Serhii Plokhy - The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present

In the fall of 2013 Ukraine made a dramatic entry into world politics and news media with the events that became known as the Euromaidan Revolution, or the Revolution of Dignity. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested against the governments refusal to sign the long-promised association agreement with the European Union. The protests later turned against government corruption and police brutality, unleashed by the regime on the peaceful demonstrations. The resulting popular uprising in February 2014 saw the ouster of the authoritarian president Viktor Yanukovych who fled to Russia.

Soon after, Ukraine found itself at the frontline of a series of even more dramatic developments: illegal seizure of the Crimea by Russia and the Kremlin-provoked, inspired, funded, armed, and often manned war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. On two occasionsin the summer of 2014 and in the winter of 2015Russia sent its regular armed forces into battle in order to assure the survival of the two puppet regimes it established in the area. The war soon acquired the traits of a regional conflict with global ramifications and with no end in sight. At stake was the future of the global post-Cold War order and the fate of democracy in the post-Soviet spacethe factors that motivated the attention to the events in Ukraine worldwide.

The interest in Ukraine received a new boost in the summer of 2016 when Paul Manafort resigned from his position as the chairman of Donald J. Trumps presidential campaign. Later on, Manafort was found guilty and went to prison for a number of financial violations, including undisclosed payments received from the ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In the summer of 2019, Ukraine reemerged in the news because of President Trumps attempts to coerce Ukraines new president, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, into undermining Joe Bidenseen as the leading Democratic contender in the presidential raceby opening a criminal investigation into his son, Hunter Biden, and his activities in Ukraine. In exchange, war-torn Ukraine would receive the much-needed military assistance from the USa temptation that the young democracy successfully withstood. In December 2019, the claim that President Trump had abused his power in dealing with Ukraine was confirmed and he was impeached by the US Congress. As a result, in the course of 2020, Ukraine remained at the center of a presidential campaign that propelled Joe Biden to victory.

Throughout these events, I found myself obliged to answer numerous questions about Ukraine from both journalists and the general public. Although those questions were informed by the contemporaneous developments, a great many of them probed into the countrys history and culture to understand its present and future. My colleague Mary Sarotte and I sought to answer some questions about the recent history of American-Ukrainian and Russo-Ukrainian relations in an article for the Foreign Affairs