By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
While the current situation in Ukraine has dominated domestic and international headlines in recent weeks, one Fort Hays State University expert said the conflict is less a standalone event and more of an escalation of hostilities.
Along with her academic expertise as a historian of central and eastern Europe, Amber Nickell, associate professor of history, also spent time living in Ukraine as a Fulbright Scholar and has traveled to and from the country for research since 2018.
While half a world away, she said there are parallels to the people of Ukraine and those living in the area.
“Ukrainians are extremely resilient, very hard-working,” Nickell said. “And it definitely reminds me of some of the hard-working folks here in Kansas, that you know, are pulling themselves up and doing what it takes to get things done. And we're definitely seeing that in Ukraine right now, as Ukrainians are fighting against Russian aggression.”
And much like the Kansas farmers who help drive local economies, Ukrainians also rely on agriculture, with corn, wheat and seed oils among their top five exports.
“Ukraine has a large swath is what of what is known black earth territory,” Nickell said. “And this is soil that is so nutrient-rich that it can give two crops per season as opposed to one. And so, for those folks out there that are working in agriculture, know that there are many Ukrainians out there just like you spending their days in the fields. This is this is part of who they are.”
Now with the recent conflict escalation, those people are fighting for their county, but she said current hostilities are only the most recent in a long history of Russian interference in the county.
“For some time, Ukrainians have been trying to fight Russian aggression,” Nickell said. “And we can really reach back pretty far in the historical narrative, all the way back to the violent escalation inside of independent Ukraine in the interwar and Bolsheviks, kind of forcibly placing power over the Ukrainian population.
“But in the more recent memory, Ukraine has been illegally occupied since 2014, in both Crimea and the Donbass region which is Luhansk, and Donetsk. Here, Russians have backed so-called separatists and well over 4,000 Ukrainian citizens and soldiers have died in this conflict since 2014.”
While the conflict might be an old one, in the last week the conflict has become decidedly more pronounced.
“Things have definitely escalated exponentially in the past five days,” Nickell said. “The emails and messages and Facebook messages that I'm getting from my friends and colleagues in Ukraine are heartbreaking. Bombs dropping on their neighborhoods in their communities, children doing kindergarten underground and bunkers, folks fleeing to the borders looking for any chance to help their families survive. ... It's heartbreaking to see the escalation these past few days.”
A civic nation
Along with the similarities of the people of Ukraine, she said the country is like the U.S. — multiracial, with populations living in the country from around the globe.
"It is, in very many ways, a civic nation, much like us here, where you can be a citizen of the United States, regardless of where you come from,” Nickell said. “And you can have that patriotism and sense of belonging really, regardless of what languages you speak.”
And so, while Russian language and culture might remain prevalent in Ukraine, the sense of self-determination is also a large part of the society.
“Much like me sitting here, I have family from Poland, but I am an American citizen,” Nickell said. “And so that is something that I think we need to think about a little closely when we're listening to some of the media that is coming out of these places.”
The trend toward simplicity in reporting from the region, she added, can create an understanding that does not fully reflect national complexities.
“I think often folks think that Ukraine is just this small country out in the middle of nowhere,” Nickell said. “And I've definitely heard those things said. But it isn't a small country. It isn't in the middle of nowhere.”
The size of the nation itself is important for a good understanding of the situation and relevant to the desire of Russia to increase their sphere of influence in Ukraine.
“It is the largest country entirely in Europe. It's bigger than Germany. It's bigger than France. It's bigger than Spain. It's bigger than the UK. And so, we're talking about a very, very large swath of territory, we're talking a couple Kansases, for those that are thinking about size relative to where they are,” Nickell said. “It is geopolitically important for both the Kremlin and for the European Union because of this relative size.”
The country is also a regional economic power, that despite ongoing conflicts, has seen growth in recent years.
“(It’s a) massive economy,” Nickell said. “A very vibrant tech sector is emerging from Ukraine, especially in the past six or so years. ... They also have a very large education sector that they are building. They are exporters of various raw materials, perhaps the most beautiful, and maybe I'm biased, is amber. But this is something that they are building and they're working very hard to build this economy, despite the fact that it was decimated in 2014, in the wake of Euromaidan, and despite the fact that their former president absconded with almost the entirety of the National Treasury when he left in 2014.”
