The revolution in Ukraine and the celebration, grief and apprehension it has inspired mask a fundamental misunderstanding. The country has released itself from the larcenous grip of a bullying dictator and his venal friends – but Ukraine has been a surreally corrupt parliamentary democracy, run by a lineage of serially corrupt presidents, for 23 years. So why now? And it has risen up only to fall foul of yet another bully. But why President Putin’s wildly aggressive reaction? And will it snuff out the hopeful revolt begun in Kyiv? To answer those questions, we need to acknowledge that the events of the past three months in and around the bloody crucible of Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv have been only secondarily about power – though Putin’s illegal occupation of Crimea is about nothing else. And to explain that, we need to recognise that the nation of Ukraine has been misunderstood, not for months but for decades, possibly for centuries.
The historical source of the misunderstanding is the assumption that Ukraine was not a nation at all, but always a province, an administrative region, a westerly satrapy of an eastern empire whose ideology, language and aspirations were so uniform that you couldn’t get a papiros paper between Moscow, the boiler room of that ideology, and the country Russia called its “little brother”.
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