Today, Explained - Why the Ukraine war happened

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Vladimir Putin believes Ukraine belongs to Russia, and he used that a pretense to invade. In an episode originally released in February, historian Timothy Snyder explains why Putin is wrong. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. In this last long year, Russia's President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and started a war that would shatter parts of Eastern Europe. It seemed like a deranged move, and yet Putin told the world exactly why he was doing it. I would like to start by saying that the modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia. After the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, some Ukrainians called for independence. They wanted a republic.

And for the next 100-plus years, the relationship between Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine has been marked by animosity over Ukraine's desire to be a nation and Russia's desire for it not to be. Putin says Ukraine is not a country. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who studies Eastern Europe, says, yes, it absolutely is. Coming up, we revisit one of our favorite conversations of 2022. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today, today explain. When we listen to other people's propaganda, it enables us to make exceptions on our own mind. That's Timothy Snyder. He's a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale. If we listen to what Mr. Putin says about Ukraine, we start to think, oh, there's a loophole here, or there's an excuse there, or there's some reason why we shouldn't be treating the country of Ukraine, the state of Ukraine, the people of Ukraine like everybody else. And my point was to say, no, it's, you know, it's a state, it's a country, it's a people very much like other peoples. And if anything, you know, more interesting.

The propaganda you're referring to, in part, is Russian President Vladimir Putin's claim that Ukraine is not a country, that it was entirely created by Russia. What is the argument that he is making? I'll address it, but I would first just suggest that it's much more a framing device than it is an argument. If I say that Canada is not a country, it's just a creation of the United Kingdom, it's going to sound ridiculous. But the technical argument is that when the Soviet Union was created, this is Putin's argument, I'm going to make it for him. When the Soviet Union was created, a Ukrainian republic was established. And as a result of Bolshevik's policy, the Soviet Ukraine was created. In that sense, Ukraine was created by the Soviet Union.

That it's Ukraine created by Vladimir Lenin. He's its creator and architect. Union. Now, there are at least three terribly wrong things about this argument. Number one, the Soviet Union is not the same thing as Russia. It was established deliberately as a non-Russian, but as an internationalist project. Number two, he's got it completely backwards because the Soviet Union was created as a federation of national units precisely because everybody, including internationalists like Lenin, understood in 1917, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, that the Ukrainian question was real. A century ago, this was not actually a big debate, even on the far left. Several years of watching people being willing to fight and die for Ukraine convinced the communists who founded the Soviet Union that there was a real question here, and they had to have a

real answer for it. So in that sense, it would be truer to say Ukraine created the Soviet Union, because without the general acknowledgement of a Ukrainian question, the Soviet Union, because without the general acknowledgement of a Ukrainian question, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been set up the way that it was. But then the third point, I mean, the third way this is just absurd is that, of course, Ukrainian history goes way back before 1918. I mean, there are medieval events which flow into it, early modern events that flow into it, there's a national movement in the 19th century. All of that is, going back to your earlier question, all that falls into completely normal European parameters. So Ukraine didn't get created in any sense when the Soviet Union was created. It was already there, and it already had an extremely interesting history.

And during the times of the Soviet Union, was Ukraine allowed to be its own country in terms of language and culture? It goes back and forth. When they set up the Soviet Union in 1922, the initial idea is we're going to win over Ukraine. And the way we're going to win over Ukraine is we are going to have policies of affirmative action where we will recruit Ukrainian elites into the Soviet Union by promoting them, by opening up Ukrainian culture, by opening up jobs in the bureaucracy. That goes on through the end of the 1920s.

But then when Stalin comes to power in 1928, he sees the situation differently. He's trying to transform the Soviet Union economically. Here was a government trying to plan and carry out the complete transformation of the economy in five short years. He carries out a policy called collectivization, which basically means the state taking control of agriculture. Private property was confiscated, and peasants were herded into collective farms.

Ukraine is the most important agricultural center in the Soviet Union. It's the breadbasket of Eurasia, basically. When his collectivization policy fails and starts starving people to death, Stalin says, no, no, this problem is caused by Ukraine. It's caused by Ukrainian nationalists. It's caused by Ukrainian agents funded from abroad, which is all complete nonsense.

