War in Ukraine – from all against all, from all to one

After nearly eight weeks With the war, the question is no longer whether Putin will succeed in capturing the capital, Kyiv. But if he managed to capture all the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, then the provinces he declared “independent” before the start of the Great War. Because Ukrainians defend themselves like lions.

So, why do you explode Putin’s project is so loud that it is heard all over the world? Because the Russian president attacked something completely different from what he thought he would attack. He believed he was attacking Ukraine, as for most of history, as geographically weak, culturally and politically divided, and for the most part at war with himself. But instead, in his war, Putin met a nation that he himself had helped largely unite.

100 years ago Parts of the Ukrainian elites were ready for independence when World War I left the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman monarchies in ruins. The era of nation-states has come in Europe. From Finland to Albania, dozens of new countries have seen the light of day. Ukraine was not one of them. Instead, Ukraine became the battleground before anyone else before World War I, and witnessed the Russian Revolution and the civil wars that followed. A total of 1.5 million Ukrainians were killed during World War II, revolution and civil wars. The border state was the same, Ukraine was crossed from east to west, and from the north, against which “everyone” turned. There was no talk of any dancing.

It was a wild mess. When it wasn’t foreigners who attacked and took political control of a stacked ploy, as the Austrians, Poles, Russian monarchists, and Bolsheviks did, it was the Ukrainians who fought among themselves. There were socialist-inspired fascist regimes, and there were agriculture-inspired anarchist armies, fighting each other and against all others. The only historical case of something as archaic as anarchist regional power or control was in Ukraine. Poor boy Nestor Makhno became an anarchist prisoner of war, with machine guns on horse-drawn carriages, as an effective weapon. But the onslaught of Ukrainian nation-building fell like a house of cards. If the anarchists did not have the power, then chaos reigned.

Now it can work As if the chaos has resurfaced somewhat, but this time with a positive conflict. Improvisation, not organization, has been Ukrainian power since the time of the Cossacks. They are in many ways also a national role model for modern Ukraine. They did not need many days to saddle the horse and sharpen the sword, if necessary. Now the ability to improvise again appears to give the Ukrainians an advantage in military confrontations with Russian forces. The guerrilla war was successful.

Ukrainians have For good reason, deep suspicion of the authorities. In the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin killed three million Ukrainians by starvation because he wanted to collect peasant land by force, while two million people were killed by state terrorism. During World War II, eight million Ukrainians were killed. In one generation, more than 17 million Ukrainians were killed.

after Ukraine They finally got their national freedom as a gift, in 1991, it was the oligarchs who stole the people’s property during post-communist privatization. Therefore, the Ukrainians have a long tradition of managing themselves, without any state, which in any case does not benefit much, on the contrary. There is one reason why the party of President Volodymyr Zelensky called the servant of the people, and why during his inauguration speech the president asked the country’s bureaucrats not to put pictures of the president in his office, but pictures of their children, to remind themselves of who they should be.

The war in Ukraine He seems to have launched some of these automatic, self-organizing forces already planted by the Ukrainians since the time of the Cossacks. Trust is between family, neighbors and friends, not government structures and hierarchies. But unlike what happened 100 years ago, when these forces were moving in all directions, now they are moving in the same direction.

The perfect blow that rocks Moscow

Putin wanted to play About the historical contradictions between eastern and western Ukraine. But instead of meeting the Russian culture in eastern and southern Ukraine with flowers, it is precisely these who are now providing the greatest military and civil resistance to the Russian occupiers. In this war, both Zelensky and the people seem to have mysteriously come to their senses. Because the experience of war shows that it is not Zelensky who rules the country, but the country that rules itself. It appears to be a fruitful principle in Ukraine.