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Ukraine

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in Ukraine you don't build a democracy; it already exists. You just defend it. ~ Petro Poroshenko
If the country controlled by Kyiv didn’t fracture in 2014, when the government and army were weak, polarization was high, and Putin could have invaded with impunity, it won't. ~ Alexander J. Motyl
“What does Ukraine look like?” ...it’s green and gently rolling, and dotted with medieval fortresses, romantically neglected baroque palaces and monasteries, and quiet, pretty towns and little cities, much like those of Austria or the Czech Republic. ~ Anna Reid (Shown: Carmelite Monastery, Berdychiv, Zhytomyr Oblast)
Kyiv itself is a grand Belle Époque metropolis with up-and-down cobbled streets and chestnut trees. There are funny little back alleys and courtyards full of coffee shops and art galleries, leafy parks with views over the sprawling river Dnipro, and an array of glorious churches, the grandest of them the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral [shown]. ~ Anna Reid

Ukraine (Ukrainian: Україна) is a country in Eastern Europe. Ukraine borders the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, respectively. It has an area of 603,628 km2 (233,062 sq mi), making it the largest country entirely within the European subcontinent.


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes

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A

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  • In carrying out the Declaration on State Sovereignty of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly proclaims
    the independence of Ukraine and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state - Ukraine.
    The territory of Ukraine is indivisible and inviolable.
    From now on in Ukraine only the Constitution and laws of Ukraine are in force.
    This act takes effect from the moment of its approval.
    • Original: здійснюючи Декларацію про державний суверенітет України, Верховна Рада Української Радянської Соціалістичної Республіки урочисто проголошує
      незалежність України та створення самостійної Української держави — України.
      Територія України є неподільною і недоторканною.
      Віднині на території України мають чинність виключно Конституція і закони України.
      Цей акт набирає чинності з моменту його схвалення.
    • Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine (1991). Text of the act.
On Saturdays Jews are strolling along all the streets, and no one pays attention. And such people who live in Lviv! Pure gold! ~ Sholem Aleichem "Lviv" (1906)
  • The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

B

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Welcoming the Accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state,
Taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time,
Noting the changes in the world-wide security situation, including the end of the Cold War, which have brought about conditions for deep reductions in nuclear forces,
Confirm the following:
1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations...

D

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  • How many people in Europe or North America know that Kyiv is the largest Russian-speaking city in the world outside of Russia? How many are aware that Ukraine has been one of Europe’s most multicultural communities for centuries?

F

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  • Perhaps the most remarkable case of all is that of the Ukrainians. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the man-made famine caused by collectivization in the Ukraine was Stalin's brutal answer to what he regarded as the 'Ukrainian question'. A backlash against the relative autonomy of the Ukraine had begun as early as the spring of 1930. 'Keep in mind', Stalin had warned darkly in 1932, 'that in the Ukrainian Communist Party . . . there are not a few . . . rotten elements, conscious and subconcious Petlyurites' (supporters of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Simon Petlyura). To be sure, the effects of the 1932-3 famine were not confined to the Ukraine; Kazakhstan, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region were also affected. Careful analysis, however, reveals that the victims of the famine were disproportionately Ukrainian. It is surely no coincidence that fewer than one in ten Ukrainians had voted for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, whereas more than half had voted for Ukrainian parties.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 216
  • It was in fact one of the stated aims of collectivization to achieve 'the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism's social base - the individual land-holdings'. Collectivization was pushed further and faster there than in Russia. Grain quotas were deliberately stepped up even as production was falling. This explains why about half the victims of the famine were Ukrainians - nearly one in five of the total Ukrainian population. Nor did Stalin regard starvation as a sufficient solution to the problem of Ukrainian disloyalty. The composer Shostakovich recalled how itinerant Ukrainian folksingers were rounded up and shot. All of this was possible because the Ukraine was in effect being run as a Russian colony. Although Russians accounted for just 9 per cent of the republic's population, 79 per cent of the Ukrainian Party and 95 per cent of government officials were Russians or Russified.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 216-217

I

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  • Ukraine is recognized as the most threatened part of Russia in terms of secession and conquest. Ukrainian separatism is an artificial phenomenon, devoid of real grounds. It arose from the ambition of the leaders and the international intrigue of conquest.
    • Ivan Ilyin, "Fundamentals of the struggle for national Russia" (Основы борьбы за национальную Россию), 1938.
  • The 2014 “constitution” of the “[Donetsk People’s Republic]” – we refer here to the original 2014 version; it has been amended in subsequent published versions, probably also for propaganda purposes – [is the first constitution] in the world that makes fighting “cults” a constitutional principle. Article 21 of the 2014 “constitution” called for “the implementation of policies to protect the public from the activities of religious cults” (I explained at length in Bitter Winter why “секта” in Russian and similar words in other languages should be translated as “cult” and not as “sect.”) …What is happening in the pseudo-“Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” is a perfect representation of the dystopic Orthodox theocracy Putin’s ideologists have in mind for a “Russian World” whose borders they continuously expand.
  • Russian anti-cultists continue to offer increasingly preposterous arguments to justify Putin’s crimes and horrors in Ukraine. “Cults” are de-humanized by their rhetoric, and by being “cultists” Ukrainians are something less than humans. The war is finally [described] as a giant collective deprogramming—and those who cannot be successfully deprogrammed are killed.

