Dispatch 004: "We're All Prisoners Of Geography"
How the geographic realities of Russia, Ukraine and Europe made conflict inevitable.
George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, a geopolitical forecasting firm, has a saying,
“Nations don’t decide their fates, geography does it for them and they merely announce its arrival”
While I do not believe nations are fatalistically doomed by their geographic realities, I do believe geography’s impact on social, political and economic reality is often overlooked in the click-bait Twitters news cycle. This is especially true in better understanding the current Ukrainian-Russian War.
To understand Russia’s fascination with Ukraine you need to understand a geological feature known as the Northern European Plain (NEP).
The NEP has offered invaders a flat, unencumbered route all the way from Paris to Moscow and it is the exact route that Napoleon in 1815, Germany in WWI and Hitler in WWII took to invade Russia. Jokingly, many historians refer to the NEP as '“the invasion superhighway of Europe”
With no geological features to hide behind - no rivers, mountains or impassable terrain, Russia acquired as much land as possible to serve as buffers between itself and the West.
Instead of trying to fight enemies directly, Russia’s security strategy became simple:
Be so big no one can conquer you.
During each of Napoleon, Germany (WWI) and Hitler (WWII)’s invasions the Russian strategy was the same: retreat continually into the vast Russian wilderness, goading the enemy into over stretching their supply lines while burning crops, cities and killing cattle along the way until the Russian winter killed or weakened the enemy force enough to be easily defeated by what was left of the Russian military.
Ukraine as a buffer state
Ukraine is a particularly interesting area of borderland Russians want to claim.
Historically, both Ukrainians and Russians seek to claim something known as the Kiev Rus Empire as their founders. Kiev Rus, starting in Kyiv the current capital of Ukraine, is considered by both Ukrainians and Russians to be the start of their shared Slavic culture.
(This may also explain some of Putin’s hesitation with carpet bombing Kyiv indiscriminately not wanting to damage a city so historically significant to him, yet)
Complicating the quest to claim Ukraine as a border land is the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s control of what is today the Western third of Ukraine, known then as East Galacia while the Czars and later Bolsheviks controlled the Central and Eastern thirds of Ukraine in the USSR.
After WWI when the Treaty of Paris mandated self-determination for the peoples of the Austrian Empire, Poland was awarded its own country along with its claims on Western Ukraine (ironically the Ukrainian delegation was ignored by Woodrow Wilson for their claim to independence)
In Western Ukraine under the Austrian Empire, the Austrians played Poles and Ukrainians off of one another.
Whenever one group became too powerful, the Austrians granted the other group more freedoms.
Under the Austrians Ukrainians developed their own language, had their own schools, art, culture and self-governance which came to the chagrin of local Poles and Jews who had, until then, occupied the ruling elite of Galacia.
In the interim years between WWI and WWII this is largely what Ukraine looked like:
Poles and Ukrainians are intertwined in Western Ukraine.
Ukrainian and Polish as languages are quite similar, and many Western Ukrainians still have ancestral claims on lands they owned in modern day Poland. In fact, if you can prove you have a Polish grandparent, Poland will grant a Ukrainian student tuition the same cost of a Polish citizen.
The Great Hunger, Stalin’s Final Solution
However, in the rest of Ukraine at this time, Stalin enact his own final solution on Ukrainians, known as the Holodymor or Great Hunger.
Ukrainians had tried to assert their independence from the USSR during the Russian Revolution and inflicted the harshest losses on the Bolsheviks throughout the Russian Revolution.
Wanting to bring Ukraine to heel, Stalin made it illegal to own bread and shipped metric tons of grain out of Ukraine in an attempt to starve off an entire generation of Ukrainians.
It was gruesome.
There were reports of children fainting on playgrounds from hunger only to be found half eaten hours later by their former friends, mothers cooking their infant children in villages to feed their other children and entire ghost towns that dropped dead of hunger.
This is why most Ukrainians, especially older ones, will shovel food down your gullet even if you just ate a meal.
In total, over 4 million Ukrainians died during Holodymor and, to replace them, Stalin gladly trained in millions of ethnic Russians in an attempt to tilt the ethnic scales of Ukraine in the USSR’s favor.
This is why today most Ukrainians (outside of Western Ukraine) share some form of Russian ethnicity and speak Russian or a mix of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk (Surjik)
This has also been part of Putin’s justification for military involvement in Ukraine - stating that Russian speakers in Ukraine were being discriminated against or having genocide committed against them.
Ironically, the historical record clearly shows the exact opposite argument of Putin, that it is Russia with the propensity to inflict systemic genocide on Ukrainians.
It was under this context that Stalin sought to claim Ukraine as a buffer state between the USSR and NATO during the Cold War.
When the USSR fell in the 1990s, Russia was still able to bring Ukraine to heel as a pseudo-buffer state via economic pressure and corruption.
However, unlike Belarus which to this day has not even bothered to change the lettering on their KGB building from the Cold War, Ukraine has been unruly.
In 2014 it overthrew pro-Russian president Viktor Yanokovich and later restarted it’s attempted to join the EU and NATO.
To Putin, as it had been to Stalin and the Russian czars before him, maintaining control over buffer states like Ukraine are an existential requirement to maintain Russian security from NATO and the US.
This is a redline Putin, and the Russian military industrial complex won’t step back from easily.
If at all.