Uncertainties in the political future of Ukraine

Europe is experiencing a situation that we can define as dramatic. The old and new nationalisms face each other, revive events of the past, show segregationist and discriminatory attitudes, and in extreme cases even confront each other militarily. These types of situations have triggered fierce conflicts with many deaths and injuries, destruction of homes and infrastructure and even disarticulation of the economy and social dismemberment.

That is what is happening in Ukraine and that has led to a war, which for now only involved Russia and Ukraine, but which may directly or indirectly affect other states that have or may have political or military interests in the conflict. This has been proven by the extent of the involvement of the European Union and the US in the Ukrainian situation, through sanctions against Russia and military assistance to the Ukrainian government.

It is important to remember that Ukraine is located in a border area of ​​former European empires. A part of the country, the west, remained under the control of the Austrian empire until 1917. The rest of the country was integrated into the territory controlled by tsarist Russia.

The Ukrainian population was part of the linguistic continuum of East Slavic cultures that encompassed the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian languages. The Ukrainian language had not had a chance to establish itself institutionally as an official language, and Russian became the most widely used language, particularly after the Bolshevik and Soviet revolution. Although the Soviet government promoted the national languages ​​throughout the territory, it gave prominence to Russian, which was the lingua franca of the entire confederation.

For its part, it should be remembered that Ukraine is a very large country. It has an area of ​​603,628 km2, which makes it the second largest country in Europe after Russia. It has a population of 41.3 million inhabitants concentrated in some urban areas, in particular in kyiv, its capital, where 3.5 million inhabitants live.

Because the Soviet multilingual policies, referred to above, were only patchily maintained, there were periods when it was the Russian language that prevailed in education and administration. As a result of this situation, when Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, it was in practice a bilingual country where a high percentage of the population, more than half, had been educated in Russian and therefore expressed themselves Usually in that language.

This situation continued intermittently until 2014, when there was a change of government in which a party with strong nationalist tendencies and anti-Russian sentiments prevailed.

In a few years, we arrived at the current situation.

While Ukrainian is the native language of 67.5% of the population, the Russian language is spoken by almost the entire population and is the native language of 29.6%.

Most of the native Russian speakers live in the southeastern provinces (the Donbass) with an area of ​​53,201 km2 and 6.2 million inhabitants.

Precisely, in the provinces of Donbass, 80% of the population speaks Russian and 17% Ukrainian.

When the nationalist government took power in kyiv, it began to require the Ukrainian language in school teaching and in administrative procedures, banning the Russian language.

This decision produced a strong reaction in the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk where predominantly Russian was spoken. Militias were created and quickly these provinces were organized and unilaterally declared their independence with the respective names of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. For informative purposes, I point out that Donetsk has an area of ​​26,517 km2 and 4,100,000 inhabitants and Luhansk has 26,684 km2 and 2,100,000. The main cities of both provinces are respectively Donetsk with 900,000 inhabitants and Luhansk with 400,000.

An even more illustrative situation regarding this ethnic-linguistic predominance of Russian occurred in Crimea, where the Russian-speaking population constituted 84% of the population, and in the face of the installation of the nationalist government in kyiv, which imposed the Ukrainian language, decided to hold a referendum to join the Russian Federation that was finally approved by 96.7% of the voters, leading to the integration of Crimea into Russia.

The Ukrainian government protested against the incorporation of Crimea into Russia but nevertheless did not attempt any forceful measures to prevent it. His attitude was different towards the rebellious provinces of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian army advanced militarily to regain control of these territories but only achieved partial success in an offensive that caused thousands of deaths and injuries but ended in an impasse that was formalized in the so-called Minsk agreements.

Although with brief interruptions, this pause continued until February of this year (2022).

The Russian government had not interfered directly in the conflict, although in some way it had collaborated by allowing border exchanges and sending some help, perhaps even of a military nature, but without recognizing these new republics and without intervening in the confrontations.

At the same time, the Ukrainian government had requested the intervention of the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, countries that quickly agreed to collaborate both economically and militarily. Based on this support, the Ukrainian government began a military invasion of Donetz and Luhansk, which was ultimately the drop in water that caused Russia's intervention, triggering the military operation or invasion that has been going on for more than 3 months.

In fact, given the regional and international geopolitical context, it seems that the main risk for Ukraine is not only the occupation of part of its territory by Russia, but also the very survival of the Ukrainian state itself.

The provinces of the southeast, what is called the Donbass, are clearly sympathetic to the Russian military operation while other regions of the south, such as Kherson and even Odessa, are likely to fold in support of this advance by the pro-Russian armies.

In the rest of Ukraine, the situation is different. Clearly, in large areas, the population has long developed anti-Russian sentiments making it difficult or even impossible for pro-Russian forces to advance north and west.

Perhaps the problem would become more serious if, under the pretext of collaborating with the Ukrainian government, the Polish army intervened in the regions that had previously been under its sovereignty, such as Lviv (Lvov) and Galicia.

Similarly there is a significant Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia near the Hungarian border which could add political instabilities to that region.

In conclusion, in the future of Ukraine there are many uncertainties that are not only those introduced by the Kremlin with the invasion currently underway.