How Ukraine became the independent democracy it is today: A visual perspective of the country's history
Editor's note: This story was originally published on February 24, 2022.
Ukraine has been invaded by Russia in a pre-dawn attack. Up to 190,000 Russian troops were positioned near Ukraine's borders, swelling from 100,000 at the end of January according to recent estimates. But threats to Ukrainian independence do not exist only on the battlefield – interpretation of history itself is a crucial theater for an information war between Russia and Ukraine.
In a lengthy speech aired on Russian state TV on Feb. 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected the idea of Ukrainian nationhood, calling it “madness” that the country had independence and claiming incorrectly that the country was only the product of power-brokering during the beginning of the Soviet Union. “We have every reason to say it’s Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin that created Ukraine,” Putin declared, arguing that “modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia.”
Putin directly threatened pro-democracy activists and civil servants who had led the pro-democracy push in the country after the 2014 revolution ousting a pro-Russian government. "We know their names and we will find them and bring them to justice,” he said.
Following the speech, Putin signed decrees that recognized the "independence and sovereignty" of two eastern Ukraine provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin offered a previous analysis in a July essay, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." Putin was not the first leader to write a historical treatise on the subject: In 2003, the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, published a book called “Ukraine Is Not Russia."
Here's a look at the history of Ukraine, its path toward democracy, and what the country has achieved since becoming an independent state.
A brief history of Ukraine
Ukrainian history goes back thousands of years. The first state formed on the territory that now comprises Ukraine was called Kyivan Rus, a loose federation established in the mid-9th century, its capital in Kyiv. This heritage is claimed by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians alike as the foundation for their respective state traditions. Over time, political fragmentation and attacks from the Mongol Empire resulted in the decline of Kyivan Rus, and many of its former lands fell under Lithuanian and Polish rule.
Gradually, a new social group called the Zaporozhian Cossacks emerged from the East Slavic population living freely in the southern steppes of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Cossacks held elections to choose their leader, a general they called “hetman." After a series of unsuccessful Cossack uprisings against Poland, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s rebellion of 1648 developed into a peasant war and national revolution, resulting in the creation of an autonomous Cossack polity in what is now central Ukraine.
Military setbacks forced Khmelnytsky to search for allies, and after the Pereyaslav Treaty of 1654, the Cossack lands became a protectorate of the Russian tsars. The Muscovite government increasingly limited the Hetmanate’s sovereignty until Catherine II forced the last Hetman to resign, erasing the last remains of the Cossacks' autonomy. She also acquired the Ukrainian lands west of Dnipro as her share of the recently partitioned Polish state. The Habsburg emperors acquired a part of the territory of Ukraine as well.
In 1710, then in-exile Hetman of Ukraine Pylyp Orlyk published the Ukrainian Constitution, one of the first in the world.
Later, 19th-century Ukrainian intellectuals developed a notion of Ukraine as a territory in which linguistic and ethnic criteria identified the majority population as Ukrainian. The development of modern Ukrainian literature was spearheaded by Taras Shevchenko, a former serf who would become the national bard.
World War I resulted in the creation of two Ukrainian republics – one on either side of the former Russian-Austrian border. They unified in 1919 as an independent state: the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Ukraine under the Soviet Union
Ukraine's independence had been established, but the country would soon become part of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian pro-independence forces fought pro-Bolsheviks intermittently from 1917 to 1921. The Soviets eventually pushed the Ukrainian Army into Polish-controlled territory in the west. While the partisan movement in Ukraine remained active until mid-1922, conventional military action by regular troops ceased in 1921. With most of the territory under the control of the Red Army, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a founding member of the USSR in 1922.
Soviet leadership announced a policy of korenizacija, or “indigenization,” including the promotion of native languages in education and publishing, at the workplace and in government; the fostering of national cultures; and the recruitment of cadres from the Indigenous populations. In its application to Ukraine, the policy was known as “Ukrainization.”
At the same time, the Soviet state was determined to extract the maximum amount of grain for sale abroad from the Ukrainian republic. Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization by concealing grain, slaughtering draft animals rather than surrendering them to collective farms, and sometimes rebelling openly.
The situation escalated during 1932 when the Ukrainian grain harvest resulted in a below-average yield. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and food confiscated. This led to the Soviet Great Famine or Holodomor.
Of the estimated 5 million people who died in the famine almost 4 million were Ukrainians. According to the research by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Holodomor accounted for up to 92% of deaths of ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine during that time.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the Soviet regime cut short the lives of millions of Ukrainians from the 1920s to the 1950s.
As one of the major battlefields of World War II, Ukraine suffered near-complete destruction of its industries and major cities. Five million to 7 million people died. After the war, the nationalist insurgency continued in western Ukraine, but the Soviet Union suppressed it by the early 1950s.
Between 1939 and 1945, the Soviet Union added almost all of the ethnically Ukrainian lands to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1954, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In the postwar period, the USSR launched efforts to assimilate Ukrainian lands into Russian culture. The number of Ukrainian books, newspapers and schools decreased gradually and were replaced by Russian ones.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, began the democratization of the Soviet Union in the 1980s by launching policies known as perestroika and glasnost. Perestroika's aim was to restructure Soviet economic and political policy, and glasnost was intended to open discussion of political and social issues. The power of the Communist Party was reduced, and multi-candidate elections took place.