But what it does is that it turns the Ukrainian question around. And suddenly all of these people who've been promoted through the 1920s are in show trials or committing suicide or executed in the Great Terror. Suddenly, Ukrainian traditional village life has been wiped out by a famine, which was not only entirely preventable, but which was basically not just allowed, but determined to happen in 1932 and 1933. So Ukraine is allowed to rise in a certain way, and then it's crushed.

Can you tell us about the famine in Ukraine? Give us a sense of what happened and what the outcomes were for people who lived in Ukraine. The five-year plan from 1928 to 1933 was to turn the Soviet Union, which was basically a country of peasants and nomads, into a country of workers. And an essential part of that was to get agriculture away from private farmers, from smallholders who were very common in Ukraine, and get it under control of the state because that would allow the state to control a source of capital, which it could then divert towards industrialization. So the peasants would be put under control, the land would be put under control, the food would be put under control, and the idea was that this would allow the state to divert resources to what it really wanted to

do, which was build up the cities, build up the mines, build up the factories. So that's 1928, 29, 30. It doesn't really work very well. Collectivized agriculture doesn't work in general very well, and the transition to it can be particularly horrifying. In 1931, and especially in 1932, there's a transition to collectivization in Ukraine. There is a bad harvest, and then you have to interpret that. Beginning in the summer of 1932, what Stalin does is he interprets it politically. It was a spoken order. Stalin gave it. He says, this is the fault of the Ukrainian Communist Party. He said, the Kulak wants to crush our Soviet government with the bony hand of famine. We will bend this bony hand back on the throat of the Kulak.

In other words, he gives a highly politicized interpretation of a failure which is basically about his own policy, and then he tries to make reality match his interpretation. So the famine is not treated as real or it's treated as the fault of the Ukrainians. The Russians came from house to house and took all the foods that people had in the house. Grain is confiscated from Ukrainians in 1932 and even into 1933, when it's clear that hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions of people, are going to die. November, December 1932, especially, Moscow pushes through a series of extremely harsh policies. For example, that peasants are not allowed to go to the cities and beg.

No one is allowed to leave the Ukrainian Republic. You know, things like this, which basically make a kind of prison of the entire republic so that starving people have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I could buy for my salary two loaves of bread a month. So that's only how we could survive. But the peasants were dying. So the result of all of this is the greatest political atrocity in Europe in the 20th century up to that point, and a nationally and politically directed famine in which I think by the best

estimates currently, about 3.9 million people die who did not need to die. Oh my God. 3.9 million people die who did not need to die. Oh my god. 3.9 million people die who did not need to die. And at that point, is Ukraine essentially beaten into submission? I mean, how do people respond? It happens over weeks and months. And as it happens, people lose their ability to behave politically or in a way that they could protect themselves, they very often lose the elemental aspects of what we would think of as human morality and decency. So it's a very, very heavy weight on Ukrainian society. It's an unforgettable episode. And it is one of the things that marks Ukrainians now off from Russians. And so if a foreign government tries to deny it or minimize

it or spin it in some way, as the Russian government has been doing, naturally that causes a good deal of resentment and alienation. What happens to Ukraine? Ukraine is a constitutive part of the Soviet Union from its establishment in 1922 to its disintegration in 1991. The back and forth of how the Ukrainian question is treated continues after the Second World War, if in a less violent way. So during the Second World War, for a while, Ukraine is praised by Stalin, and that's because the war is being fought largely in Ukraine. And by the way, Ukrainians suffer more than Russians in that war, not just relatively, but also in absolute terms. The civilians suffer more in Ukraine than in Russia. But during the war, because the Germans are trying

to control Ukraine, Stalin praises Ukraine. But when it's over, that all turns around again. And the fact that Ukraine was occupied by the Germans is turned against Ukraine. Now Ukrainians are suspected of being collaborators. They're more suspicious than Russians are. When Stalin dies, there's a certain loosening on the Ukrainian question, which comes to its apex in the 1960s, where there's a certain relaxation and Ukrainian culture is allowed to flourish a bit. But when Brezhnev takes control from the late 60s, and especially from the early 70s forwards, you have a policy of a very deliberate Russification in Ukraine. And it's at that moment, the 1970s, that are so important for understanding the present, because that's when you have a policy of a very deliberate Russification in Ukraine. And it's at that

