Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War With Russia (Yale University Press) by Adrian Karatnycky

In 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology carried out a study on Ukrainian identity. Just 45.6 per cent of people living in the country identified as citizens of Ukraine, the remainder primarily identified either with their own local regions or the Soviet Union. So how did it happen that, 30 years later, the Ukrainian people’s sense of themselves as an independent, unified nation proved so strong as to resist a powerful invading force?

This question is at the heart of Adrian Karatnycky’s Battleground Ukraine. The first major English-language history of the country from its emergence after the fall of the Soviet Union through to the present war, it tracks Ukraine’s post-independence history through the country’s six presidencies. Each president receives his own chapter, apart from incumbent Volodymyr Zelensky, who merits two, since his presidency entered an altogether new phase when Moscow’s tanks rolled over the borders on 24 February, 2022. This organising principle is effective and, in Karatnycky’s own words, justified by the fact that “Ukraine’s presidents have exerted deep influence over the state and often represented the social trends of their time.”

Karatnycky rates presidents not just on the comparative strengths of their leadership, but also on the extent to which they contributed to the nation-building process, and more specifically, how the Ukrainian identity came to shape itself, even against the will of some of the country’s elected leaders. By the end of the book we have a good idea of how, by the time Putin invaded, there was sufficient unity to ensure not only resilience but effective resistance.

This three-decade journey takes in such pivotal moments as the adoption of the constitution, the 2004 Orange Revolution – peaceful protests that initially succeeded in preventing Kremlin-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych from becoming president – and the 2014 Euromaidan protests sparked by the decision of Yanukovych (having finally gained power in 2010) not to sign a major agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer links with Russia.

Finally, the book takes in the start of the current war. Indeed, a key theme is Moscow’s attempts to wreck the nation-building project, whether by meddling in Crimea in the earliest days of Ukrainian statehood, shutting off gas supplies, encouraging corruption among Ukraine’s oligarchs, or striving to infiltrate and destabilise state institutions while launching a hybrid war in the country’s east.

What distinguishes Karatnycky’s work from other accounts of Ukraine’s modern history is that he was personally privy to many of these key events. Now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US-based international affairs think-tank, Karatnycky’s relationship with Ukraine began long before the country gained independence. As far back as the 1970s, he was working closely with Ukrainian human rights defenders and, in the 1980s, helped support trade union movements throughout the Eastern Bloc.

He then spent a decade at the helm of civil liberties monitor Freedom House, developing assistance programmes for democratic and human rights movements in Belarus, Serbia, Russia and Ukraine. These experiences have offered him such close ties with Ukraine’s political class that, at times, the book feels like receiving a guided tour through the country’s recent evolution from someone who has personally influenced it.

Viktor Yushchenko, the president who took office after the Orange Revolution, tells the author about his first official international visit to Moscow, informing Putin of his intention to press ahead with Ukrainian aspirations to join the EU and Nato but proposing a treaty to ensure that no Nato troops would have bases or a permanent presence on Ukrainian soil. Putin was apparently unwilling to even countenance such an idea. “There was no reaction. Putin simply ignored my comments,” Yushchenko recalled. “He didn’t engage and we moved on to other topics.”

While the author may be far from an impartial observer, his encapsulations of the advantages and deficiencies of Ukraine’s leaders are both well evidenced and pleasurably succinct. Yushchenko, he writes, became “insular, aloof and short-tempered”, ceasing to act like a politician during his tenure, in part because he realised his chances for re-election in 2010 were nil. Yanukovych’s chapter is titled simply “A thug in power”.

Karatnycky furthermore has an eye for arresting details. When Yanukovych tried to steal the 2004 presidential election, leading to the Orange Revolution, his rival Yushchenko’s plane was denied landing rights minutes before the latter was due to speak. Even when Yushchenko could reach the rallies, the electricity would be cut. Pens filled with disappearing ink were found in polling booths in those areas where support for Yushchenko was running high. We also hear how, after he was ultimately forced to concede defeat, Yanukovych spent several months in Moscow, reportedly subjected to such a humiliating haranguing from Putin that it made him determined to stage a political comeback.

Some readers may be more interested in the current president. Karatnycky tells us how, after Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 election, the comedian (in the author’s words, the “Ukrainian version of Benny Hill”) spent his time not out meeting voters but rather travelling with his comedy troupe.

Zelensky’s campaign was so lacking in policy and so heavily dependent on virtual platforms that the writer Oksana Zabuzhko likened his efforts to a Black Mirror episode centred on an animated blue bear who gains such popularity by satirising British politicians that he finishes second in a by-election. When Zelensky assumed office in May 2019 he was, Karatnycky tells us, “one of the least prepared individuals to head a democracy in world history”.

Indeed, Zelensky initially showed little indication that he would become the defender of Ukrainian statehood – Karatnycky reminds us that the president’s 2020 New Year’s address did not project a “unified sense of identity” rooted in Ukraine’s culture, language and history. It was rather an embrace of diversity, his “why can’t we all just get along?” moment, where he argued that it did not matter, for example, whether one learnt Ukrainian. For his own part, having grown up in a Russophone family, Zelensky had a shaky handle on Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Attending a 2019 book festival, for example, he demonstrated a superficial understanding of Ukrainian literary culture.

Of course, all the years of nation-building and consciousness-raising described by Karatnycky were put to the ultimate test in 2022. Karatnycky is himself personally touched by the invasion, having married into a Ukrainian family. His stepdaughters fled Kyiv, while his brother-in-law, a concert violinist, volunteered to go to the front at the age of 50.

For a volume which ends with a war for the very survival of the country whose path to national consciousness he has just narrated, Karatnycky finishes on a surprisingly optimistic note for Ukraine. Due to the war, Zelensky has gone “from someone with a vague connection to Ukrainian culture to a leader who now fully embraced a distinct Ukrainian national identity” – and he is not the only one transformed. Ukraine has, the author concludes, emerged as “a capable state inhabited by a determined people united by both ethnic and civic patriotism”, their “desire for freedom and independence impossible to deny”. Having won this “crucial first battle”, the chances of Ukraine prevailing against Russia are made greater, he concludes.

Besides offering a compelling and compact history of modern Ukraine, Karatnycky’s work proves an inspirational reminder of all that Ukrainians have endured on the journey towards the statehood they now defend. While Karatnycky concludes that the fight for the unified, independent identity of Ukraine has been won, the true war for the equivalent nation is still being waged. We can only hope that his prediction – “that Ukrainians will preserve their statehood” with “Russian domination over the Ukrainian people an unlikely scenario” – proves to be correct.

This article is from New Humanist’s autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.