All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again…
Just as the creator of Peter Pan said, and Battlestar Galactica reiterated time after time — humans are simply incapable of conjuring up new flows of events. Hell, we can’t even come up with new phrases to use…
The war in Ukraine is the latest attestation to this time honored truth.
Lets take another walk through history and look at the flow of events in more recent history that appears to be repeating itself almost word for word. In my original article, I purposely skimmed over the events of WWI and WWII, as they require a deep dive of their own, but as the war progressed, it became more and more obvious to me that we don’t need to look back a full millennium, a simple century will do just fine.
Synopsis: Soviet takeover of Ukraine between 1917 and 1921 and its retaking between 1943 and 1945 bear an uncanny resemblance to what is happening today in terms of the rhetoric (both domestic and foreign), the propaganda, the human cost, and of course military operations.
First, let’s be clear that since the end of the Viking Age and the Mongol invasions, there have been two Ukraines — East, mostly under Poland, and West, the free people of the Sich. The split was fundamental from the beginning, with Poland being at the same time politically enlightened and also a ruthless (barely) post-medieval feudal conquerer state with imperial ambitions. Meanwhile, the Sich was a no-man’s-land at the westernmost edge of the great eurasian steppe, where one was both free and at the same time constantly under threat.
By the 17th century, the East further split into North, which fell under the influence of the Russian Tsardom, and South, which remained as a neutral state that bounced between farming and mercenary activities. Technically, there were further subdivisions, as reflected in old maps from those times…
In the 18th century, the rise of Austro-Hungarian Empire saw the latter annex a large portion of western Ukraine as a gesture of gratitude for the support it received from the Zaporozhian cossacks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
So by the time the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, there were really at least 4 separate “Ukraines”… not even counting Crimea, which had pretty much nothing to do with any of them.
As a smaller scale reflection of the rest of Europe at the onset of WWI, Ukraine’s separate regions were simultaneously politically and financially influenced/manipulated by their ruling powers, including Germany, Poland, Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans, and of course Russia, while also harboring nationalistic ambitions that had been growing for a century among all people subjugated by the ever-hungry Empires. And similar to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, the situation was further complicated by each part of the bigger Ukraine considering itself as the true core of the nation that everyone else should naturally rally around.
WWI allowed all of this out in the open. The Hungarian portion of Ukraine was probably the first to act, as the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen formed the first military core of a self-proclaimed Ukrainian People’s Republic, following their breakaway from the Austro-Hungarian military, which ended up on the losing side of the war. But this was quickly followed by a giant mess of east and west nationalists, anarchists, and multiple Communist factions. No one could agree on anything, and in the end, the Bolsheviks took control. The loss of life was colossal, as the see-saw of war kept taking its toll over the years. The ever shifting allegiances demonstrated complete lack of any sort of “national unity”. The only constant seems to be that Ukrainians from all over hated everyone more or less equally, until one side started winning, at which point they became the focus.
This period was formative of the modern worldviews we are dealing with today. Despite the ever-changing reality of who was in control, the cultural and geographic differences were clear and easily manipulated. The Soviet propaganda machine really flourished in this atmosphere, but it was far from the only one. The Germans leveraged all the unresolved bitterness of the early 1920’s to their fullest in the late 1930’s, as they prepared to invade the USSR, beginning in Western Ukraine.
The events of WWI largely repeated themselves during WWII. The far West of Ukraine allied itself with the Axis Powers, seeing the USSR, Stalin, and the Russian people in general as the main enemy. The Ukrainian Liberation Army was a straight up division of the ⚡︎⚡︎ (and this is not up for debate) while the Ukrainian Insurgent Army saw itself as the true descendant of the Sich Riflemen and sought to unite all of the nation under its banner. But history repeated itself swiftly, as UPA proceeded to split into its own factions, loosing its collective power and ending up fighting a rather disorganized guerrilla war against everyone. However, its origins were still tied to the Nazi forces, and many of its branches continued to fight on the side Germany.
When the tables turned in 1943, this became a huge liability for UPA — one it could never overcome… The Soviet Union jumped on this with full strength of its propaganda, military, and NKVD police and never let go. Once the fight against Nazi Germany became a total existential struggle and got elevated to the level of “sacred”, anything that opposed it was easily labeled as truly evil.
And as Eastern Ukraine was already considered sufficiently russified, all the focus was on the West. In fact, Donbass had partly been part of Russia rather than Ukraine, as can be seen in the 1920’s map above. And by the 1940’s, it was viewed by the USSR as the industrial core of the whole nation.
The Donbass offensive in 1943 was perhaps the second most important of WWII for Russia after Stalingrad. The latter blocked Hitler’s access to the Caucasus and secured USSR’s supply of oil, while the return of Donbass quickly reenergized the Soviet heavy industry and propelled the Soviet war machine to victory.
And then the war of words begins… The more unsure of success someone is, the more effort they put into the outward appearance of it. Long before social media, this was done with posters and leaflets.
See if any of these seem oddly familiar… The Russian plan failed! Ukraine held on to Kiev and is now on the offensive. The Russian military has proven to be inferior and is doomed. Putin is sending his soldiers into a trap, and ruining ordinary Russian families.
And of course the absolutely ridiculous claims that start popping up…
Meanwhile, the reality on the ground is somehow starting to look more and more familiar…
I’ll leave you with an unpopular prediction… History will once again (at least partly) repeat itself, and Russia will end up with full control of Eastern and Southern Ukraine. This time, there’s no need to march all the way to Berlin, and really no good reason to directly occupy Kyiv, but remember this line in a year or two:
Yes, the underground UPA continued its campaign until 1949, and I believe this current iteration will drag out for years as well. But eventually, everything will fall into place like it did in the late 1920’s and again in the late 1940’s. NKVD lost on the order of 30K people over a span of 5 or 6 years back then, but UPA lost about 10x that in the end…
