The War That Never Ends
It would be a delusion to think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine started in 2014 or 2022. It is only a part of a never-ending process that has lasted for several centuries. What’s Russia’s aim? It wants to make Ukraine a territory, not a state. Russian territory. Ironically, Russia doesn’t change its methods for ages. Let’s try to find out.
Looting
In 1169, Vladimir-Suzdal prince Andrey Bogolubsky assembled a coalition of 11 princes and captured Kyiv which was the capital city of Kyivan Rus — a medieval state that included some territories of today’s Ukraine, Russia, and Belorus. By that time, Rus fell to different principalities and their rulers were competing for the title of Grand Prince of Kyiv. Contemporaries believed that Bogolubsky wanted to become Grand Prince as well. That’s why local people decided to rely on the mercy of the victors. It was a mistake.
Andrey Bogolubsky ordered his soldiers to pillage the city. They didn’t need to be told twice. Soldiers looted everything they could: residences, properties, churches, and monasteries. They took out not only private property but also icons, chasubles, and bells. One of these icons — Holy Icon of the Mother of God — became the greatest shrine of the Russian Empire. There’s no need to mention that looting was accompanied by mass murders: neither women nor children were spared.
Genocide
The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin but the phenomenon itself was common long before World War II. Russian authorities contributed to it as well and Ukraine wasn’t an exception.
Baturin Massacre (1708)
In 1708, Ukrainian Cossack Hetman (ruler) Ivan Mazepa decided to change sides in the war between Russia and Sweden. He couldn’t stand watching as Russian tsar Peter the First was destroying Ukrainian autonomy and using Ukrainian cossacks as cannon fodder. The last straw for Hetman was that the tsar refused to help him defend Ukraine against the Polish King who was the ally of Sweden. Mazepa called Cossacks to arms but only 3,000 of them followed him. Others remained loyal to the tsar. As it turned out, that meant nothing for the Russian ruler. He send an army to destroy the city of Baturyn which was the capital of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate.
Baturyn defenders refused to surrender. They managed to repulse the Russian army but can’t detect the traitor — colonel Ivan Nis, who showed the secret underground passages to the enemies. Russians entered the city and killed both cossacks and civilians. Historians say that between 6,000 and 7,500 civilian inhabitants of the city were killed. Military casualties were practically the same. Invaders were merciless. They killed civilians everywhere, even in churches which were perceived as secure places. When archaeologists conducted excavations in 2006–2009, they discovered the highest number of casualties in the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, where the wives and children of Cossacks were hiding.
Holodomor or the Great Famine (1932–1933)
Researchers still debate if the mass starvation of Ukrainians can be described as genocide. But there is no doubt that this hunger was man-made. The harvest of 1932 was smaller than the one of the previous year but the government did nothing to assist people. Moreover, authorities transported grain to the cities and abroad as if nothing happened. They obliged villages to provide huge quantities of grain and other products. Those who failed to meet these goals were blacklisted: authorities simply blocked all the roads and people starved to death.
People tried to take leftover grain from fields of collective farms but those attempts were strictly punished. The “Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property”, dubbed by farmers as the Law of Three Spikelets allowed to prosecute people for gleaning leftover grain from the fields. There were more than 200,000 people sentenced under this law.
The exact number of Holodomor’s victims will remain unknown. People died en masse and nobody counted them. Even when officials registered such persons’ deaths they rarely recorded that hunger was a cause. According to different estimations, the total number of those starved to death is between 3 and 7 million.
Mass deportations and forced mobilization
You may have heard that Russians deported and mobilized the population of occupied Ukrainian territories this year. They had done that in the past as well.
In 1929, Soviet authorities decided to force peasants to work on collective farms (kolkhozy in Russian). Those who don’t want to give up their land and inventory or were too wealthy, in the authorities’ opinion, were exiled to Syberia. Thousands of people were affected by these mass deportations. And not everyone managed to get to the destination alive.
In 1939, Soviet troops entered western Ukraine, according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They started with mass arrests and deportations. Everyone who was considered by them as an enemy lost their freedom, regardless of ethnic origin. Among those deported were government officials, university professors, priests, and entrepreneurs. Arrests lasted until 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Before fleeing to the East, Soviet authorities ordered to kill all the arrested.
In 1943, Soviet troops started to defeat Nazis in Ukraine. However, they often did it by showering the enemy with the corpses of Soviet soldiers. Authorities mobilized boys and men from liberated regions and sent them to the frontline without proper training and weaponry. Many of these people didn’t even have uniforms and were called chornosvytnyky (“men in black overcoats”) because they were fighting in a civilian outfit.
In 1944, Red Army units entered Crimea. On 18 May Soviet authorities started to deport Crimean Tatars — native people of Crimea — allegedly for their collaboration with Nazis. Despite the fact that many Tatars were fighting as partisans and Red Army soldiers, the entire nation was deported to Central Asia. They weren’t allowed to return to Crimea until the end of the 1980s. When Russia invaded the peninsula in 2014, it didn’t deport Crimean Tatars. But many of them left their homes because of repressions.
The 1940s become the decade of mass deportations. The Polish population of western Ukraine was forced to leave the region and move to Poland. The Ukrainian population of Kholmshchyna was deported to other regions of Ukraine (mostly to the south) and their region became Polish territory. In 1947, Soviet authorities conducted the operation “West” — mass deportation of more than 78,000 people from western Ukraine, mostly participants of the Ukrainian independence movement and their families. It was the largest deportation in this region but not the only one. In the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, more than 203,000 inhabitants of western Ukraine were deported.
There are just a few examples that show that modern Russia has used the same methods in Ukraine for ages. It perceives our country as a part of Russian territory although we have our own history, language, and traditions. While the other former colonial empires don’t care about their former colonies and live their own life, Russia still can’t calm down. It lives in the past and wants to pull us there. That’s the main cause of this war that never ends. But now, we, Ukrainians are determined to end it.