K

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M

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  • If the country controlled by Kyiv didn’t fracture in 2014, when the government and army were weak, polarization was high, and Putin could have invaded with impunity, it won’t in 2016.
  • Many people seem to feel that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the end of the Cold War. That’s wrong. It had ended two years before that. And the breakup of the Soviet Union did not occur because of Western pressure; it occurred because of internal pressures within the Soviet Union. And it was something that President Bush did not wish. As a matter of fact, one of his last speeches, when there was a Soviet Union, was in Kyiv, when he advised Ukrainians to join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation, that he was proposing, and actually warned against suicidal nationalism. Those words, you know, are not remembered much now. People seem to think that Ukraine is free because of the end of the Cold War and the pressure of the West as one of the fruits of victory in the Cold War. This is simply incorrect. It turns history upside down...

N

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P

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The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings [Varangians shown] in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’ ~ Serhii Plokhy
  • The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.
    • Historian Serhii Plokhy The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) p xxii
Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache. ~ Serhii Plokhy [Ukrainian banknote shown]
The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era. ~ Serhii Plokhy
  • Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.
    • Historian Serhii Plokhy The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) p 42
  • Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence...The vote for Ukraine’s independence spelled the end of the Soviet Union.
    • Historian Serhii Plokhy The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) pp 320–321
  • These days in Europe, many countries are sympathetic towards Ukraine and the situation here - of course, this touches a lot of people from different states. The fact that volunteers and government organizations work together on this and these kinds of humanitarian actions happen - is not unique, but it proves, that there are a lot of regular folks out there who care about Ukraine and its future

R

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  • “What does Ukraine look like?”...it’s green and gently rolling, and dotted with medieval fortresses, romantically neglected baroque palaces and monasteries, and quiet, pretty towns and little cities, much like those of Austria or the Czech Republic. Kyiv itself is a grand Belle Époque metropolis with up-and-down cobbled streets and chestnut trees. There are funny little back alleys and courtyards full of coffee shops and art galleries, leafy parks with views over the sprawling river Dnipro, and an array of glorious churches, the grandest of them the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral.
  • Ukraina is literally translated as “on the edge” or “borderland”, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it had never been an independent state.
    • Anna Reid Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine (2015) p 1
From the tenth century to the thirteenth it [Kiev] was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. ~ Anna Reid (Silver coin shows Vladimir the Great (958–1015))
  • But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.
    • Anna Reid Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine (2015) p 5
  • Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia.'
    • Anna Reid Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine (2015) p 16
  • Ukrainian society is less ambiguous today and Ukrainian identity is becoming increasingly civic rather than ethnic, and increasingly incompatible with a supra-ethnic, non-civic, quasi-religious, East Slavonic identity. While civic unity and civic identity are on the rise, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russians remain rather positive, in contrast to the highly negative Russian attitudes toward Ukrainians. First, Ukrainian media do not practice hate speech and propagandistic brainwashing on the scale of the Russian media. And second, Ukrainians are much less inclined to identify the people with the state; their loathing of Putin has not translated into a similar attitude toward common Russians. Many Ukrainians still want open borders and good relations with Russia, even though that’s increasingly impossible at a time of war.
  • Russia’s still saying, we want a European security framework out of this and we are adhering to our original objectives. Russia hasn’t altered course at all. Ukraine, on the other hand, is saying that victory can only be achieved when Russia is evicted from all territory, including Crimea.... Russia has realistic objectives that can be attained. Ukraine doesn’t.

