Previous Subchapter → 0.1 Introduction - Explaining the Chapters
The story of how Ukraine’s politics managed to escalate into a full scale war only received a brief summary in our last documentary, 3 minutes or so of an over 50 minute long production. Now that the conflict is becoming more long term, it is important to understand its origins just as much as current events.
For this we have to go back over 100 years:
As you can see, the world was a very different looking place back then, lots of the countries we know of today don’t exist yet.
And there’s a problem.
Ukraine isn’t here. That’s because it’s split between two empires, two countries: Russia, and Austria-Hungary.
You see, modern countries are built on two big ideas, self determination and territorial integrity. The first is the idea that a group of people, also known as a “nation” can decide for themselves what government, or “state” they want to be ruled under, this is called the “nation-state”, the second is that these states should have territories reserved for them, protected by borders that other states cannot violate.
But this concept is a modern one, a century ago it didn’t really exist, with much of the world being composed of seemingly random, messy, cobbled together kingdoms, ruled by old royal families.
Without self determination, weaker populations were often absorbed by the stronger ones with little power to retaliate, and so in the early 1900s Ukraine was occupied, for now.
The countries that ruled what is now Ukraine were stuck in the middle of the First World War, known at the time as the Great War. Austria-Hungary was fighting for a German-led alliance called the Central Powers, while Russia was fighting for a British and French-led alliance called the Triple Entente, or more simply known as “the Allies”.
Austria-Hungary was fairly small compared to some of its neighbours, but you can’t say the same for the Russian Empire, a country that comprised around one sixth of the entire planet, containing not just modern day Russia, but also numerous other territories in Central Europe, Asia and huge portions of Eastern Europe, including most of Ukraine; All of this was Russia until 1917 when everything started to unravel.