Why it matters
The size, location and economic value of Ukraine is a primary driver of the desire of Russian to control the country, in part or in whole, and she said is an important buffer between NATO-allied countries and Russia.
“One of my scholarly colleagues by the name of Serhii Plokhy, he has called Ukraine the gates of Europe,” Nickell said. “And I think this is a really apt description, because it is the gates of Europe and Mr. Putin is afraid that those gates will come flooding open and European ideas, and what are perceived as Western ideas, like democracy will flood into Russian territory.
“And so I think he sees this as strategically a place to try to cut those ideas from flooding over,” she said. “So that location is very, very important. And, of course, it is bordering several NATO countries.”
Putin’s invoking of NATO creeping into the area is also a misrepresentation of the situation, Nickell said.
“I think it's important when we're listening to the news and thinking about these things, you're going to hear several people say that Mr. Putin is worried about NATO coming to his doorstep. I encourage you to open a map of NATO. You will see that NATO is already on his doorstep in the Baltics and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, so he does have NATO countries already bordering Russia. So much of this is just rhetoric.”
But while the rhetoric coming out of the Russian government has been presented around the globe, Nickell said the situation has shown even within the country Putin’s messaging has been increasing scrutinized.
“I think we're seeing definitely over the past five days that some of our assumptions about some of these things are breaking down,” she said. “If you would have asked me five days ago about the extent of Putin's propaganda machine and its success, I might have thought it to be a little bit more successful than we're finding out it actually is. The propaganda is breaking down on the ground. Russians are coming out into the streets in the thousands, despite the very literal threat to their personal livelihoods to protest this. They're getting arrested. They're getting disappeared.”
Further, as those protests are occurring in the light of a “very sophisticated propaganda machine” and the heavy clampdown on the public sphere, showing complexity and divergence of thought within the region that highlights potential threats to Putin.
“Much of this is also just kind of in rooted in an autocrats' attempt to maintain power,” Nickell said. “And, really, I think he's afraid right now.”
Specifically, she said he seems to fear a growing trend toward democracy on Russia’s doorstep.
The conflict
While Ukraine continues the fight to fend off Russian forces, Nickell said the Ukrainian response has come as surprising to Putin and his allies.
“We have evidence, empirical evidence at this point, he thought that this was going to go very differently,” she said. “He was under the impression that Russia would arrive and then Ukraine would capitulate within three days. We know these to be facts, because the Wayback Machine, which Putin tried to prevent from having access to Russian media outlets, caught something that was supposed to go out 48 hours ago, with pictures and everything, announcing that Ukraine had capitulated. And that is not what happened.
“So here we are. We're two days after that (and) Ukraine is fighting hard. And the world is seeing the propaganda machine for what it is.”
A large part of that propaganda perpetuated by Putin, is based on “entangled history,” Nickell said. But is not actually rooted in historical fact.
He often tries to use the shared history “as a way to depict both entities as the same thing, when in fact, they are different, but related things and the true heirs to Kievan Rus’ are not only Russians, but also Bella Russians and Ukrainians, all distinct separate national identities and now distinct sovereign nation states,” Nickell said.
While, historically, borders have shifted as the result of conflicts and wars in Europe, Ukrainian borders as they are now formed after World War Two.
“It's important that we understand that all of this rhetoric coming from the Kremlin, that Ukraine was always part of Russia is just that Ukraine is composed of parts of several different empires, be it Polish, be it Ottoman, be it Russian, be it Austrian,” Nickell said. “And so, it really is this place for many places, and not necessarily something that was Russian, and then became something else after.
While the lines were formalized in more recent history, they stem from movements in the 17th to 20th centuries.
“There's an independent Ukraine that emerges in 1917-1918,” Nickell said. “There's a brief moment in which they are kind of put down or pacified. And then they emerge as an independent Ukraine again shortly after that. This is short-lived, because unlike our war for independence, where we succeeded in gaining our independence from an imperial power, they did not succeed in gaining their independence from an imperial power. The Bolsheviks violently pacified Ukraine, they murdered millions in the process of doing this and incorporated Ukraine into the Soviet Union. And so that's how Ukraine gets into the Soviet Union.”
Ukraine would function as a part of the Soviet Union until 1991.
