What is ukraine

Ukraine may count among the small handful of countries which have largely avoided such non-democratic trends, arguably along with Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Indeed, there is a sweet irony in the comparison with Canada, which might provide an example for enshrining multiculturalism as a formal policy.

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Consists chiefly of lowlands; economy based on rich agriculture and mineral resources and on the major heavy industries of the Donets Basin. Official language: Ukrainian; Russian is also widely spoken. Religion: believers are mainly Christian. Currency: hryvna. Capital: Kiev. Pop: 44 est. Area: sq km sq miles. Under oppressive Polish and Russian rule in the seventeenth century, Ukrainian fugitives, known as Cossacks , organized resistance movements. Since then, several big things have happened.

In February, anti-government protests toppled the government and ran Yanukovych out of the country. Russia, trying to salvage its lost influence in Ukraine, invaded and annexed Crimea the next month. In April, pro-Russia separatist rebels began seizing territory in eastern Ukraine.

The rebels shot down Malaysian Airlines flight 17 on July 17, killing people, probably accidentally. Fighting between the rebels and the Ukrainian military intensified, the rebels started losing, and, in August, the Russian army overtly invaded eastern Ukraine to support the rebels. This has all brought the relationship between Russia and the West to its lowest point since the Cold War.

Sanctions are pushing the Russian economy to the brink of recession, and more than 2, Ukrainians have been killed. A lot of this comes down to Ukraine's centuries-long history of Russian domination.

The country has been divided more or less evenly between Ukrainians who see Ukraine as part of Europe and those who see it as intrinsically linked to Russia.

An internal political crisis over that disagreement may have been inevitable. Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin is pushing an imperial-revival, nationalist worldview that sees Ukraine as part of greater Russia — and as the victim of ever-encroaching Western hostility.

It appears unlikely that Ukraine will get Crimea back. It remains unclear whether Russian forces will try to annex parts of eastern Ukraine as well, how the fighting there will end, and what this means for the future of Ukraine — and for Putin's increasingly hostile but isolated Russia.

It used to be "the Ukraine," but after breaking away from the Soviet Union in the name changed to just "Ukraine. Ukraine has a very long history of being subjugated by outside powers, and a very short history of national independence.

That may actually be why the country became known as "the Ukraine," which many historians think meant "the borderland" in the language of ancient Slavs it may also mean "the homeland," a theory that Ukrainian nationalists understandably prefer. In other words, it may have been called "the" because it was considered more of a geographic region than an independent country, and one defined by its in-between-ness. You've got to reach pretty far back in history to find the last time Ukraine was independent, before There were a few years right after World War I, and before that a short time in the s.

The country has been under partial or total Russian rule for most of those intervening centuries, which is a big part of why one in six Ukrainians is actually an ethnic Russian, one in three speaks Russian as their native language the other two-thirds speak Ukrainian natively , and much of the country's media is in Russian.

It's also why the subject of Russia is such a divisive one in Ukraine: a lot of the country sees Moscow as the source of Ukraine's historical subjugation and something to be resisted, while others tend to look on Russia more fondly , with a sense of shared heritage and history.

Crimea is considered by most of the world to be a region of Ukraine that's under hostile Russian occupation. Russia considers it a rightful and historical region of Russia that it helped to liberate in March. Geographically, it is a peninsula in the Black Sea with a location so strategically important that it has been fought over for centuries. From Ukraine's independence up through February , it was a Ukrainian region that had special autonomy and large Russian military bases kind of like how the US has bases in Japan and Germany.

Crucially, Crimea spent a very long time before as part of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, and most of its citizens are Russians themselves. In late February, a few days after Ukraine's pro-Moscow president was ousted from power, strange bands of armed gunmen began seizing government buildings in Crimea. Some Crimeans held rallies to show support for the ousted president and, in some cases, to call to secede from Ukraine and re-join Russia.

