Escuche esta historia
--:--
5:41
Origin of Ukraine and its links with Russia
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia, over which they have fought for the last decade, continues to hold the entire planet in suspense.
Like other nearby countries, Russia and Ukraine have a shared history, something that unites and separates them at the same time.
Since the 9th century when Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was the main population of the first Slavic state that existed. It was created by a group of Scandinavians called "Rus".
That first medieval state, which experts call Kyivan Rus, was the origin of Russia and the Ukraine.
It was in the 12th century that Moscow was created, on what was then a huge border in the North East.
The religion practiced was Orthodox Christianity, accepted in 988 by Vladimir I, also known as Saint Vladimir Sviatoslavich "The Great", who entrenched the Rus' kingdom from present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia to the Baltic Sea.
From the large number of languages spoken by the Eastern Slavs, the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian languages originated.
This story seems to prove Vladimir Putin right, who recently asserted that Ukraine and Russia are one people.
But historians point out that despite having their origin in common for the last 900 years, the experience and development of the Ukrainians has been completely different, because their destiny was shaped by different powers that entered the country.
Dr. Andrew Wilson, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at University College London, Ukraine should be seen, both its territory and its identity, as a “shifting puzzle”.
In the mid -1300s, the Rus' federation was conquered by the Mongol empire.
100 years later, taking advantage of the defeat of the Mongol Empire, the great authorities of Moscow and the Duchy of Lithuania (later annexed to Poland) divided the former Rus' lands.
Kiev and the surrounding lands came under the mandate of the Commonwealth of Lithuania and Poland, which instilled in the population beliefs such as the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
Carpathian Galicia, in western Ukraine, was ruled for a long time as part of the Habsburg empire, whose culture is still present today.
One of the world's leading historians of Russia and its influence, Geoffrey Hosking, claimed that the western part of Ukraine had a completely different history than the eastern part.
Many of those who inhabit that region are not Russian Orthodox, but are members of the Uniate Church or Eastern Catholics, who recognize the Pope as their spiritual leader.
Another region of present-day Ukraine with a very different history is Crimea, which has Greek and Tatar influence and was under Ottoman and Russian rule for a long time.
During the war between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against the Russian Tsardom in the 17th century, the lands east of the Dnieper River came under the control of the Russian Empire.
This territory was called as "Ukraine of the Left Bank".
During that century, in the central and northwestern regions of present-day Ukraine, a Ukrainian Cossack state existed, but in 1764, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great put an end to it and went to conquer the Ukrainian lands that were from Poland.
During the following years, maintaining a policy called Russification, the Empress prohibited the use and study of the Ukrainian language.
In addition, the inhabitants were pressured so that their faith was Russian Orthodox, in order to constitute the small tribes of the great Russian people.
At the same time, patriotism was growing in the western lands, which ceased to be Polish and belonged to the Austrian Empire, where the inhabitants were called "Ukrainians" to differentiate themselves from the Russians.
The current Ukraine
But the 20th century was the year of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Union, which properly rearranged the “Ukrainian puzzle”.
The Western Ukraine was awarded to the leader of the Soviet Union, Iosif Stalin of Poland, at the end of World War II.
For its part, Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union by Moscow in the 1950s, but still had strong ties to Russia, notably the Russian Black Sea naval base of Sevastopol.
The Soviet government forced the Ukraine to maintain close Russian influence at an enormous cost.
In the 1930s, millions of Ukrainians belonging to the Soviet Union died in a famine created by Stalin to force peasants into collective farming.
Years later, Stalin began importing Soviet citizens, many unable to speak Ukrainian and with few ties to the territory, to help repopulate the eastern region.
However, Ukraine was never culturally dominated by Soviet Moscow.
Political, military and economic decisions were imposed from the center, but Ukraine had a certain sovereignty in culture and education, Hosking explained.
Although Russian was the main language, children learned Ukrainian in schools and books were published in the language.
Already by the second half of the 20th century, a large Ukrainian nationalist movement originated within the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a treaty between Ukraine and Russia originated in 1997 to respect the sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders.
The subsequent legacies in the different regions of Ukraine left flaws that are currently the main argument of the conflict.
On each side of the Dnieper River, there are great contrasts of culture for the length of Russia's rule.
In the eastern region, the ties with the Kremlin are much more entrenched, with a more Orthodox population and with the Russian language as the main language.
In the West, due to the centuries dominated by European powers, such as Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it has led the inhabitants of the region to be more Catholic and use Ukrainian as their primary language.
Each region in Ukraine manages its own culture, ideology and belief. Some consider it necessary to retake the annex with their "Mother Country" and others seek an independent path.
