Ukraine’s finest hour; About the Holodomor: A look at the Ukrainians anger toward Russia

 The Aspen beat

. . ."Ukraine is not Britain. Ukraine lies not as a naturally protected island of civilization, but at the crossroads of cultures – the juncture of two continents, Europe and Asia. It’s a precarious place.

"Ukraine is largely Slavic in an anthropological sense, as is, to varying extents, Western Russia along with Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Slovakia and, to a lesser extent, the Baltic republics . But that doesn’t mean Ukraine is Russian. Russia is a nationality; Slav is an ethnicity.

"Russia’s claim to Ukraine is approximately the same as Britain’s claim to the United States or Ukraine’s claim to Poland. Which is to say, Russia’s claim is no claim at all.

"And so, to my friends who say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rightly seeks to “reunite Russia,” I say you’re full of it. You know just enough about anthropology and history to be dangerous, and just enough about morality to be impenetrably amoral.

"Ukrainians know this. They know who they are, and they know they’re not Russian. They struggled under the yoke of totalitarian Russian rule for the better part of a century. They finally broke free along with the rest of eastern Europe upon the inevitable but long-awaited fall of the Soviet Union. They have no desire, and do not deserve, to become a vassal state of backward, tyrannical Russia again.

"The Ukrainians want freedom, and they’re earning it every hour. They’ve risked everything in defying one of the mightiest armies the world has seen. They’ve driven them out of Kyiv, they’ve denied them Kharkiv.. . ."

Ukrainians hated Russia and welcomed German invaders at first   Then the Nazis blew it all by murdering Ukrainians wholesale.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 is remembered as Hitler’s most catastrophic military mistake. But in 1941 it didn’t seem to be a mistake at all. “Everyone thought at the beginning that the war will result in the complete defeat of the Soviet Union,” said Aleksey Bris, who was an 18-year-old Ukrainian student in 1941.". . .

. . ."But then, after a moment’s reflection, I realized that this could never have happened. The whole nature of Nazism meant that after the initial euphoria of their “liberation” from Soviet rule wore off, Ukrainians were destined to experience the Nazis as some of the cruelest conquerors in history.". . .

Not even the Communist Holodomor surpassed Hitler's genocide!

A Brief History of Ukraine-Russia Relations    

Seven million Ukrainians died during the Holodomor. Some scholars say Stalin did this to crush the Ukrainian independence movement, and the Holodomor was verboten ‌until the waning years of the USSR.  Then, in World War 2 (WW2), Ukraine’s location between the great powers turned it into a meat grinder. Having to endure both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, many millions of Ukrainians died, millions more became homeless, and the conflict destroyed the country’s wealth.  The Holodomor translates roughly to “death by hunger” in Ukrainian. 

Holodomor Memorial, Kyiv. Holodomor means, “death by starvation

26 Horrifying Photos Of Holodomor, The Ukrainian Famine That Killed Millions (allthatsinteresting.com)

All the above to say that Ukrainians do not have a pleasant history with the Russians.