Escalating Conflict Is Today’s Worst Trend

Austin Smith and Michael Muir discuss the historical factors leading to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They explore various narratives and historical events, including the influence of Imperial Russia, World War I, and the Soviet Union’s policies. They also touch on the 1954 transfer of Crimea and the 1994 nuclear disarmament agreement.

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Transcript:

Okay, I’m Austin Smith, joined by Michael Muir of 24-7 Wall Street.

And Michael, we had a conversation recently about the China-Taiwan conflict, and we talked a little bit about the conflict that’s going on between Russia and Ukraine today.

And I’d like to go back to that for this.

And I’m curious, what has actually led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

We’ve seen a lot of different narratives.

We’ve seen, you know, Putin is trying to conquer Ukraine.

We’ve seen Putin is trying to reintegrate Ukraine.

We’ve seen the argument of denazification.

We heard Putin’s own argument with Tucker Carlson, which was somewhat long-winded and based in history.

As you view it, based on the information you’ve seen, what has actually brought us to the conflict today?

What triggered this?

Well, we can really go back a long way to see the origins of this idea that Putin and other hardliners have put forward of Ukraine as essentially little Russia.

That goes all the way back to the days of Imperial Russia before the Soviet Union.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned amongst major European powers, a large chunk of Ukraine ended up in the Russian Empire.

Another portion was taken by the Habsburgs.

And the two Ukrainians, for lack of a better word, had very different experiences.

Austria-Hungary wasn’t necessarily very welcoming of its ethnic minorities, but because it was a multiethnic, multilingual empire, it needed to be a bit more accommodating.

So they allowed a proliferation of Ukrainian language and culture, whereas the Russians suppressed it.

So again, this idea goes way back to the 18th century.

So that’s just one of many areas of this very long story.

And we can go forward a little bit to World War One.

Now, when we think World War One, we generally think Western Front two lines of static trenches, not an awful happening.

And that’s largely true.

But then when we go to the Eastern Front, which is far less studied in the Western world, the English language speaking world, there’s not an awful lot of research on that area.

But Ukraine was actually an epicenter of World War One.

We just don’t typically associate with that conflict.

And because of the partition between the Habsburgs and the Russian Empire, about 300,000 Ukrainians fought for Austria, Hungary and.

About four point five million Ukrainians fought for the Russian Empire and.

Then by 1917, the Eastern Front was largely dead, it was finished, and Ukraine, we see the first Ukrainian government, for lack of a better word, emerging in 1917.

But this experiment wasn’t destined to last very long.

Again, there was a lot of conflicts after World War One ended in Eastern Europe to establish the post-war borders.

There was also the Russian Civil War.

So Ukraine comes under Russian dominion once again after the end of the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s.

There’s another key point that we want to address here is the famine in Ukraine that took place as a result of Stalin’s five-year plan.

And that still has an impact on the present discourse.

Ukraine is pretty adamant that that was a genocide.

Carried out by the Russian, well, by the Soviet Union, but under Russian dominion.

And Russia has consistently denied that that was a genocide.

It was just an unfortunate consequence of rapid industrialization.

So there’s already this very, very long standing distrust of Russia in Ukraine goes way back.

And then we can get to, so you mentioned the denazification of Ukraine, one of Putin’s key talking points that goes back to Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

So after the famine, Operation Barbarossa’s launch, that’s Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Most of Ukraine is quickly overrun.

And some elements of ultra-nationalists within Ukraine were actually fairly welcoming of this invasion, seeing them as liberators.

Obviously, that wasn’t the reality.

A few even went as far as joining up with volunteer SS regiments.

But that shouldn’t be misunderstood.

The Galicia division represented thousands of Ukrainians, but millions more Ukrainians fought against the Nazis.

But that’s a talking point that Putin and a lot of hardliners have exploited as memory of World War II.

In fact, really the first half of the 20th century, Ukraine was probably one of the worst places to be.

It was just a series of tragedies and conflicts.

So again, there’s a couple more important things that happened between the end of World War II and today.

1954, this was an event that didn’t really generate a lot of attention at the time, but Khrushchev granted Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 as a goodwill gesture.

Now, at the time, very little change didn’t have a great deal of practical effects because it was all still under the Soviet Union.

But obviously, we fast forward to 2014 and we see that it’s a major bone of contention between Russia and Ukraine.

Crimea didn’t really have any specific attachments to Ukraine.

In fact, a lot of the population wouldn’t even consider themselves Ukrainian when Ukraine became an independent nation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

There was a question of what are we going to do with Crimea because it didn’t necessarily want to be part.

So the sort of solution, the ad hoc solution was to have Crimea as an autonomous region within Ukraine.

And there’s one other point we need to get to as well is in 1994, this is after the dissolution of Soviet Union and Ukraine is an independent nation.

And there’s the question, what are we going to do with nuclear weapons that are stationed in Ukraine?

And obviously, with hindsight, we can think of that as a very bad move, but actually in the context of the time, it made a lot of sense.

There were serious questions over the safety and the loyalty of the soldiers who were in charge of nuclear weapons at the time.

So it just seemed a sensible move, but it also should be pointed out that even in 1994,

Uh, Ukrainian government was under no illusions, um, that this guarantee.

So the, the deal was we’ll remove the nuclear weapons and you promise never to invade.

Um, but even in 1994, the Ukrainians didn’t take that particularly seriously.

They pointed out, uh, one of the senior politicians at the time pointed out if Russia invades tomorrow, no one’s going to do anything.

Obviously it wasn’t tomorrow, but it was more like 20 years later.

Um, so yeah, it’s just a lot of these points, um, going way back.

Have a huge impact on the present day.

So when I look at this, you know, the clean answer is probably that it’s complicated, right?

And what we’ve already looked at is five different potential causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine going all the way back to the early 1900s.

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