Musings on Yet Another Great Power Crisis in Eastern Europe

Reality check:

The Ukraine is a complex mix of languages and "ethnicites". Generally speaking, and you can see this mapped, those on the eastern side of what is today the Ukraine, are Russian speakers. Lvov, on the western side, has historically been the cultural centre or hearth of Ukrainian nationalism

 

What is today the Ukraine has, historically speaking, been part of, for example, Galicia-Volhynia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Mongol Empire, the Crimean Khanate, the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth (the western part), the Russian Empire (the eastern part), the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and the USSR. Like all "nations", in other words, the Ukraine is an ideological fabrication and it has not existed since the mythical dawn of Ukraine kind. 

 

It is, by the way, no surprise that some journalists and polemicists, like those at the New York Times, would fetishise the notion of nations, ethnicities, and the Ukraine. As with virtually all fetishisations they are fabricated. In reality, the Ukraine, like most European "nations", is the product of the nineteenth century age of nationalism in Europe, an age which equated speech community with blood and soil. Needless to say, such a notion--language equals blood equals soil--would lead directly to the Shoah or Holocaust. 

 

Also, needless to say, current tensions over the Ukraine are linked to the Cold War and the expansion of the imperial NATO into regions of Europe it promised not to go after the end of the Cold War. Putin has warned NATO of crossing the near frontier line or the near beyond on many occasions and, as an imperial power with a sense of its own rightness and universalism, it, NATO, refuses again and again to heed those warnings.

Postscript: 

On 13 December 2021 a now dissident former Putin supporter and former Duma member now living in Kyiv argued that Putin's focus during the so-called crisis over the Ukraine is not really on the Ukraine, though, he says, Putin is concerned and Russians are concerned with NATO expansion to the Russian border. The former Putin supporter and MD argues that Putin is really more concerned with Belarus and the Ukraine crisis is simply a kind of bait and switch.