S

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  • Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow, but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. Their utopias of control overlapped in Ukraine. Hitler remembered the ephemeral German eastern colony of 1918 as German access to the Ukrainian breadbasket. Stalin, who had served his revolution in Ukraine shortly thereafter, regarded the land in much the same way. Its farmland, and its peasants, were to be exploited in the making of a modern industrial state. Hitler looked upon collectivization as a disastrous failure, and presented it as proof of the failure of Soviet communism as such. But he had no doubt that Germans could make of Ukraine a land of milk and honey. For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil and its millions of agricultural laborers. In 1933, Ukrainians would died in the millions, in the greatest artificial famine in the history of world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin, and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.
    • Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. E-book, New York: Basic Books, 2010
  • * Ukraine is not a theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle from which pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union and Russia.
  • In 1919, when he imposed his regime on Ukraine, Lenin gave her several Russian provinces to assuage her feelings. These provinces have never historically belonged to Ukraine. I am talking about the eastern and southern territories of today's Ukraine. Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, with the arbitrary capriciousness of a satrap, made a "gift" of the Crimea to Ukraine. But even he did not manage to make Ukraine a "gift" of Sevastopol, which remained a separate city under the jurisdiction of the U.S.S.R. central government. This was accomplished by the American State Department, first verbally through Ambassador Popadiuk in Kiev and later in a more official manner. Why does the State Department decide who should get Sevastopol? If one recalls the tactless declaration of President Bush about supporting Ukrainian sovereignty even before the referendum on that matter, one must conclude that all this stems from a common aim: to use all means possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia.
  • As a result of the sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled Slavic peoples, the borders have torn apart millions of ties of family and friendship. Is this acceptable? The recent elections in Ukraine, for instance, clearly show the [Russian] sympathies of the Crimean and Donets populations. And a democracy must respect this. I myself am nearly half Ukrainian. I grew up with the sounds of Ukrainian speech. I love her culture and genuinely wish all kinds of success for Ukraine--but only within her real ethnic boundaries, without grabbing Russian provinces. And not in the form of a "great power," the concept on which Ukrainian nationalists have placed their bets. They are acting out and trumpeting a cult of force, persistently inflating Russia into the image of an "enemy." Militant slogans are proclaimed. And the Ukrainian army is being indoctrinated with the propaganda that war with Russia is inevitable. For every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character. I have never wished great power status for Russia, and do not wish it for the United States. I don't wish it for Ukraine. She would not be able to perform even the cultural task required to achieve great power status: In her current borders, 63% of the population consider Russian to be their native language, a number three times larger than the number of ethnic Russians. And all these people will have to be re-educated in the Ukrainian language, while the language itself will have to be raised to international standards and usage. This is a task that would require over 100 years.
  • Officials at the Reich Security Main Office planned the annihilation with cynical precision. They planned a war that declared the entire Soviet population – the entire Soviet population – to be the enemies, from newborn babies to the very old. The enemies were to be defeated not just militarily, but were also to be made to pay for the war imposed upon them themselves, with their lives, their property, with everything that was part of their existence. The entire European part of the Soviet Union, whole stretches of today's Ukraine and Belarus – and I quote from the orders – were to be "cleansed" and prepared for German colonisation. Metropolises such as Leningrad, present-day Saint Petersburg, Moscow or Kyiv, were to be razed to the ground.

U

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Ukraine's freedom is still alive, and so also is liberty ~ Pavlo Chubynsky
  • Ще не вмерла України і слава, і воля,
    Ще нам, браття молодії, усміхнеться доля.
    Згинуть наші воріженьки, як роса на сонці.
    Запануєм і ми, браття, у своїй сторонці.
Ukraine's freedom is still alive, and so also is liberty,
And fortune will smile on us, young brothers.
All our enemies will die like dew in sun.
And at last we will be rulers of our homes.
We'll devote our souls and bodies to our free will,
And we will prove that we are all of Cossack origin.

V

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  • Ukraine has always aspired to be free: but being surrounded by Muscovy, the states of the Sultan, and Poland, a protector had to be sought, and consequently a master in one of these three states. She first put herself under the protection of Poland, who treated her too much as subject. She then gave herself to the Muscovite, who governed her as a slave as much as he could. At first the Ukrainians enjoyed the privilege of electing a prince under the name of general; but soon they were stripped of this right, and their general was appointed by the court of Moscow. (L’Ukraine a toujours aspiré à être libre : mais étant entourée de la Moscovie, des états du grand-seigneur, et de la Pologne, il lui a fallu chercher un protecteur, et par conséquent un maître dans l’un de ces trois états. Elle se mit d’abord sous la protection de la Pologne qui la traita trop en sujette : elle se donna depuis au Moscovite, qui la gouverna en esclave autant qu’il le put. D’abord les Ukrainiens jouirent du privilège d’élire un prince sous le nom de général ; mais bientôt ils furent dépouillés de ce droit, et leur général fut nommé par la cour de Moscou.)
    • Voltaire 1731, Histoire de Charles XII (History of Charles XII), p 161.

W

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  • Some groups continued to resist, especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states. Ukraine, which had been part of the Russian Empire and was taken over by Communist forces after the 1917 revolution, had come under German control in 1941, and Ukrainian nationalists used the opportunity to declare independence from the Soviet Union. While Ukrainian autonomy remained a sham under German occupation, many Ukrainian nationalists continued to fight against the Red Army after the Nazi withdrawal. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) existed in the Soviet Union until 1950, when its leader, Roman Shukhevych, was killed. While the OUN was feared for its collaboration with the Nazis and its atrocities against Poles and Jews, some Ukrainians still regarded it as the champion of independence and sovereignty. Soviet countermeasures were brutal. Between 1944 and 1952 as many as six hundred thousand people were arrested in western Ukraine; about a third of these were executed and the rest imprisoned or exiled. The fierce Soviet response probably did as much to keep resistance alive as the waning military power of the OUN.
    • Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2005)

Y

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Z

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  • Ukraine has become the global centre of Nazism, and this issue goes far beyond Eastern Europe. All reasonable anti-fascist and anti-Nazi forces must work together to ensure that the broader society learns the truth.

See also

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