“But there was always kind of an undercurrent or demand for Ukrainian independence,” Nickell said. “This is hard to do in a totalitarian state, to come out and be like 'I want to independent state,' but there were always those ideas and cultures of Ukrainian independence. And as they steadily marched closer and closer to the collapse of communism, you saw them become more overt in these calls.”
After the collapse of the USSR, Ukrainians voted for their independence.
But in doing so, they found themselves in a precarious situation that was the impetus behind a meeting in Budapest in 1994.
“It's here that Yeltsin, that leaders of the United States, leaders of the U.K., and leaders of Ukraine all came together to discuss one of the biggest issues facing independent Ukraine,” Nickell said. “And that was the fact that they were sitting on top of the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. And we wanted to denuclearize. We were moving away from the Cold War world, and that we put full faith in Russia and full faith in ourselves that we would begin this process of disarming our nukes.
“As a Colorado girl,” she continued, “I watched that process unfold at home. ... Ukraine agreed to this, that they would give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for one thing — that Russia and the United States acknowledged their territorial sovereignty and promise to protect it. So, we are right now contractually obligated to protect Ukrainian sovereignty, though much of our conversation has been about NATO. And Russia is also contractually obligated to do so. And this is kind of a little bit of a lesson and Putin's promises.”
The conflict heats up
As elections in Ukraine yielded pro-Russian and more pro-democratic leaders, tensions with Russia would come to a head in 2014 with the Euromaidan.
“Maidan is just the word for Square in Ukrainian, which is why Ukrainians call this the Revolution of Dignity, because this was the moment that they claimed back their dignity from the state,” Nickell said. “And they demanded democratic policies.”
Despite the desire of the people to live in a democratic system, the president at the time desired to bring Ukraine closer to Russia.
“And so, he essentially sicced the secret police on the population that was protesting,” Nickell said. "(A) little over 100 individuals were murdered ruthlessly in the streets of Kiev protesting. And today Ukrainians call them the Heavenly 100.”
The timing of those deaths corresponds with the Russian annexation of Crimea, something she attributes to Putin, or at least on his behalf. Soon after as a democratic election was underway, he took advantage of the situation to invade Crimea.
It was at this time he “also began the process of backing so-called separatists in eastern Ukraine in two regions called Donetsk and Luhansk,” Nickell said. “And they're kind of the equivalent to states here in the United States. And this has been ongoing since 2014. Well, over 4,000 Ukrainians have died in this war and war has been part of their everyday lives since."
Until recently, military action has been confined to those two regions.
“And Mr. Putin has at least maintained the facade of nonintervention in the eastern kind of crisis in Luhansk and Donetsk, the war of aggression there,” Nickell said. “However, over the past five days, we've seen this rapid escalation there. ... There is no more facade. Mr. Putin is sending in troops, he is sending in tanks, he is sending in planes, he is using weapons that even here we consider violations of human rights. And so, this is a violent, violent escalation that most of us hoped that we would not be coming to.”
And while allegiances in those regions created complex international relations, Ukrainian borders had been clearly set, she said.
As a historian, Nickell said she has no ability to predict what the outcome of the conflict might be, but fears the situation will not be quickly resolved.
“What I can say is based off of what has been occurring so far and the ratcheting up of violence, I do think this will be a very long and protracted — like very long — conflict,” Nickell said. “And given Putin's general approach to Ukraine over the past 15 years or so, I do think that he will continue to fight (and) Ukrainians will continue to resist. This is something I can say, I think, with some level of certainty.”
But she is encouraged by internal action to stop Russian aggression.
“Some of the rhetoric inside of us inside of the Russian Federation is really starting to break down his grip on power, I think protests out of Belarus in 2020 and again, this week, protests in Kazakhstan, all of these areas surrounding the Russian Federation, as well as inside where there are calls for democracy calls for an open public sphere calls for transparency,” Nickell said. “I think this is where our best hope lies, this would be the most ideal outcome, that democratic ideas overturn autocratic ideas.”
“But other than that,” she continued “I don't I don't know what comes next. I do know that the people of Ukraine need our support, they need our voices, they need anything that we can send their way. Call your congresspeople, do what you can do your bit. And this is a place that does their bit. So do your bit and make change.”
Nickell is scheduled to speak on this topic at the Hays Public Library at 10 a.m. Thursday. The public is invited to attend.
The meeting is also scheduled to live stream on the library Facebook page, facebook.com/hayspubliclibrary.