has been sundered by outside forces historically, and as new forces continue to aim at breaking up Russia.

The Mongol conquests of much of Eurasia thoroughly upended the circumstances of the Ukrainian heartland. Much of the territory came under the Mongols’ khanate of the Golden Horde, then a Tatar khanate centred on Crimea, and then, in the southern region, ruled by an expanding Ottoman Empire following the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Three centuries later, Russia wrested Crimea from the Ottomans. Over centuries, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire fed a Russian idea that their state was the third Rome, and the Ukrainian lands were part of that. Such ideas have subtly influenced the thoughts of Russian leaders.

After years of confused warfare across the region, the expanding Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth controlled significant parts of the Ukrainian heartland. A Cossack rebellion that began in 1648 ended as parts of these steppe lands fell under the control of an expanding Muscovy/Russia.

That domination became still more extensive with the three partitions of Poland-Lithuania by Prussia, Austria and Russia from 1772 to 1795. The partitions gave a lion’s share of Ukrainian lands to Russia, although the western reaches, including the city of Lwów/Lviv, went to Austria. These boundaries remained until the collapse of empires after the First World War.

Rise of nationalism

By the 19th century, in western Ukraine under Austria — in common with the rise of nationalism across much of the rest of Europe — newspapers and other publications helped fuel a growing sense of Ukrainian nationalism, even as Austria’s territory Galicia was a demographic mix of Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Poles, Austrian-Germans and Jews.

Joseph Roth’s evocative novel “The Radetzky March” was set in this region, in the years leading up to the end of the Habsburg Empire, and that mix of peoples served as the novel’s backdrop. People in Russia’s Ukraine, meanwhile, were pressurised to Russify education, language, cultural activities and religious practices.

Throughout history, a major challenge to building a sense of nationhood has been the absence of natural borders that define a nation. Over hundreds of years, the imperial and national borders have shifted with the rise and decline of empires sprawling across the landscape, what historian Anne Applebaum defined in the title of one of her books as the situation “Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe”.

In Russian Ukraine, the Pale of Settlement restricted the nation’s Jewish population (largely inherited with the demise of Poland) to limited areas that largely coincided with Belarus, the Baltics and Ukraine. Over time, the city of Odesa had become a multi-ethnic port and industrial town, with many active radical groups among its various ethnic groups.

After World War 1 and its brief period of independence, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union, suffering the Holodomor in the 1930s. Then, in the Second World War, there was again much fighting and devastation in Ukraine.

In the post-war era, many of the Crimean Tatar population were exiled from their traditional lands on suspicion that they had allied themselves with Nazi Germany. The Crimean peninsula and its surrounding territory were administratively transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Stalin as a “reward” for the province’s immense suffering during the war.

When Ukraine declared independence in 1991, it had inherited the world’s third-largest collection of nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union. As part of a series of agreements that included Russia as a signatory, these weapons were decommissioned, and Ukraine’s sovereignty and current boundaries were guaranteed.

(In a historical sidelight, US President George HW Bush had initially advised Ukrainian leaders not to divorce entirely from Russia. Presumably this was because such a split might lead to regional instability — and even the leakage of nuclear weapons to non-state actors.)

Independence

The first years of independence were marked by an economic free fall and the difficult task of building a state from the wreckage of the Soviet era. Leonid Kravchuk and then Leonid Kuchma presided over privatisation efforts that enriched a handful of oligarchs (a phenomenon not unfamiliar to South African readers), but left ordinary citizens increasingly disillusioned. Regardless, Ukraine held on to its sovereignty, even as Moscow sought to draw it back into the Russian sphere of influence.

Economically, from the 19th century onward, the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine had become an increasingly important mining and heavy industry area, with a growing population of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. After Ukraine declared its independence, Russia encouraged and then supported separatist movements in that region — the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk — including the reported dispatching of troops not wearing any uniforms or insignia, the “little green men.” Then, in 2014, Russia sent its forces into Crimea to carry out a de facto annexation that included a referendum with an implausible 98% support for the annexation.

A line of Ukrainian presidents largely oriented towards Russia ended when the indecently corrupt Viktor Yanukovych (he of the private zoo) fled the country in response to massive protests. Yanukovych, the Kremlin’s favoured son, had worked his way back to power in 2010, and then in 2013, under Russian pressure, he rejected an agreement with the European Union.

Once again, massive protests erupted in Ukraine, and despite security forces’ efforts to break the protests, the protesters prevailed, and Yanukovych fled to seek refuge in exile, leaving behind his exotic assemblage of animals.

The current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former lawyer, popular television comic and entertainment executive, was elected president, with the irony of a comic actor who had played a president in a TV series actually becoming one. Zelensky’s goals were clearly aimed at building strong ties with Western Europe, despite Russian growling about those ambitions.

‘Special military operation’

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched its “special military operation”, hoping to seize Kyiv quickly, force Zelensky out of office and into exile (or even kill him), and install a new president who would reposition Ukraine away from building ties with Western Europe. (In Ukraine, it was hoped the country could eventually join the EU and even Nato, thereby cementing further integration into Western European economic life.)

The war that had begun with a quick knockout advance to the capital by the Russian army was only just repelled. The war has now raged on for more than three years, with no real path towards a peaceful settlement. One unexpected development has been the extraordinary increase in the use of weaponised drones by both sides, creating a new global conversation about the future technology of warfare.

Yet, in the progress of the war so far, there is a remarkable counterpoint. Despite wide expectations, Ukraine has endured. Its politics, shaped by struggle, are increasingly a testament to resilience. Whereas Putin has wagered on the effect of fear, both internationally and domestically, Ukrainians have gambled on defending their national independence and freedom. The country’s politics have become resilient, and its resistance has reminded the world of something too easy to forget: democracy remains worth defending.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Ukrainians now is maintaining a flow of military equipment, intel and financial support from elsewhere. This comes in the face of continuing piecemeal attacks by Russia — and also from strategic and tactical difficulties from the on-again, off-again support by Donald Trump’s administration. The US president appears oblivious to the dangers a Ukrainian defeat would pose to Western Europe.

He recently slid towards endorsing a ceasefire while an all-encompassing agreement was eventually negotiated, but after he met Putin in Alaska, he flipped to favouring negotiations towards a peace treaty, but without a ceasefire. This is despite the obvious threat that while negotiations would probably proceed slowly and fitfully, Russian military pressures could continue.

Any peace treaty would also come with Russian insistence on including Ukrainian territory beyond that already achieved in battle, plus Ukrainian acquiescence to effective limitations on its sovereignty, such as which international bodies it could apply to join.

The Trump position is to offer some vague formulation about land swaps, a continuation of arms sales to European nations that could be passed on to Ukraine, and a vague security guarantee. That last comes without any actual force commitments.

With all of this on the table, what seems most likely is that Ukraine will be forced to continue to fight off Russian advances as best it can and to hope Russians become even more weary of the war Putin started than they, the Ukrainians, have already become. DM