The bands of gunmen grew until it became obvious they were Russian military forces, who forcefully but bloodlessly brought the entire peninsula under military occupation. On March 16, Crimeans voted overwhelmingly for their region to become a part of Russia. Most of the world sees Crimea's secession vote as illegitimate for a few reasons: it was held under hostile Russian military occupation with no international monitoring and many reports of intimidation, it was pushed through with only a couple of weeks' warning, and it was illegal under Ukrainian law.

Still, legitimate or not, Crimea has effectively become part of Russia. The US and European Union have imposed economic sanctions on Russia to punish Moscow for this, but there is no sign that Crimea will return to Ukraine. The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in April with low-level fighting between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatist rebels who seized some towns in predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. It has since escalated to outright-if-undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine.

Separatist rebels began popping up in eastern Ukraine shortly after Russia had invaded and annexed Crimea, where supposed Crimean separatists actually turned out to be unmarked Russian special forces. They seized towns like Sloviansk and Donetsk, in the eastern region known as Donbas, ostensibly in outrage against the protests that had toppled Ukraine's pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych, himself from that same eastern region. That feeling of disenfranchisement among eastern Ukrainians is real, and the rebels likely do have some organic, local support.

Still, the rebels were armed and supported by Russia's government. One of the most important rebel leaders, Igor "Strelkov" Girkin, is a Russian citizen and military veteran who retired from Russia's internal security services just weeks before he began leading the rebels, who are widely thought to include unmarked Russian special forces.

Thousands of Russian troops massed on the border just across from the rebellion. For months, Ukraine did not move very aggressively against the rebels: Putin had not-so-subtly hinted that, if they did, he would blame the Ukrainian government for any deaths and invade to protect the Russian-speaking citizens of eastern Ukraine, whom he implicitly considers to be more Russian than Ukrainian. Everyone wanted to negotiate a peace deal. Things got bad in early July, when the Ukrainian government launched an offensive to push out the rebels once and for all.

Russia started arming the rebels with high-tech surface-to-air missiles; on July 17 a civilian airliner with people on board was shot down over eastern Ukraine, most likely accidentally by the rebels , and the world had finally had enough.

Ukraine redoubled its offensive, the rebels looked on the verge of getting overrun, and in mid-August Russia escalated from covertly supporting the rebels to overtly invading with Russian military troops. Russia denies it is invading, but the evidence is overwhelming: on August 15, Ukraine said its military engaged Russian tanks crossing the border; on August 16, the leader of the Russian-backed rebels announced he had received 1, troops from Russia; on August 21, satellite imagery spotted Russian artillery crossing the border to fire at Ukrainian forces; on August 26, someone in Ukraine took a video of Russian tanks crashing through town, and so on.

The Russian military is one of the largest in the world and is pushing back the Ukrainian forces fairly quickly. It is not clear whether they plan to occupy and annex eastern Ukraine as they did in Crimea, or simply to defend the rebels against getting overrun — if Putin even has a strategy at all.

The US and Europe, while clearly outraged and punishing Russia with economic sanctions, have no plan to intervene, as putting Western troops into direct combat with Russian troops could make the risk of World War Three too great. So there is nothing stopping the Russian tanks. Though President Vladimir Putin insists that Russia is not invading eastern Ukraine, Russian soldiers, tanks, and self-propelled artillery have been crossing the border since mid-August in what can only be described as a hostile invasion.

There are two ways to think about why Putin is doing this: as a rational, strategic effort to take something from Ukraine, or as a less-rational action driven by domestic Russian politics.

Theory 1: Putin is trying to overturn to the rebels' losses because he wants something from Ukraine. On the surface, the Russian invasion looks like it is meant to bolster the pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine, who began losing ground in early August when the Ukrainian military began a renewed offensive against them. In this thinking, Russian troops are there to keep the rebels from being entirely overrun. Putin has been backing the rebels for months and fomenting violence in eastern Ukraine.

