Dear CCI Friends,
Nicolai Petro is among the most knowledgable academics writing about Ukraine, where he has lived, off and on, for the past ten years. Nicolai is not given to taking the side of Russia, the U.S. or Ukraine, but believes intensely that a lasting peace will require a deep and persistent dialogue among all three countries.
Read and take in Nicolai’s points of view, ask your colleagues and friends what they think about this seemingly intractable situation. If anyone comes up with a great idea, share it with us!
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
How to Break the Cultural Gridlock in Ukraine
When the seven-year war in Ukraine began, it was primarily an interregional conflict. By choosing sides at its outset, however, Russia and the West have made it international. With the domestic and international aspects of this conflict now so thoroughly intertwined, the solution will also have to address both of these aspects simultaneously.
July 12, 2021
By Nicolai N. Petro
There will be no peace in Ukraine until its domestic politics are brought into conformity with its cultural reality.
Ukraine’s independence in 1991 created a nation-state whose two predominant cultural constituencies were unevenly divided between urban and rural, between wealthier and poorer regions, and between the more and less educated. The historical disbalance in favor of the Russian-speaking in each of these groups automatically made the status of the Russian language in Ukraine an issue of political contention.
Political elites from the westernmost region of Ukraine—Galicia—who before 1939 had been part of Poland, and before that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, argued vehemently that for Ukraine to become truly independent, the use of Russian had to be restricted. State policy, they argued, should aim at creating a Ukrainian national identity based on their own Galician identity which, given the oppression of the Soviet era, was now the only authentic Ukrainian identity. In those halcyon days many Russophone Ukrainians, seeking to distance themselves from the legacy of communism, also supported a gradual Ukrainianization. As Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk explained to them in the run-up to the independence referendum, they would be “full-fledged owners” of the country, and they would always be guaranteed “preservation of full-blooded, unhindered ties with Russia and other sovereign states of the former Union.” With this understanding, they voted in large numbers for Ukrainian independence at the end of 1991.
But the vastly divergent historical memories of Eastern and Western Ukraine quickly led to mutually exclusive visions of Ukraine’s future.
In the Galician narrative, Russia is the root of all evil. The reason there is corruption in Ukraine is that Russia has imposed its slave mentality on Ukrainians; the reason the country is not more prosperous today is because of Russia’s colonial trade practices; the reason Ukrainian politics continue to be unstable is that Russia is always intervening. Since all problems point to Russia, the solution is to sever all ties with Russia.