moment, the 1970s, that are so important for understanding the present, because that's when people like Putin grew up, you know, so Putin's perspective that everything is basically Russian, and like, you know, everyone really speaks Russian, and even if they seem not to, they really want to. That's a very 1970s perspective on all of this. From a Ukrainian point of view, the 1970s were very much a down point, which only really starts to turn around after the horrible nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. An official announcement from the Council of Ministers. There has been an accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station. One of the atomic reactors was damaged.

It's really only after Chernobyl when Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership don't say anything about the spread of radioactive material, that things start to move in Ukraine and a new kind of politics emerges in Ukraine, which starts to talk about a Ukrainian autonomy or even Ukrainian independence. The Soviet Union comes to an end in 1991. Contemporaneous with that, there's a referendum in Ukraine about independence in which there's not only a very large majority across the country for independence, there's also a majority in every region of Ukraine, including the ones that Russia claims or occupies or says it's fighting for right now. So after that, Ukraine has to build everything anew.

It has to build a state, It has to build an economy. It has to build a political system. And that's the phase of history that we're in right now. Thank you. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

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of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. I'm Mike Pearson. free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. We're revisiting a conversation we had with Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale. I asked him how Ukrainian national identity manifested in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A couple of things happened. The first thing that happens is to try to answer the question that you asked. So, you know, where does Ukraine begin? And that the collapse of the Soviet Union? A couple of things happen. The first thing that happens is to try to answer the question that you asked. So, you know, where does Ukraine begin? And that was

answered, first of all, in a series of technical ways. Border treaties were signed with Russia, a new constitution was written, a new political system, a parliamentary system was set up with Ukrainian elections. And then it was also then answered more slowly, but interestingly, with history and culture, and even more slowly still, language. It's been 30 years, and Ukraine is slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly becoming more important than Russian. And it's the young people who say now that they prefer Ukrainian to Russian, but it's been very slow. And if anything, like, what makes Ukrainians a bit different than, let's say, Americans, and for that matter, Russians, is that they're bilingual, and they will code switch. And so, it's not so much like the Ukrainian

language. I mean, they have the Ukrainian language, and that does make them different. It's their language, and it has a beautiful literary tradition, and it's a beautiful spoken language. But they also have a capacity which the Russians lack and which we lack, which is to code switch. I shouldn't say we, because some Americans can't. There are plenty of bilingual Americans. But Ukraine is basically a whole nation of code switchers. And it's that thing also which makes them a little bit different and hard for us to understand. When does Vladimir Putin first start to incur into Ukraine, either physically or politically? When does he start this?

I mean, he went to Kiev in 2013. Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine's capital Kiev to celebrate the 1025th anniversary of the region's conversion to Christianity. Putin literally said, God made us one nation a thousand years ago and there's nothing that anyone can do about it, which is a very bizarre claim. But I think it's the kind of thing that he believes in more and more. I mean, just following this thread, you know, in 2021, last July,

he wrote about how he thought that Ukraine and Russia were historically unified. First of all, Putin says, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind, is our great common misfortune and tragedy. It starts with this story of this guy who was actually a Viking pagan,

how this guy converted to Christianity, and therefore everything has to happen. You know, therefore I have to invade Ukraine in 2022. It would not be an exaggeration to say in the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state aggressive towards Russia is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. So there's a part of Putin, which I think has come more and more to the fore, who sees all of this in these like weird metaphysical terms. The spiritual choice made by Saint Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today. I see. Okay. Starting in 2013, he's speaking in a way about Ukraine that he hasn't before. He's bringing religion into it. And then in 2014, this is where he first physically sets foot in Ukraine, right? Tell me about what happened.

