Eastern Europe Conflicts: Does Russia Occupies Ukraine?

The overwhelming majority of the world considers Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, an unlawful occupation. Russia’s seizure of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that a European state annexed the territory of another. Although the Russian government denies it, Russian “volunteers” and regular troops are also present in the two self-proclaimed pro-Russian “people’s republics” in the Donbas region near the Russian border. However, exploiting the late 14th-century decline of Mongol power, the Grand Principality of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the latter eventually uniting with Poland) divided the former Russia lands. A new social group of Ukrainian Cossacks developed on the southern frontier of Poland, guarding it against Crimean Tatar raids. The Ukrainian Cossacks were a large group of free people, many of them were peasant serfs, who guarded the southern steppe border of Poland against Turkish and Tatar raids. The concept of ‘Ukraine’ already existed, but locals continued calling themselves ‘Rusyns’, while referring to the future Russians as ‘Muscovites’. By the early 17th century, the Orthodox Christian population of the Ukrainian lands had become antagonized by Catholic Poland’s religious policies and the spread of serfdom – a form of slavery in which peasants were bound to the land and sold with it. A 1648 Cossack rebellion led by Hetman (military leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595–1657) became a mass social and religious war against Polish rule, resulting in the creation of the Hetmanate, a Cossack polity nominally autonomous under the Polish king but independent in fact. Searching for allies against Poland, Khmelnytsky accepted the “protection” of the Orthodox Russian tsar in the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav. The exact meaning of “protection” continues to be debated today, but subsequent Russian policies affected the absorption of the Cossack lands, especially after Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s (1639–1709) failed attempt in 1709 to break with Moscow.