Ukraine-Russia conflict explanation. Deep. Short.
To explain the reasons of the Ukraine - Russia today's conflict, to understand the true causes we have to turn to history.
The Ukraine’s origin dates back to the 9th to 10th century the time of Kievan Orthodox Rus.
In the subsequent historical period on the right side Dnieper River lands the Orthodox Russian people were subjected to strong assimilation of Poland and Lithuania both on the basis of faith (they were forced to accept Catholicism) and on the basis of their native language (they were forced to speak Polish).
And therefore the Russian language in this territory was transformed from Russian into a kind of hybrid of Russian and Polish and this dialect later became known as the modern Ukrainian language. Actually a new national identity was formed here: the Ukrainians who self-identified their nationality as distinguished from both Russia and Poland. But the people of Donbass on the left side Dnieper River preserved the Orthodox faith and the Russian language and its national identity to Russians.
After soviet socialist revolution 1917 organized by fanatic Lenin, Russia suffered the dramatic events and devastating changes happened.
It worth noting, that both before 1917 revolution and after the territory of modern Ukraine grew significantly due to the transfer of historically Russian lands to the administrative subordination of Ukraine. In essence, the area of the original territory where people began to self-identify themselves as a new Ukrainian nation in Sharovary trousers with Polish - Russian hybrid language was extremely small compared to the territory of modern Ukraine. In 1648 to 1654 it was a small area of the Zaporizhya Sitch or also known as Cossack’s Ukraine of the Bogdan Khmelnitsky times. Since the forced adoption of Catholicism and the Polish language was planted by Poland, after the petition of Bogdan Khmelnitsky to the Moscow king in 1654, Russia took this region under protection.
During the next years from 1654 to 1917 this small region was part of Russia. In next the war 1654 to 1668 with Poland these vast territories conquered by Russia were annexed to Ukraine. These were a kind of gifts from the Russian kings for the Ukrainian region’s loyalty to Russia. More over the vast territories illegally transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period.
These lands were transferred by the fanatical and dictatorial leaders of the USSR without taking into account the opinion of Russia and the people originally living in this territory.
During the cold war the former USSR created a massive nuclear arsenal and a lot of it was part of the then Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Those weapons remained in the country after its proclaimed independence in 1991. But Ukraine gave Russia its soviet nukes in 1995 in return for a promise to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Ukraine in its turn, according to this agreement, guaranteed Russia the free use of Crimea for the deployment of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, as well as the observance of all human rights, the Orthodox faith, the education in Russian for children schools and colleges on these former Russian territories.
United States helped to break down the USSR in 1991. So in the nineties Russia got devastated soviet heritage and was very weak to demand the return of its historical lands from Ukraine, moreover, at that time the Ukraine’s course towards the independence was motivated by the united West.
To further weaken Russia at this period the West and US also largely sponsored international terrorists and radical islamists in Chechnya, which led to a protracted bloodshed that ended only in 2000.
After the end of this conflict, even more weakened Russia was on the verge of collapse and therefore in 2000 the EU actually forced Russia to sign a deal with the EU which once again reaffirmed Ukraine’s independence saying it would allow Ukraine to make treaties with whatever nation they wanted to.
That all fell apart in 2014 when democratically elected government of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich announced that it wasn’t signing a long negotiated association agreement with the EU. Yanukovich was going forward with a Russia-focused Eurasian Economic Union. Protesters flooded the streets of the capital Kiev.
And the crisis also known as 2014 maidan revolution ultimately led to Yanukovich fleeing the country.
Southeast Ukrainian regions: Donbass, Crimea and Luhansk didn’t support this revolution because in the midst of the unrest in Kyiv, ultra-nationalist parties seized power which many years before publicly and consistently announced that Orthodoxy, the Russian language and culture must be and would be destroyed in Ukraine as well as their willingness of Ukraine’s further integration into the EU and NATO.
Ukraine actually joined the NATO Cooperation Council in 1992. For the subsequent years from 2015 to 2021 these neo-Nazi plans were implemented by them. Since the summer of 2014 the broadcasting of dozens of Russian channels has been banned in Ukraine.
In 2016 the Russian language was first restricted in use in government institutions, on television and radio broadcasting. In 2019 the Russian language is practically banned everywhere, now teaching in Russian at schools was completely banned.
In 2015 the law No.317 was adopted on the decommunization of Ukraine, which banned soviet symbols including those associated with the victory in the 2nd World War such as the flag of victory, the St.George ribbon and so on. the course towards joining NATO was fixed in the Ukrainian Constitution in February 2019.
During these years the interference in the Orthodox faith increased. The then Ukraine’s President Poroshenko repeatedly submitted proposals to parliament to ban the only existed Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate,
but since there are a lot of Orthodox believers in Ukraine and this would lead to protests, Poroshenko with the support of the United States Assistant Secretary Mike Pompeo began to seek the creation of a formally new Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
He did it in 2019, when The Synodal Tomos of granting the autocephalous church structure to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine from the Moscow Patriarchate was issued a document that was signed on January,6 2019 by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
Therefore, the majority of Southeast Ukrainian regions Donbass Crimea and Luhansk didn’t support this 2014 revolution. These people claimed the Russian as their mother tongue and felt stronger ties with their eastern neighbor. On the referendum 2014 people overwhelmingly voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
For this reason, the nationalists who seized power in Kyiv in 2014 led by the ultra-radical Oleksandr Turchynov sent all the might of the Ukrainian army to suppress the regions that disagreed with this revolution. Indiscriminate strikes were carried out on residential buildings, schools, shops, clinics and other peaceful civilian facilities in Donbass and Lugansk.
All military power was used: heavy artillery, aviation, tanks, tactical high power rockets, multiple launch rocket systems and large-caliber automatic weapons. The number of civilians has exceeded tens of thousands. Turchinov even self-satisfied and boasting called himself a "bloody pastor" and these crimes he called an "anti-terrorist operation". Not numerous people of resistance in the Donbass turned to Russia for help and Russia seeing all these terrible crimes against humanity and all Russian heritage decided to provide military assistance to the Donbass and Lugansk.
Moreover, it was a brazen and disgusting insult by the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime of those agreements that Ukraine pledged to Russia in 1995.
With the help of Russia the resistance of Donbass in a short time inflicted decisive crushing on these neo-Nazi Kyiv war criminals, their army was surrounded and defeated in many places, for example: up to 8000 neo-Nazi Ukrainian punishers were destroyed in the Izvara encirclement, 5000 in the Ilovaisk encirclement, and 8000 in the Debaltsevo encirclement and at other successful operations were even more destroyed. The army of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime has completely lost its combat capability. The Donbass militias went on the offensive and had already recaptured significant territories of the Donbass and with the help of Russia, could reach Kiev at that time. And then the Kyiv regime requested a truce and began negotiations. This is how the Minsk agreements of 2014 to 2015 were born, but not a single paragraph of which has been implemented by Kyiv to date.
On the contrary, the Kyiv regime all this time was actively building up its forces for a decisive attack on the Donbass, the collective West actively helped Kiev in this, modern weapons were pumped up, NATO command and control systems, radio communications, in fact the command and control system of Ukraine was integrated with NATO.
NATO instructors came en masse to train soldiers. Strongly fortified firing points were built. Russia received intelligence information and knew about these plans of Kiev and therefore, ahead of Kyiv by only a few days, it began its military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine on February 24 2022.