John David Ebert recently released an article on his substack titled, Ukraine and Taiwan: A Theory of Civilizational Planes. In it, he analyzes the two pressing “Border Disputes” on the world stage, between the West and Russia over Ukraine, and the West and China over Taiwan. The article is available only to paid subscribers (which I would recommend everyone become, as JDE is indisputably the best content creator this sphere has,) but he released a preview of his article on his YouTube channel which is linked here. For paid subscribers, his whole article is linked here. The dear reader would be making a mistake should they read my article before his.
JDE argues that these border disputes between his termed “Global Triumvirate” of Euro-America, China, and Russia, are a conflict occurring on multiple civilizational planes. He differentiates the two conflicts, as Russia and China have different reasons (the former more legitimate than the latter) for pressing their claims on these two regions. This article will focus on the Ukraine situation, and will serve to give context to the situation of Ukraine. The arguments of this article are heavily based on the Russians With Attitude podcast, specifically from Episodes 8, 21, 24, and 26.
To understand the immediate situation of Ukraine is to understand the Political and Social nature of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is, first and foremost, an artificial construct. I.e., there is no such thing as an, “Ethnic Ukrainian,” unless one purposely misreads said construct onto groups there that already existed.
Ukraine, like its name’s translation, has always been a borderland (it isn’t even the only place in Russia that’s been called Ukraine.) This is especially so after the migration of the Kievan Rus to Muscovy and the ethno-genesis of modern Russians around Moscow. In the absence of the Kievan Rus, many different peoples moved in to fulfill different roles. Poles moved in when the land was possessed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as numerous Germans during the great eastward migrations towards the latter end of the middle ages. Cossack bands moved into the east of Ukraine around the same time. The Crimean Tatars, which were always a ruling minority, were expelled around the turn of the 18th century. The dissolution of the Commonwealth led to the absorption of Galicia and Lodomeria (Western Ukraine) by the Habsburgs, and Eastern Ukraine to include Crimea by the Czardom of Russia. Hence the east and west differentiated even more, the former falling under Germanic influence, the latter re-asserting the native Slavic population.
The language of Ukrainian too is as organic as Esperanto, first created during the romantic era of the 19th century by provincial intellectuals, as inventing the histories of rural backwaters and regional peasant dialects was in fashion at the time. Even today, there are no perfect Ukrainian speakers as the rules of the language are changed every year. The language was adopted by the nascent Soviet administration as a part of their “National Republics” scheme, which established minority “ethno-states” across the former Russian Empire with the purpose of breaking up the homogeneity and political power of ethnic Russians. The result of this was that minorities were given tracts of land to form their “National Republics,” the residents of which were upwards of 90% ethnic Russians. In the case of Ukraine, no nationality existed, other than the Poles who already had a Republic and were too few and too geographically limited to the area around Lwow. So the Soviets simply took this language of provincial intellectuals, gave it a history as artificial as its borders, and turned it to a constituent state of the Soviet Union.
It must be emphasized, the Slavs native to Ukraine are Ukrainian only by geographic designation. They are ethnically identical to Russians. This is where the lie of official statistics must be drawn, as the Government of Ukraine has always existed as a sort of money-laundering scheme by whomever rules it. Official statistics say Ukrainians make up around 77% of the population, while Russians make up around 17%. This is patently false. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because Ukrainians do not exist. This means that some 94% of Ukraine are ethnic Russians. Ukraine is more Russian than Russia.
Ukraine was made into a separate entity from Russia due to circumstance, mostly being the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the subsidiary Ukrainian Civil War. The hostility of the Soviet regime to ethnic Russians did not apply to Ukrainians, exemplified in the fact that four of the eight leaders of the Soviet Union were Ukrainian (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, and arguably Gorbachev.) Ukraine remained a constituent state of the Soviet Union, being granted several tracts of land with no historic ties to Ukraine (Novorossiya and Crimea come to mind) until the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The thirty years of Ukrainian independence were a series of economic downturns, poor Presidents, patronage politics, and a delicate balance of interests east and west, with the influence of the latter at its nadir in the early-2000s. As the prosperity of the EU has declined, so too has pro-western sentiment. Since 2008 and the decline of Euro-American prosperity, pro-Russian sentiment is on the rise in Ukraine, especially in the Donbas and surrounding regions. The 2014 conflict is merely the logical result of an artificial construct purposely amputated from its organic progenitor for the purposes of American politicians money-laundering their government funds.
The NATO Empire is in decline, its cultural immune system afflicted with a disease which has spread to every country in its orbit, to include Ukraine. But Ukraine is not the West, it’s not even Ukraine. It is Russia, as Russian as Moscow or St. Petersburg, if not more so. If the dear reader disagrees, take a trip to Odesa or Kiev (supposedly ethnically “Ukrainian” cities) and listen to what language they’re speaking. The only thing keeping Russia from anschluss-ing its own people is the rotting corpse of the West. I predict they’ll meet as many cheers and flowers as the Germans did in 1938.
The Swiss speak French, German, Italian and Romansh. Doesn’t make them not Swiss.
Unified national languages are creations of states. Otherwise, you have collections of dialects. (Newspapers, etc, can also linguistically standardise.) Ukrainian as a language is no more artificial than Portuguese. And, clearly, the Russian Army wasn’t greeted as liberators.
What we are watching is the pressure of the Russian state generating ethnogenesis. Just as there was no Palestinian people in 1920 but there sure is now. Sure, there is a division between the quite Nordic West Ukrainians (who are absolutely not Russian) and the much more Slavic East Ukrainians, but national identities have been created out of less promising material.