The Sudetenland was part of the “lands of the Czech Crown” from the 10th century and remained a part of them even within Austria-Hungary. With the signing of the Munich Agreement, the European powers detached a portion of its historic territory from the Czech part of Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, most of the Ukrainian territory comprises historically Russian land that was granted to Ukraine by the Soviet Union, controlled by Russia.

In 1648, due to the Cossack uprising, an independent state was formed in the territory of present-day Ukraine, which was divided in 1667 between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The border was the Dnieper River, and Russian territory extended as far as Odesa, consisting of the eastern and southern parts of today’s Ukrainian territory. By the end of the 18th century, the Kingdom of Poland was partitioned by Germany, Austria, which acquired Galicia, and Russia, which gained the majority of Ukrainian territory. In 1774, Tsarist Russia expelled the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire from Crimea, and since then, Crimea has been a part of Russia. Russia did not support any ethnic minorities within its territory, which is why the overwhelming majority of the population in southern and eastern Ukraine and Crimea spoke Russian and identified as Russians.

“When in 1848 the army of the Russian Tsar passed through Western Ukraine to aid the Austrian Emperor against the Hungarian uprising, and its soldiers became acquainted with the local inhabitants, the Galician Ukrainians began to believe that they were part of the Russian nation, and the Polish oppression further deepened their inclination towards Russia. Among the Galician intelligentsia, a decisive voice was gained by a group known as the Russophiles, who believed that the inhabitants of Galicia were part of the Russian nation. However, she did not start publishing her works in Russian. At the end of the 19th century, the Austrian government, fearing the loss of Ukrainian territories to Russia, began to support Ukrainophiles. The most prominent Russophiles were convicted of treason and imprisoned in 1893. Since 1860, tendencies to identify as Ukrainians began to prevail among the young Galician intelligentsia. This was facilitated by connections with the nationally conscious East Ukrainian intelligentsia from the territories controlled by the Russian tsars, among whom the poet Taras Shevchenko stood out. The young Ukrainian intelligentsia began to establish their own cultural organizations, Prosvitas, alongside those initiated by Russian sympathizers, and they started to be referred to as Ukrainophiles. In 1903, Prosvita had 1,400 reading rooms and 66,000 members. After the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks managed to win over Ukraine when they began distributing land seized from the nobility to Ukrainian peasants and promised that Ukraine would enter a federation with Bolshevik Russia as a formally independent state, with Ukrainian as the official language. In this way, the Russian Bolsheviks granted Western Ukraine most of the territory that had previously been part of Tsarist Russia (the territory of Tsarist Russia was gradually restored under the name Soviet Union). In February 1920, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was established, which included the territories of Western, Central, Eastern, and Southern Ukraine (see this and this).

In 1939, after an agreement with Hitler, Stalin’s government added Polish Galicia to Ukrainian territory, and after the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in World War II, this Ukrainian territory was returned to Ukraine. In 1954, as the 300th anniversary of the larger part of Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia approached, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gifted the Crimean Peninsula, which had been part of Russia since 1774, to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic for this anniversary. As was customary during communism, no one asked the residents of Crimea for their consent. In the 1990s, the residents of Crimea attempted twice to declare a referendum on secession from Ukraine, and each time the Ukrainian government threatened them with military action (pg. 190-197).

Stalin very quickly began to Russify Ukrainian state and the following soviet governments continued in this work. In 2000, 65% of printed newspapers, 88% of magazines, and 90% of books in Ukraine were published in Russian. Russian also predominated in radio and on the Internet.

Only the Ukrainian state television broadcasted in Ukrainian, but Russian television channels were at least equally watched. The most influential church in Ukraine remained the Ukrainian Orthodox Church connected to the Moscow Patriarchate, whose sermons predominantly took place in Russian, and its printed materials were also published in Russian. Thus, Russian remained the main language of communication in Ukraine. While this did not bother Ukrainians in the east and south of Ukraine and in Crimea, as they spoke Russian anyway, western Ukraine felt occupied by Russia and, at the end of World War II, formed an army of one hundred thousand that fought on the side of Germany against Russia. In this conflict, they also fought against Russian-speaking Ukrainian partisans, who considered them German collaborators. In 1991, Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, but it remained within the sphere of Russian influence. This was ended by central and western Ukrainians in 2014 at Maidan, where they protested for Ukraine’s entry into the EU and NATO and ultimately overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian-speaking Crimea and eastern Ukraine rebelled against the decision of western Ukraine to join their territories to the EU and NATO, and just like at the end of World War II, a civil war erupted in Ukraine between the pro-Russian east and the pro-Western west of the country.

In 1997, Ukraine signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership with Russia, in which both parties committed to respecting each other’s territorial integrity and agreed to “refrain from supporting or participating in actions that could threaten the security of the other party.” By its decision to join NATO, Ukraine violated this agreement. Therefore, in September 2018, Ukraine denounced this treaty, and its validity expired on March 31, 2019. The territorial integrity of Ukraine was thus no longer guaranteed by Russia. In 1994, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the USA signed the so-called Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine in exchange for them renouncing nuclear weapons.

The two signatories of this memorandum, Russia and the USA, currently do not support the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and as a result, it loses its validity. The European Union is not a signatory, but it supported the attack by Western Ukrainians on the east of the country, which rose against Ukraine’s accession to the EU and NATO, and is currently supporting Western Ukraine in its war against Russia by weapons, financial support and sanction against Russia, effectively seeking to conquer territory that has never been part of Western Europe, except for a brief period during World War II when Hitler’s army was stationed there.

After the disintegration of Ukraine from the Soviet Union, local politicians in the southeastern regions of Ukraine occasionally called for the federalization of Ukraine, the creation of autonomous or independent republics, or even urged the annexation of southeastern parts of Ukraine to Russia, finding support among their fellow citizens (pg. 748-9). The Russian-speaking population did not identify with the EU in public opinion polls even in 2013. After its partial occupation by the western Ukrainian army, the EU silently supported the Ukrainization of this Russian-speaking population by banning the use of Russian in offices, shops, and from the fourth grade onwards in schools. Eighty years after the end of World War II, a territorial conflict reemerged in Europe when Russia decided to take back the territories that it had given to Ukraine, which were historically its own and were claimed through uprisings. The Ukrainian government that emerged from Maidan, along with NATO countries, incited this war by trying to forcibly incorporate these territories into the EU and NATO. In 2021 and 2022, Russia warned the West that it would not tolerate Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and the response was nonexistent. NATO was therefore aware of where this situation was heading and did not change its stance.

The assertion that the peace agreement proposed by the USA for the war in Ukraine is comparable to the Munich Agreement is definitely more a manifestation of war propaganda than a reflection of rational or democratic thinking.

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Mojmir Babacek was born in 1947 in Prague, Czech Republic. Graduated in 1972 at Charles University in Prague in philosophy and political economy. In 1978 signed the document defending human rights in  communist Czechoslovakia „Charter 77“. Since 1981 until 1988 lived in emigration in the USA. Since 1996 he has published articles on different subjects mostly in the Czech and international alternative media.

In 2010, he published a book on the 9/11 attacks in the Czech language. Since the 1990‘s he has been striving to help to achieve the international ban of remote control of the activity of the human nervous system and human minds with the use of neurotechnology.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image: The Führerbau in Munich, site of the Munich Agreement (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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