Ukraine was going to sign something called an association agreement with the European Union. That's not membership in the European Union. It's a big, complicated trade agreement. This is Ukraine's largest industrial chocolate maker. And for the last month, it's found itself caught up in a trade war. By that point, Russian foreign policy had taken a turn against the European Union and decided that the European Union was harmful because it tended to consolidate democracy. Russia is blocking imports of its chocolates, saying the quantity isn't up to scratch. And the first evidence of that turn was that Russia put a lot of pressure on Ukraine not to sign the agreement, which was supposed to be signed in late November 2013. The Ukrainian

president, at that time a man called Yanukovych, pulled back at the last moment under Russian pressure. President Viktor Yanukovych has said he's only suspending not cancelling Ukraine's plan deal on closer ties with the EU and still intends to sign an agreement at a later date. Yanukovych did that and then there were huge protests, beginning with young people, with students because they're the ones of course who wanted to think of themselves as Europeans or as having a European future. Violent clashes erupted in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, as more than 100,000 people protested against a government decision to delay an association deal with the EU. Yanukovych had the students beaten, and then their parents and grandparents showed up on

the logic that you can't beat our children, you can't beat our future. The protests became very large indeed. Jubilation on the streets of the Ukrainian capital as protesters took control of Kiev and President Viktor Yanukovych was impeached. By that time, February 2014, the Russian army was already on the move. It had been mobilized several weeks before that and carried out an operation to occupy the Crimean Peninsula. Russian troops spreading out throughout the strategic Crimean Peninsula. President Obama speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently pulling no punches,

although it is unclear what the White House can really do about all this. The Russian army shortly after that began to try to provoke in eight Ukrainian districts pulling no punches, although it is unclear what the White House can really do about all of this. The Russian army shortly after that began to try to provoke in eight Ukrainian districts, basically artificial uprisings to try to overturn Ukrainian power, which failed in six of them and partially succeeded in two of them, which led to this quasi-Russian occupation of two more Ukrainian districts, Luhansk and Donetsk. So that incident is known as the Maidan, and then the beginning of the first Russian invasion in February of 2014. So since 2014, there's been Russian power already in a good deal of Ukraine before this latest and terrible invasion began. Separatists seized the airport in the early hours of Monday morning,

before the Ukrainian army responded quickly, retaking the site with both concentrated airstrikes and heavily armed troops. It's a funny kind of separatism because, sure, there are a few people who want to separate, absolutely, but they're being controlled by and are ultimately dependent on for pretty much everything the Russian Federation. So you have these enclaves which are kind of anarchical zones. They're de facto dependent upon Russia, but Russia says it doesn't have anything to do with them. So basically they're places which are kind of unsafe for everybody. You know, even journalists from Russia and Ukraine don't tend to go there, but what they've become is a kind of pretext, right? There wasn't anything going on there in early 2022, but what Putin did was he basically said he made the same kind of move that Hitler

made with Czechoslovakia in 1938. He said, you know, there's a democratic country next to me, but that's not what I'm going to say. I'm going to say my people, my, you know, my co-religionists, my compatriots are being horribly oppressed. Therefore, I'm going to recognize these breakaway republics are going to issue an invitation, which they literally did the next day, for Crimea to invade Ukraine. At the end of the day, they just become a kind of pretext for this larger action. You know, I've been talking to Ukrainians for this show, and they have all effectively said some version of the same thing.

Number one, we're staying calm, but we're ready to fight. One gentleman said he was not going to consider the possibility that Russian troops would make it to where he lives. He would not let his mind engage with that. One woman said, thank you and glory to Ukraine. On the whole, it sounded as if Ukrainians are certain that Ukraine is a country and that they will defend it. What do you think will happen? You asked me why I said Ukraine was a normal country. And in a way, those answers are confirming the point. It's a normal country where people already have some understanding of what war means,

you know, unfortunately, and already have some understanding what Russian occupation means. They already have some understanding of what it means for there to be refugees. There's basically not a family in Ukraine which hasn't been touched. It's a common national experience to an extent, which I think people in the West don't really grasp. That 2014 moment got the attention of Ukrainians and got them asking some of the questions you asked with more urgency, you know, who are we and what makes us different? And it's of course their experiences which make them different. You know, you can't make people love Russia by invading them from Russia over and over again. Whatever Putin does and whatever the military outcome is, there will be a Ukraine in some way that's not going to be undone.

Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.