Other famines in the 1920s and 1940s each led to the deaths of 1 million people. In the 20th century, Russian Bolsheviks destroyed Ukrainian independence, exterminated its intelligentsia and killed about 4 million people in the 1932-1933 artificial famine. For much of the 19th century, the Russian empire banned the Ukrainian language from public use and sent leaders of its culture to prisons or exile. Ukraine has paid a high price for daring to challenge Russian authoritarianism throughout its history-and still is today. And in the 20th century, the Ukrainian version of socialism was oriented towards European models of cooperative economics and emancipation of peasants and workers, rather than the Russian model of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In the 19th century, Ukrainian intellectuals developed an idea of bottom-up politics focused on autonomous communities ( hromadas), against tsarist autocracy. In the early modern period, the Ukrainian Cossack polity formed a model of republican politics and contractual idea of the state different from the rising Muscovite authoritarianism. In the Middle Ages, Kyivan Rus' was a pluralistic political entity organized around multiple centers of influence of city-states, without a single tyrannical ruler. In fact, Ukraine has been developing a political culture centered around rights and against tyranny for centuries. The country's struggle against Russian authoritarianism is not new. The Ukrainian struggle for freedom and democracy is a universal one. Seventy-two percent of Ukrainians believe Russia is a hostile country 68 percent want to join the EU and 62 percent want to join NATO. This is why Russia has been so desperate to bring Ukraine back into its sphere of influence.īut the reality is that Russia has lost the battle for Ukrainians' hearts and minds. To Putin, a democratic Ukraine represents an existential threat to his new Russian imperialism-a political model centered around the cult of state and new Leviathan, rehabilitating Stalinism in domestic and foreign politics. This belligerent rhetoric is explained by one simple fact. What's more, Putin accused Ukraine of committing "genocide" in Russia-occupied Donbas-failing to explain how exactly that could happen in territories Ukraine has had no access to for eight years. All these allegations were a pretext for Putin to recognize the "independence" of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" and justify the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian troops. He denied Ukraine's right to exist pushed false narratives that the post-2014 Ukrainian government is illegitimate and subscribes to a radical nationalist ideology and portrayed Ukraine as an aggressive state willing to take back the Russia-occupied Donbas by military means. Earlier this week, ahead of his formal order for the invasion of Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave one of his most aggressive speeches yet.
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