The Fluid Frontier

With the latest kerfuffle over Ukraine, it's worth remembering how we got here, and knowing what to do next.

Atlanta, GA

March 4, 2025

“The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable.”

– Madame de Staël

“500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend [Ukraine] against 140 million Russians.”

- Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland

For three years, many who couldn’t previously distinguish the Ukraine from a ukulele confidently identified heroes and villains in that corner of the world.

The last several months, as the futility of the fight became undeniable, even the most ardent warhawks appeared ready to move on. They seemed almost bored with Ukraine, resigned that a wasteful war would wind down… and began shifting their focus to other fads.

But then, last Friday, this happened:

And suddenly… Blue and Gold was back in fashion!

I’m neither a Russophile (except with regard to one woman) nor a “Putin apologist” (whatever that is). But I do have an aversion to being vaporized in a nuclear war.

About multi-faceted conflicts in distant lands among people we’ll never meet, it’s OK to be indifferent. In fact, it’s probably smart.

To almost everyone, particularly flag-emoji outsiders who are most emotional in their predictable opinions, foreign affairs are incomprehensible. The more we learn, the less we know. Which is ample reason to keep our distance.

Hunk of Meat

That is particularly true regarding the sticky web weaving Russia to Ukraine. Let’s pull some threads, and see what we can untangle.

Albeit to a lesser degree than many Mideast countries that were completely made up, the Ukraine is an amorphous construct. Even its modern Slavonic name means “on the edge”, what Americans might call a frontier.

As with Poland or the Punjab, it’s historically been a hunk of meat buzzed by hungry flies, and regularly contested by rival dogs. Over the centuries, Russians, Ottomans, and Mongols tugged it east, whereas Poles, Austrians, and Americans have pulled it west.

On occasion, the hounds drop the slab, show their teeth, and turn on each other. Which is why canines from distant neighborhoods should stay on their leash.

The Ukraine is not merely a breadbasket of Europe. It’s its cradle. It’s the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. It’s also the fertile crib of Mother Russia.

From north of Lake Balkhash and the regions round the Aral Sea, the fourth century Huns pressed west. These warriors epitomized ferocity, and were quintessential nomads. “Their country”, said a proverb, “was the back of a horse”.

Pressed by eastern enemies and depleted lands, the invaders rode “their country” across the steppes, forded the Volga, and overcame the Ostrogoths in what is now Ukraine.

From the other direction, migrant Slavs crossed the Danube, to scoop scattered crumbs of stale Roman bread. In the sixth century, Avars arrived thru southern Russia to fill the vacuum of vacating Huns. They enslaved the Slavs, who gave their name to a perpetual practice.

Creating the Ukraine

The original Slavs probably came from the marshy regions of western Russia, bounded roughly by Kiev, Mogilev, and Brest-Litovsk. These poor people were regularly overrun, repeatedly enslaved, and routinely pushed around.

Migration and war shuffled them across eastern Europe, breeding an abiding variety of kindred customs and related languages. Polish, Czech, and Slovak tongues rose in the west. Great Russian, White Russian, and “Little Russian“ (Ruthenian and Ukrainian) developed in the east. Nearly all of these…as well as Slovene, Serb, and Bulgarian to the south…have remained mostly intelligible to speakers of any one of them.

Several Slavic tribes settled the valleys of the Dnieper and the Don. They cleared forests, drained swamps, killed beasts, and created the Ukraine.

By the ninth century, Scandinavian Vikings invaded from the north, and plied Russian rivers. They penetrated as far south as Kiev, which grew as Moslem control of the eastern Mediterranean diverted trade from Italian ports to Russian towns. By the tenth century, Kiev had become the commercial hub of an emerging Rus.

As the millennium turned, Vladimir, Fifth Grand Duke of Kiev, ruled the rising principality. His marriage to the daughter of Emperor Basil II united Russian regions in religion, alphabet, and art to the Byzantine empire they longed to conquer.

Islands and Poles

For several hundred years, the various principalities that comprised Russia mostly acknowledged the suzerainty of Kiev. But by the 13th century, the Kievan realm began to recede. Eighty civil wars and almost fifty invasions ravaged Russia in this period.

