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“It’s an eight-year, two-month war.” This is how the former Ukrainian ambassador to Brazil, Rostyslav Tronenko, defined the situation in his country in an interview with TV Cultura’s Roda Viva program on Monday (25).
In answering a question from journalist Gustavo Simon, deputy editor of Mundo at Sheeton the possibility of an escalation of the conflict, the diplomat declared that the country has faced Russia since 2014, while the West “was waiting” to act and called for calm.
“No one believes that Ukraine has been resisting this aggression for so long,” he said.
Tronenko’s speech concerns the facts that explain the current tension and culminated in the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russia, 65 days ago.
But what happened in 2014 that reflects on today’s conflict? We summarize in three spots:
Protests and change of government
Large demonstrations that started the year before and that became known as Euromaidan, or simply Maidan (the square of Kiev), demanded the departure of President Viktor Yanukovych. The trigger was the government’s decision to suspend the dialogue of rapprochement between Ukraine and the European Union and resume ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – who, as he declares to justify the war, saw in the alliances of his surroundings with the West a threat to Moscow.
Yanukovych was ousted by Parliament and replaced, after an interim government, by tycoon Petro Poroshenko, open to a closer rapprochement with the European Union – the outcome divides public opinion as a revolution for democracy or a coup encouraged by the West.
annexation of Crimea
The fall of Yanukovich, a Putin ally, has raised tensions between Ukraine and Russia. One of the consequences was the occupation of Crimea —then an autonomous republic under Kievan control— by Russian troops and the holding of a plebiscite that approved by 96.8% the incorporation of the area into the Russian Federation. Recognition of this annexation — rejected by Ukraine and the UN — is one of Putin’s demands to end the current invasion.
Understand: Crimea, which was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchov, has an ethnic Russian majority. According to a Ukrainian government census, in 2001 the population consisted of 125 nationalities and ethnic groups, of which 58.5% were Russians and 24.4% were Ukrainians.
Since the annexation, the region has been in a geopolitical limbo.
tension in the east
A month after the annexation of Crimea, separatists from Donetsk and Lugansk, in eastern Ukraine, declared independence with Moscow’s support. Close to the border with Russia, the region concentrates the Russian-speaking population and is culturally and economically linked to Moscow. It was also at this time that nationalist and neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov Battalion, accused of promoting violence against the Russian population, gained strength in the region.
According to the UN, fighting from 2014 until this year’s invasion killed around 3,000 civilians and injured more than 7,000.
To remember: In the current war, Russia demands recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk as autonomous regions, and the new geography of the attacks indicates the intention to create a corridor from eastern Ukraine to Crimea.
Putin also calls for the “denazification” of Ukraine – part of the Azov Battalion has been incorporated into the national army, but President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, denies any links with the extremists.
Separatism
We return to the interview with the ex-ambassador to TV. Rostyslav Tronenko, who is from the east and had Russian as his first language, rejects the idea that cultural differences constitute separatism and says that disputes of this nature only started after 2014, fostered by Russia.
“[Donetsk e Lugansk] They are not separatist regions, separatism did not exist before the illegal occupation, the annexation of the autonomous republic of Crimea and the aggression in Donbass”, he declared.
To help us reflect on this statement, we hear two researcherswho gave differing opinions on the subject:
“I don’t agree with the former ambassador. If this separatism didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be sustaining itself. On the contrary, we see groups from these regions fighting alongside Russia.
This movement was fostered in 2014, yes, but by the processes that took place at Euromaidan. We have the overthrow of a president seen as pro-Russian and the rise to power of a president who was seen as hostile to Russia — two extremes, there was no in-between. The direct effect of this is that these regions felt threatened because they already had a relationship with Russia — with imperial Russia and with the Soviet Union. There’s no way to separate it.
They are peoples that were born, grew up and developed together over 70 years. No wonder they have a very similar language. It’s no wonder that today you see the two armies in the field having to wear a colored band on the arm, because a lot of equipment is the same and the uniforms are similar.”
“The former ambassador is largely correct. It is evident that there is a process of building a uniqueness in the eastern region, a proximity of this population to Russia. But Ukraine has immense ethnic and linguistic diversity common to the remaining countries of the Soviet Union. , but which is not only indebted to this history.
Until the 19th century, Ukraine was divided by many empires and many national projects, which left the Ukrainian language in a fragile situation: depending on the region where they were, the elites chose to speak Russian, Polish and German, while the Ukrainian was characteristic of the peasantry. In the Soviet Union, Russian began to have an important role again and continued to be used by the urban elite, by the working class, in schools.
It was not until the 1990s that there was a change in the status of the language, and many Russian speakers sought to improve their Ukrainian – as is the case with President Zelensky himself. He is Russian speaking, his successful movies were spoken in Russian.
This idea that in Ukraine there is a persecution of Russian speakers is something that Putin has been nurturing since that time. He invokes an alleged situation of vulnerability of Russians who are outside the territory as if a possible solution was not also in the construction of citizenship in the countries where they are.”
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