LONG, BUT SHALLOW:

At the beginning of the 20th century, today's Ukraine was split between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The Russian part was officially known in Moscow as "Little Russia", and was subjected to a series of repressive measures to keep it that way. When Ukrainians began agitating for greater autonomy in 1906, Tsar Nicholas II reacted by arresting Ukrainian activists.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists tried again: they announced their independence, and raised an army to try to protect it. In the civil, ethnic and class wars that followed, the new Ukrainian army lost out on both sides. In the west, they lost to the Poles, who annexed large parts of the regions of Volhynia and Galicia. In the east, they lost to the Bolsheviks, who forced the bulk of Ukraine to join the Soviet Union. On paper, Ukraine was now an autonomous republic, but it was still controlled centrally from Moscow. In the 1930s, it was subjected to both Stalinist terror and the Holodomor, a man-made famine that resulted in millions of deaths.

Ukraine's next opportunity to break away from Russia came during the Second World War. After the German invasion in 1941, some Ukrainian nationalist groups allied themselves with the Nazis in the mistaken hope that it might help them achieve independence. Some of these groups actively assisted with the Holocaust, before turning their attention to ethnically cleansing the Polish minorities in the western borderlands. As a consequence, the Soviets were able to paint all Ukrainian partisans as fascists, regardless of their true politics. Partisans continued to resist Soviet domination for the next decade.

When the dust finally settled in the mid-1950s, much had changed. Stalin had moved the borders, forcing Poland to give up a large amount of its territory to Ukraine, but this was not so much of a gift to Ukraine as a land-grab for the Soviet Union as a whole. To dispel some of the ethnic tensions, a massive population exchange had taken place between Poland and Ukraine - but, again, this was not for Ukraine's benefit, but simply a way to impose Soviet control. In the years that followed, Russian speakers were encouraged to migrate to Ukraine to promote greater integration into the Soviet project. It is these Russian-speaking minorities that are at the heart of today's crisis.

Ukraine did not manage to win independence until the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Once again, a moment of chaos provided the opportunity. In August 1991, while the Soviets were distracted by an attempted military coup and their own impending collapse, Ukraine unilaterally announced its independence. This was quickly ratified in a popular referendum three months later.

Russian-Ukrainian relations have never been the same since. Russian nationalists, including president Vladimir Putin, have always felt betrayed by Ukraine, which they still regard as "Little Russia". 

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