The Soviet Union gave Ukraine two nightmares:
Ukraine famine, Chernobyl nuclear disaster
During the Soviet era, Ukraine was one of its most oppressed member states. Nearly 40 percent of known political prisoners in Soviet history were Ukrainians, more than double Ukraine’s share of the Soviet population. But for the people living on Ukrainian soil, the Soviet Union brought them two biggest nightmares. The first was the “Holodomor” in 1932-1933, and the second was the 1986 “Holodomor”. Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The former was the failure of Stalin’s agricultural policy, but the situation in Ukraine, traditionally the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, was most alarming, with conservative estimates at least 2 million people lost their lives.
But the events that really triggered Ukraine’s break with Russia were the annexation of Crimea by Russia after Ukraine’s “Dignity Revolution” in 2014 and its assistance to the pro-Russian rebels in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian political mainstream immediately tilted towards the anti-Russian line, focusing on elevating the status of the Ukrainian language and promoting the “independence” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Moscow’s influence.
Timothy Snyder, an expert on the history of Eastern Europe at Yale University and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” said frankly when he wrote for The Washington Post in January: “There is no Ukrainian (government) policy compared to Russia’s. The war on Ukraine brought about such a big ‘Ukrainization’.”
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