Ukraine, along with Russia, had constituted a "loose federation of East Slavic tribes" known as warrior-traders that were ruled by the Rurik dynasty from the 9th to 13th century in what is historically referred to as Kievan Rus. Ties were cemented by the Orthodox Church when Prince Vladimir chose that religion for his people in the 10th century. By the time of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, the area had degenerated into rivalries among various princes who’d lorded over a dozen or so independent areas. When the Mongol massacre killed about two-thirds of the population, some of the survivors managed to flee closer to what is modern-day Moscow and those who remained were forced into subjugation, rupturing Slavic bonds. Those from the southern part of the Kieven Rus region later became known as Ukrainians and were cut off and later ruled over by Poles and Lithuanians.
In the mid-17th century, the Treaty of Pereyaslavl united Ukraine to Russia as an autonomous region. This led to a 13-year war between Russia and Poland which resulted in the division of Ukraine between the two countries. From then on, the Ukrainian-speaking parts of Poland-Lithuania were progressively conquered by the Russian Empire, leading many Orthodox Ukrainians to strongly identify with Russia. From the late 18th century on, Russians referred to Ukraine territory as Malorussia or "Little Russia," viewing Ukraine and the Ukrainian language as having derived from the greater Russian history and culture and later sought to standardize it to Russian.
The Western parts of modern-day Ukraine had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries while the southeastern portion was part of the Russian Empire. An independent Ukrainian state emerged very briefly in the years of the Russian Revolution and early civil war period, but the project failed in 1919. From then until WWII, parts of Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Soviet Russia, with the latter becoming a Soviet Republic ruled by the Communist Party. Russian/Soviet rule of Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries created complex patterns of migration with significant parts of southern Ukraine settled by Russians, including those who came to work in the mines and factories of the Donbas region, bringing the Russian language with them.
In 1991, Ukraine gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on the history outlined above, Ukraine found itself with ethnic, cultural, and linguistic divisions within the country. According to British scholar Richard Sakwa in Frontline Ukraine, there emerged two different and irreconcilable views of how to organize the Ukrainian state.
The first is the monist approach. This is the belief that Ukraine is a single cultural and political entity. The political philosophy underpinning this view is heavily influenced by the Galician ethnonationalist identity of Ukraine rather than a civic or pluralistic one. It advocates for the Ukrianization of society including a unitary state with one language. It partly draws on the thinking of those who were trying to create the independent state that failed in 1919. That failure was subsequently blamed on democracy, liberalism and a lack of will, paving the way for fascist sympathies. In the early 1930’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, led by Stepan Bandera, violently resisted Polish rule in Galicia. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union made Galicia part of the Soviet Union – a region that had never been under Russian imperial rule and today remains the most strongly nationalist and anti-Russian part of Ukraine.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Ukrainian ultranationalists supported Germans thinking they would assist in the creation of an independent Ukraine. The Ukrainian ultranationalist army – who were supporters of Bandera – massacred 70,000 Poles in Volyn in 1943 and is estimated to have killed 130,000 in Eastern Galicia by 1945. Statues of Bandera have been erected throughout western Ukraine starting in October of 2007. Streets have also been named after him and a giant portrait of Bandera was displayed on stage at the Maidan protests in 2014.
The alternative view of how to organize the state is based on pluralism and acknowledges that Ukraine has a common ancestry with Kievan Rus and emphasizes a civic Ukrainian identity rather than an ethnonationalist one. The pluralist approach says that cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity must be acknowledged and respected. It calls for a degree of decentralization. However, support for this is complicated by the fact that centralization benefits certain financial as well as political interests, namely oligarchs.
For its first two decades of independence, Ukraine was engaged in a clumsy balancing act between the nationalist west, the Russophile east and the relatively moderate central part of the country.