He's doing this either because he wants to maintain a perpetual separatist crisis he did this in Georgia and Moldova as well so that he has leverage over the Ukrainian government to keep it from crossing him, or because he wanted to give himself an excuse to invade on the premise of saving eastern Ukrainians, then annex that territory as he did in Crimea. In any case, the thinking here is that Putin is after some immediate strategic goal, and will stop once he feels he's achieved it.

Theory 2: Putin was sucked into an irrational invasion he didn't want by his own rhetoric and propaganda. Since taking power in , Putin governed through an implicit deal with the Russian people: he delivered high economic growth, and Russians accepted curbs to political and individual rights. But after the economy slowed and some Russians protested his sham reelection in , Putin shifted strategies, focusing on stirring up old-school anti-Western paranoia and imperial-style Russian nationalism.

So when the Ukraine crisis started, Putin's state media spun up a narrative that the Ukrainian protests were an American conspiracy to isolate Russia and that the new Ukrainian government is run by secret Nazis bent on expansion. Sponsoring the rebels and saving Ukraine — which in the Russian nationalist view is really part of Russia — became a matter of national pride, of asserting Russia's defiance of the West.

Sure enough, when Putin invaded and annexed Crimea in March, his slouching approval rating skyrocketed. Putin, addicted, has played up the nationalist cause in eastern Ukraine, the heroism of the rebels, his own heroism in backing them, and the threat of Ukraine's "fascist" government.

Were he to sit idly by while the rebels were defeated, it would show that his rhetoric was a lie and leave him without the nationalist cause on which he now bases his political legitimacy. So, with no other way out, he invaded. Putin is not crazy, but he may have created a crisis with an internal momentum so great that it has broken beyond his control. That is a truly scary possibility. This is actually a legitimately difficult question. Yes, the way that Russia seized Crimea by force from Ukraine this March was hostile and extremely illegal — there is no doubt about this.

But the more abstract question of whether Crimea is deep down Russian or Ukrainian is much less clear. There are three ways to think about this question, and they all contradict. The reasons for this are esoteric and it didn't actually do much since both "republics" were part of the Soviet Union.

In , when the Soviet Union broke up, everyone expected Moscow to demand Crimea back. But it didn't. A slight majority of Crimeans voted for independence from Russia, and when Crimea formally joined the newly independent Ukraine but with special autonomy privileges , Russia promised to honor and respect this.

Most Crimeans are ethnically Russian, not Ukrainian. While Crimea has been changing hands between regional powers for centuries, for most of the last plus years it has been part of Russia.

The fact that everyone expected Russia to take it back when the Soviet Union broke up in tells you a lot: the world often sees it as historically Russian as well. It was not shocking when, in February, some Crimeans held pro-Russia rallies. Since the crisis began, some Crimeans have been holding pro-Moscow rallies calling to rejoin Russia. In mid-February, a poll found that 41 percent of Crimeans wanted the region to become part of Russia.

That's an awful lot — but it's still not a majority. Crimea's March referendum on leaving Ukraine for Russia ostensibly garnered 97 percent support, but it occurred in a rush, without international monitors, and under Russian military occupation. A draft UN investigative report found that critics of secession within Crimea were detained and tortured in the days before the vote; it also found "many reports of vote-rigging.

They're called the "Euromaidan" protests because they were about Europe and they happened in Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti Independence Square. Lots of Ukrainians had wanted the EU deal, partly because they thought it would help Ukraine's deeply troubled economy, and partly because they saw closer ties with Europe as culturally and politically desirable.

The second, deeper reason for the protests was that many Ukrainians saw Yanukovych as corrupt and autocratic and as a stooge of Russia. So his decision to reject the EU deal felt, to many Ukrainians, like he had sold out their country to Moscow.

This is why the protesters so quickly expanded their demands from "sign the EU deal" to "Yanukovych must step down.

Over the months that followed, Yanukovych tried to break up the protests, first by sending in the dreaded "berkut" internal security forces to crack down, and next by passing a series of laws that severely restricted Ukrainians' basic rights of speech and assembly. Both of these just made protests worse. By late January, they'd expanded to lots of other Ukrainian cities.