In explaining why he launched the invasion, President Putin falsely claimed that Ukraine was always a part of Russia, while he also made bogus assertions about pro-Russian Ukrainians being under threat.
To help sort fact from fiction, and gain a better understanding of how we got to this point, the NewsHour's Ali Rogin looks at the history of Ukraine and its people's political independence.
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An Atlas of the Geology and Mineral Deposits of Ukraine
Seventy-six full-colour maps with text present the geological characteristics of Ukraine in this translation of an atlas first prepared by scholars at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences' Institue of Geology in 2001. Widely acclaimed in its country of origin, An Atlas of the Geology and Mineral Deposits of Ukraine includes up-to-date geological concepts, as well as ecological, historical, and prehistoric items of interest. The seventy-six maps are grouped into seven categories: general data, geophysical, structural, geological 'slice,' lithological, ecological, hydrological, and mineralogical. Ukraine has for some time been known as a country rich in mineral resources; as a result, maps depicting its vast mineral deposits as well as its oil, gas, and coal deposits may be of particular interest to foreign readers.
Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe
The concept of a 'return to Europe' has been integral to the movement for Ukrainian national rebirth since the nineteenth century. While the goal of a more fully reformed politics remains elusive, numerous expressions of Ukrainian culture continue to develop in the European spirit. This wide-ranging book explores Ukraine's European cultural connection, especially as it has been reestablished since the country achieved independence in 1991. The contributors discusses many aspects of Ukraine's contemporary culture - history, politics, and religion in Part I; literary culture in Part II; and language, popular culture, and the arts in Part III. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a young country grappling with its divided past and its colonial heritage, yet asserting its voice and preferences amid the diverse and at times conflicting realities of the contemporary political scene. Europe becomes a powerful point of reference, a measure against which the situation in post-independence Ukraine is gouged and debated. This framework allows for a better understanding of the complexities deeply ingrained in the social fabric of Ukrainian society.
The Cossack Myth : History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires
In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious manuscript began to circulate among the dissatisfied noble elite of the Russian Empire. Entitled The History of the Rus', it became one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era. Attributed to an eighteenth-century Orthodox archbishop, it described the heroic struggles of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Alexander Pushkin read the book as a manifestation of Russian national spirit, but Taras Shevchenko interpreted it as a quest for Ukrainian national liberation, and it would inspire thousands of Ukrainians to fight for the freedom of their homeland. Serhii Plokhy tells the fascinating story of the text's discovery and dissemination, unravelling the mystery of its authorship and tracing its subsequent impact on Russian and Ukrainian historical and literary imagination. In so doing he brilliantly illuminates the relationship between history, myth, empire and nationhood from Napoleonic times to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Eagle and the Trident : U.S.—Ukraine Relations in Turbulent Times
An insider's account of the complex relations between the United States and post-Soviet Ukraine The Eagle and the Trident provides the first comprehensive account of the development of U.S. diplomatic relations with an independent Ukraine, covering the years 1992 through 2004 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States devoted greater attention to Ukraine than any other post-Soviet state (except Russia) after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Steven Pifer, a career Foreign Service officer, worked on U.S.-Ukraine relations at the State Department and the White House during that period and also served as ambassador to Ukraine. With this volume he has written the definitive narrative of the ups and downs in the relationship between Washington and newly independent Ukraine. The relationship between the two countries moved from heady days in the mid- 1990s, when they declared a strategic partnership, to troubled times after 2002. During the period covered by the book, the United States generally succeeded in its major goals in Ukraine, notably the safe transfer of nearly 2,000 strategic nuclear weapons left there after the Soviet collapse. Washington also provided robust support for Ukraine's effort to develop into a modern, democratic, market-oriented state. But these efforts aimed at reforming the state proved only modestly successful, leaving a nation that was not resilient enough to stand up to Russian aggression in Crimea in 2014. The author reflects on what worked and what did not work in the various U.S. approaches toward Ukraine. He also offers a practitioner's recommendations for current U.S. policies in the context of ongoing uncertainty about the political stability of Ukraine and Russia's long-term intentions toward its smaller but important neighbor.
East West Street : on the origins of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity"
Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize "A monumental achievement...a profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, told with love, anger and precision." -John le Carré "A narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented. [It] should not be ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere." --Bernard-Henri Levy on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review "Exceptional...has the intrigue, verve and material density of a first-rate thriller." --The Guardian "Astonishing...An outstanding book...A story of heroes and loss." --The New Statesman A profound and profoundly important book--a moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler''s Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity," both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, "the little Paris of Ukraine," a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who''d moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author''s mother), and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy, with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered, clue by clue, the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather''s mysterious life, and of his mother''s journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation, Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men--Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht--each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather''s birth, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book, Sands looks at who these two very private men were, and at how and why, coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city, studying at the same university, each developed the theory he did, showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal concept--"genocide" and "crimes against humanity"--as a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler''s personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together, in October 1945 in Nuremberg--Rafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice, with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command, prisoner number 7, Hans Frank, who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg, among them, the families of the author''s grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.