As Italian commerce revived, Black Sea commerce faltered… and Kiev declined. Mongol invasions sealed the city’s Medieval fate. It was about this time that leadership passed from the “Little Russians” of Ukraine to the “Great Russians” around the nascent village of Moscow.

As late as 1300, “Russia” existed only as scattered islands of northern city-states, Lithuanian dependencies, and eastern principalities floating haphazardly on a vast feudal sea. As Moscow grew and Russia congealed, Kiev lay dormant. Around it, the Cossacks stirred and the Poles moved in.

In the mid-seventeenth century, a Cossack chief serving the occupying Poles demanded redress for an insult from a ruling Polish nobleman. Not receiving satisfaction, he fled to the Crimea, and enlisted the khan of the Tatars to help him overthrow the Poles.

As often happens, the mercenary alliance was initially fruitful, but ultimately soured. The Poles were pushed back. But their new king upped the ante. Bribery turned the Tatars. They ditched the Cossacks, who resorted to Russia to rescue Ukraine and (most importantly) themselves.

Swinging Gate

After receiving the request, Czar Alexis asked his assembly to annex Ukraine. Despite the risk of war with Catholic Poland, the annexation of a Ukraine both Orthodox and Russian was ultimately approved.

The Cossacks, dreading the Russian czar less than the Turkish sultan or the Polish king, also agreed. They voted unanimously to yield Ukraine to emerging Muscovy.

Coming during the same generation Russia conquered Siberia to reach the Pacific, this acquisition implies that the real founder of the Russian Empire was Czar Alexis rather than his celebrated son, Peter the Great.

But as thru a swinging gate in a western saloon, fresh fighters routinely crossed this fluid frontier. Crimean Tatars resented Russian rule, and shifted allegiance from the victorious Cossacks to the vengeful Poles.

After years of war and a convoluted peace, Ukraine was carved. Poland kept the west (with long interludes of Turkish rule). Kiev and Ukraine east of the Dnieper were ceded to Russia. This division held for a century, till the first partition of Poland.

During this period, under the imperial guidance of Romanov rule, Ukraine struggled to preserve its identity under nominal control of the Dnieper Cossacks. This soil sowed many resentments.

After a failed Ukrainian attempt to break away during a Swedish invasion, the Russians annexed Crimea and suppressed Ukraine. They renamed it “Little Russia”, and abolished all traces of separate traditions.

“New Russia”

Russification and colonization were intensified throughout the eighteenth century. Cossacks were denied the autonomy that had been granted their Russian counterparts.

The Russian language and Orthodox Church were vigorously enforced. The land was intentionally settled with Russians. The Ukrainian language was officially described as a Russian dialect. The beautiful city of Odessa, where my wife lived her first decade, was in 1794 established by Catherine the Great as the magnificent capital of an incipient “New Russia”.

For hundreds of years…from the Baltic to the Bosporus…Swedes, Poles, Turks, and Russians competed for the ports, bounty, and booty of a boiling Ukraine. By the nineteenth century, the Hapsburgs had entered the mix.

After the first partition of Poland and until the First World War, Austria ruled western Ukraine. Like glycerol to nitric acid, this brought them into contact with Russia.

The competing powers rubbed against each other across southeastern Europe. They eventually produced a spark in Sarajevo.

Broken Promises

After the First World War, Ukraine became a battleground of Red and White Russians. It lost, and was consumed.

As part of a vengeful Soviet “policy” in the early 1930s, Stalin enforced a genocidal famine that in two years massacred almost as many Ukrainians as Hitler killed Jews.

A decade later, 75 million people died in World War II. More than a third were Soviets, and a quarter of those were Ukrainian.

When the Soviet Union mercifully disintegrated, it’s captive “republics” broke free. Ukraine was among the first.

In a mirror image of Cuba sixty years ago, the Russians consider Ukraine to be within their sphere of influence. US officials consider it part of their own.

It may be that neither is right. But the Americans are certainly wrong. Constitutionally, without formal treaty or declaration of war, the US government has no business being anywhere near the Ukraine.

Almost twenty percent of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, and forty percent are culturally Russian. Both those proportions are much higher in the southeastern crescent of the country, especially the Donbass region and the Crimean peninsula, where 70% incline toward Russia. In the city of Sevastopol about 90% speak Russian.