In December 1991, a referendum on Ukrainian independence was backed by a majority in every region of Ukraine, producing a more than 90% landslide. A week later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Ukrainian politics after the fall of the Soviet Union
After the 1991 vote, an independent Ukraine sought to shed its Soviet past. Soviet holidays have been revised or removed entirely from the national calendar. Ukraine's adoption of decommunization laws in 2015 led to the renaming of towns, cities, streets and squares across the country and the abolishment of Soviet statues and monuments.
Civil society has also been growing and strengthening with the jump in the number of civil society organizations, active citizens and volunteers after the Maidan revolution. According to the registration data of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, there were around 140,000 civic society organizations in 2006. Ten years later, the number of civic society organizations totaled more than 240,000. While most of the Ukrainian media belongs to the country's major oligarchs, online publications with enough independence to perform investigations and offer unbiased information have sprung up.
The U.S.-funded nongovernmental organization Freedom House currently assigns Ukraine a "global freedom score" of over 60 out of 100 (“partly free”), one of the highest ratings among the post-Soviet states that gained their independence after the USSR’s dissolution.
Since Ukraine became independent in 1991, there has been a peaceful transfer of power through free and fair democratic elections. In that time, Ukraine has also seen two major waves of popular protests against rising Russian influence: the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity.
Mass protests by millions of Ukrainians in November 2004 forced the authorities to rerun a rigged presidential vote, enabling Western-oriented opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko to win. Here's a look at Ukrainian and Russian leadership from 1991 to present day:
The Maidan Revolution
Pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych chose not to sign a European Union association agreement that would have integrated Ukraine more closely with the EU, and Ukrainians turned out in large numbers to protest. It became known as the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan Revolution.
Mostly peaceful demonstrations continued for two months in Kyiv’s main Maidan square. They turned violent after the government moved to break up protesters, and the crackdown killed more than 100 people. Yanukovych fled to Russia.
The annexation of Crimea and Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine
By March 2014, so-called "little green men" – Russian soldiers in Russian uniforms but with identifying insignia removed – seized control of Crimea. Next, Russia orchestrated an insurgency in Donbas stoked initially by Russian special operations units and paramilitary groups.
More than 13,000 Ukrainians have been killed and about 1.5 million have been displaced by an almost eight-year conflict in the east of the country.
Over the past eight years of occupation, Ukrainians have organized hundreds of grassroots volunteer initiatives to help with the humanitarian crisis stemming from the long-running conflict and counteract a full-scale military invasion. While at first volunteer fighters were crucial, the national army has undergone a major transformation starting in late 2014.
Fight against corruption
Ukraine’s corruption-related problems trace back to the fall of the Soviet Union. When state planning collapsed, powerful businessmen took control of key economic sectors, giving birth to an oligarchy. This control of industries by a small group remains a major obstacle to Ukraine’s progress.
But Ukraine has been pushing on in the fight against corruption. It has been advancing transparency, passing a 2016 law requiring politicians and bureaucrats to file electronic declarations of their assets. Around the same time, the Ukrainian government opened state databases, including real estate, vehicle, land and company registries. Public procurement was transferred to the online system ProZorro (meaning “transparent”), which has resulted in savings of up to 10% of the money budgeted for each purchase because of the site’s auction approach, transparency, and competitiveness.
State services have been digitized, streamlining the relationship between the state and its citizens. Ukrainians have also started several anti-kleptocracy projects, such as a public national database of politically exposed persons – people who hold “prominent public function” – and their family members and close associates. Today, the database includes profiles of more than 48,000 top officials and their associates and dossiers on more than 30,000 affiliated legal entities.
The law enforcement body National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the independent High Anti-Corruption Court were launched in 2015 and 2019, respectively.
However, despite several attempts to introduce reforms and improve transparency, senior officials have been blocking many of the procedures: for example, the electoral committee has stalled meetings for appointing an anti-corruption prosecutor for more than 18 months.
Public opinion is moving toward the West
A shift toward the West has been underway since Ukraine broke off from the USSR. The country declared European integration as a foreign policy priority back in 1993.
A November 2021 survey found that while 18% of Ukrainians consider Russian their first language, 78% indicated Ukrainian as their mother tongue, with well over 50% of Ukrainian speakers in the east and south of the country. In 2012, 58% of Ukrainians indicated Ukrainian as their mother tongue. A high percentage of Ukrainian military recruits have come from the majority of Russian-speaking areas of the country.
Maps with the results of the presidential elections during the 2000s show a sharp divide between east and west. In the past two elections, however, the winning candidate secured majorities in almost every region of the country.
Last presidential elections showed unity among Ukrainians
Support for openly pro-Russian parties has significantly decreased across the country since 2014. Before 2014, the pro-Russian Party of Regions won three consecutive parliamentary elections and got its member to be elected as the president. After Russian aggression, Kremlin-leaning political parties saw their share of the vote drop to below 20%, according to the Central Election Commission of Ukraine.
In early 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church officially gained independence, abolishing the control of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Ukrainians favor democracy and European integration. More than 60% of Ukrainians now wish to join NATO, up from 16% in 2012, according to the Center for Strategic Development.
The latest polls show that about 50% of Ukrainians are ready to stand up against Russia, while 33% are ready to put up armed resistance. Ukrainians have been joining the territorial defense brigades in different towns and cities.
Contributing: Matt Brown, Shawn J. Sullivan