The gates of Europe : a history of Ukraine
Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine was shaped by the empires that used it as a strategic gateway between East and West -- from the Roman and Ottoman empires to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. For centuries, Ukraine has been a meeting place of various cultures. The mixing of sedentary and nomadic peoples and Christianity and Islam on the steppe borderland produced the class of ferocious warriors known as the Cossacks, for example, while the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox churches created a religious tradition that bridges Western and Eastern Christianity. Ukraine has also been a home to millions of Jews, serving as the birthplace of Hassidism -- and as one of the killing fields of the Holocaust. Plokhy examines the history of Ukraine's search for its identity through the lives of the major figures in Ukrainian history: Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kyiv, whose daughter Anna became queen of France; the Cossack ruler Ivan Mazepa, who was immortalized in the poems of Byron and Pushkin; Nikita Khrushchev and his protege-turned-nemesis Leonid Brezhnev, who called Ukraine their home; and the heroes of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, who embody the current struggle over Ukraine's future. As Plokhy explains, today's crisis is a tragic case of history repeating itself, as Ukraine once again finds itself in the center of the battle of global proportions. An authoritative history of this vital country, The Gates of Europe provides a unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.
History of Ukraine
First published in 1996, A History of Ukraine quickly became the authoritative account of the evolution of Europe's second largest country. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Paul Robert Magocsi examines recent developments in the country's history and uses new scholarship in order to expand our conception of the Ukrainian historical narrative. New chapters deal with the Crimean Khanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and new research on the pre-historic Trypillians, the Italians of the Crimea and the Black Death, the Karaites, Ottoman and Crimean slavery, Soviet-era ethnic cleansing, and the Orange Revolution is incorporated. Magocsi has also thoroughly updated the many maps that appear throughout. Maintaining his depiction of the multicultural reality of past and present Ukraine, Magocsi has added new information on Ukraine's peoples and discusses Ukraine's diasporas. Comprehensive, innovative, and geared towards teaching, the second edition of A History of Ukraine is ideal for both teachers and students.
Kiev : A Portrait, 1800-1917
In a fascinating "urban biography," Michael Hamm tells the story of one of Europe's most diverse cities and its distinctive mix of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Jewish inhabitants. A splendid urban center in medieval times, Kiev became a major metropolis in late Imperial Russia, and is now the capital of independent Ukraine. After a concise account of Kiev's early history, Hamm focuses on the city's dramatic growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first historian to analyze how each of Kiev's ethnic groups contributed to the vitality of the city's culture, he also examines the violent conflicts that developed among them. In vivid detail, he shows why Kiev came to be known for its "abundance of revolutionaries" and its anti-Semitic violence.
Life Exposed : Biological Citizens after Chernobyl
On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters? Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. Life Exposed provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Midnight in Chernobyl : the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster
A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner One of NPR's Best Books of 2019 Journalist Adam Higginbotham's definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster--and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history's worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will--lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.
The Reconstruction of Nations : Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999
Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this fascinating book, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries, discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland's recent successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighbors, as it has channeled national interest toward peace.
Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine
What are the reasons behind, and trajectories of, the rapid cultural changes in Ukraine since 2013? This volume highlights: the role of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the formation of Ukrainian civil society; the forms of warfare waged by Moscow against Kyiv, including information and religious wars; Ukrainian and Russian identities and cultural realignment; sources of destabilization in Ukraine and beyond; memory politics and Russian foreign policies; the Kremlin's geopolitical goals in its 'near abroad'; and factors determining Ukraine's future and survival in a state of war.The studies included in this collection illuminate the growing gap between the political and social systems of Ukraine and Russia. The anthology illustrates how the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014, Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and its invasion of eastern Ukraine have altered the post-Cold War political landscape and, with it, the regional and global power and security dynamics.
State Building in Ukraine : The Ukrainian Parliament, 1990-2003
This book examines the development of the Ukrainian parliament - the Verkhovna Rada - from before Ukraine's independence in 1991 to the present. It shows how the parliament transformed itself from a provincial republican Soviet to the national legislature of a sovereign state and from a nominal, symbolic body to a genuine legislative and representative institution. It discusses the key role of parliament in the wider state-building process and examines the evolution of political factions and the committee system in the parliament.
Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It
Ukraine suffered unprecedented political, economic, and military turmoil following Russia's annexation of Crimea in early 2014. Russian military aggression in the east and a legacy of destructive policies and corruption have created an imminent existential crisis for this young democracy. Yet Ukraine also has a great opportunity to break out of economic underperformance. In this study, Anders Åslund, one of the world's leading experts on Ukraine, traces Ukraine's evolution as a market economy starting with the fall of communism and examines the economic impact of its recent difficulties. Åslund argues that Ukraine must undertake sweeping political, economic, social, and government reforms to achieve prosperity and independence. For its part, the West must abandon its hesitant approach and provide broad economic assistance to help Ukraine transform itself.
The Ukrainian Diaspora
In this fascinating book, Vic Satzewich traces one hundred and twenty-five years of Ukranian migration, from the economic migration at the end of the nineteenth century to the political migration during the inter-war period and throughout the 1960s and 1980s resulting from the troubled relationship between Russia and the Ukraine. The author looks at the ways the Ukranian Diaspora has retained its identity, at the different factions within it and its response to the war crimes trials of the 1980s.
The Ukrainian West
In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union. Lviv's borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city's intellectuals?working through compromise rather than overt opposition?strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv's post?Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared. The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union's postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.
Voices from Chernobyl
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe.Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form,Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.
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