For what it’s worth, no part of Ukraine includes many Americans:

Source: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Ukraine-Language-Map.pdf

When the Soviet Union was founded, the heavily Russian Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk were appended to eastern Ukraine. A few decades later, Khrushchev added another one when he gifted Crimea.

At the time, these decisions seemed relatively inconsequential since these were all Soviet territory, and no Soviet leader thought the empire would collapse.

But when the USSR dissolved, the Ukraine went free. Before it did, President George HW Bush (thru James Baker) assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch” to the east.

Bush’s successors, including his son, made him a liar (Jeffrey Sachs details the history here).

On the Porch

Murray Rothbard said we can’t be sure a government has done something until it’s officially been denied. The same can’t be said of government promises. We know those are lies the minute they’re uttered.

Within a decade of Baker’s pledge, Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary joined NATO. Five years later, the Baltic states did.

An Atlantic alliance that lost its raison d’être when the Soviets vanished had made its way to Russia’s door. By 2010, Bulgaria, Croatia, Albania, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia expanded NATO’s presence on the porch.

The only way these countries joining NATO would’ve increased the security of the United States is if they had taken America’s place in the alliance.

We’re constantly “reminded” that these nations chose to join NATO. So what?

Of course they wanted in. The question is, given potential ramifications to the United States, whether it was wise to welcome them.

What if the Warsaw Pact had infiltrated not only Nicaragua, but all of Central America? And then threatened to bring Mexico into the Soviet sphere?

Would the US government have been fine with this even if those nations volunteered to join the Russian bloc? Or would Americans have been justifiably upset, and not let decades pass before intervening? The questions answer themselves.

NATO provocation of Russia is obvious. But what many Americans dismiss or deny is the US coup d’état in Kiev eleven years ago. If US operatives hadn’t gone to Kiev, Russian troops wouldn’t be in Ukraine.

In February 2014, CIA agents and State Department functionaries stage-managed assorted militants, radical nationalists, white supremacists, and literal neo-Nazis (not the juvenile appellation applied by “woke” half-wits to people they don’t like) to overthrow the democratically elected government in Kiev.

The Ukrainian president was ousted after trying to steer a middle path between Russia and the EU. A new puppet was installed, dangling obsequiously from CIA strings.

[NB: evidence for this is abundant in Scott Horton’s heavily sourced account of how the US created this calamity; Jeffrey Sachs touches on some of it at the 9:00 mark of the video below, which includes the incriminating recording of Victoria Nuland discussing the plan].

Poking the Bear

It was after this coup that Russia annexed Crimea to protect its Black Sea base. Fighting persisted across ethnic Russian regions of eastern Ukraine. The Minsk Agreements were an intended settlement. But the Ukrainians claimed they were compelled to sign, so refused to implement.

For eight years the US kept pumping illegal weapons to its Ukrainian satraps, who used them to wage war on Russians in the east. Since 2014, Russia and the people of Donetsk and Lugansk have waited for Kiev to adhere to the Minsk agreements. But Ukraine refused.

For years, Putin warned that Ukraine joining NATO was his “red line”. As US Ambassador to Moscow put it in 2008 when he forwarded Washington the cable affirming Putin’s position: “Nyet Means Nyet”.

But the West spent another decade-and-a-half poking the bear. Three years ago, it woke up.

Russia’s invasion was illegal, immoral, and indefensible. But it wasn’t “unprovoked”. And it’s none of our business.

However awful Putin is, Ukraine isn’t an American state. Russia hasn’t threatened the US, and Congress never declared war on Russia.

Nor should it. Are Americans willing to die for Donbas? Does anyone honestly think that if Russia takes Luhansk that Los Angeles is next? Or London? Or Lisbon? Or even Lithuania?

That’s the same silly argument used to justify war with Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded that thriving “democracy” in…

Kuwait.

It’s absurd. But even if it weren’t, Americans aren’t morally obligated (or financially able) to keep defending other countries.

We pray for Ukraine, and for its people… a generation of whom is dead from war under their trampled terrain. We also hope the US government ceases involvement, ditches NATO, and does nothing more to “help”.

Lord knows it’s done enough already.

JD