Zelensky’s about-face a recognition of unviability of ethnically pure Ukraine

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a joint press conference with European Council President Antonio Costa, in Kiev, Ukraine, Dec. 1, 2024. | AP

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s about-face on how to end the war with Russia is much more than just a clever maneuver on his part to end the deadly fighting and, in the process, get NATO to protect part of his country. It is a recognition that the aim of the right wing in Ukraine to establish an ethnically pure Ukrainian state is one that is impossible to achieve.

Attempts to do this during the years of Soviet socialism, during World War II – a period of open collaboration by the right with invading Nazis – and after the war, were all met with failure. So too, it seems, will be the attempts to achieve this aim nowadays.

This is the message implicit in a Dec. 2 editorial in the Morning Star, Britain’s daily socialist newspaper.

As the editorial points out, Zelensky, at a meeting with European Council President Antonia Costa in Kiev on Dec. 1, said he would accept a deal that cedes eastern territories controlled by Russia to Russia in exchange for NATO membership that would “protect” the country against future Russian aggression.

What he is talking about when he discusses ceding the Donbass and Crimea to Russia is actually allowing re-integration of those regions back into Russia. Those areas, the wealthiest manufacturing and most mineral-rich areas, were gifted to Ukraine, as the editorial points out, by the Soviet socialist state.

It was the policy of the Soviet Union to carry out massive affirmative action programs to benefit many of the non-Russian states in the Soviet Union.

The Donbass and Crimea were overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and Russian ethnic areas when they were given to Ukraine, and the Soviet government went to great pains to convince the populations of those areas that it made economic and political sense for them to be administered by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Now, Zelensky has suggested that the war with Russia might end with a diplomatic settlement that includes ceding those territories in exchange for Russia acquiescing to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Implicit in this is a recognition that his previous position of refusal to cede anything would lead nowhere.

He holds out the prospect that an end to hostilities could follow if NATO offered security guarantees for the parts of Ukraine over which Kiev currently exercises control.

Zelensky is offering to allow “re-incorporation,” of those territories by Russia, as the Morning Star puts it, as part of a final deal.

On one level, Zelensky’s change of heart and his shift away from the position that Ukraine will never “cede” any territory to Russia is a recognition, as the Morning Star points out, that the battlefield situation for Ukraine is deteriorating badly, that public opinion in Ukraine has turned against the war, and that the so-called “allies” in Europe and the U.S. are about to end their support for a war effort that, for them, really had much more to do with harming Russia than it did supporting democracy in Ukraine.

The Star reports that Gallup’s latest surveys, not counting the Russian-speaking eastern provinces and Crimea, show that the people back a negotiated settlement. Some 52% told Gallup they want this solution, despite fear of coming out against the war, which is illegal in Ukraine. They told Gallup they want an immediate end to the fighting.

There is a substantial minority, however, 38%, that wants “a fight to the end.” Among these are right-wing Ukrainian nationalists who still want the pure ethnic Ukrainian state that they’ve been pining for for many decades.

The Morning Star editorial also discusses the massive population decline in Ukraine as part of Zelensky’s motivation to alter course. Ukraine’s population has declined from 43 million to 35 million, with an entire generation of young men sacrificed on the battlefield.

In addition to deaths, many others have fled Ukraine and, to the credit of Britain’s socialist daily, it is pointed out that millions have left Ukraine for Russia in addition to the millions that have migrated to other European countries.

Being a realist, Zelensky knows that the incoming Trump administration will likely not continue giving Ukraine the incredible military, economic, and diplomatic assistance that President Joe Biden extended.

Zelensky is smart enough to know that bleeding Russia of its money, pipelines, and military recruits was a much higher priority for Biden than backing democracy in Ukraine. The Ukrainian president was willing to take whatever he could, however, and was never really worried about democracy anyway, having banned the political opposition and all but government-controlled media.

Zelensky himself, under pressure from the U.S. and others, has flip-flopped from the beginning of his appearance on the political scene in Ukraine. He was actually elected on a platform of peace with Russia but was quickly threatened by right-wing forces in his country if he pursued that path.

Members of the fascist Azov Battalion, interviewed on MSNBC when the current war broke out, told reporters that they would get rid of Zelensky if he dared trying to negotiate with the Russians. Additionally, he was promised tens of billions of dollars in military and economic help and God knows what else by the West if he abandoned plans to negotiate.

In discussing factors that feed into Zelensky’s change of heart, the Morning Star also goes into some of the most important elements of Ukraine’s history. These factors are unaired in the major media in the U.S.

As part of the Czarist empire, Ukraine was largely agrarian. Under the years of Soviet socialism, as was pointed out earlier, Kiev was given administrative authority over the Russian-speaking territories in what is now eastern Ukraine that — then and now — contain great mineral wealth and industrial capacity. It was a successful attempt to develop more than just agriculture in Ukraine.

The Morning Star accurately sketches some of the history this way:

“As a consequence of the Soviet victory over fascism, before which millions of Ukrainians died under Nazi occupation, and many more were martyred as Red Army combatants and anti-Nazi partisans, the western territories, which formerly were Polish, were added to Ukraine’s territory.

“And after the war, in a further, and not locally uncontested, act of the Soviet government, Crimea was added to a Ukrainian Soviet socialist state, which had its own representation at the UN.

“Reactionary ideas of an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation, which trace their origins to the violently anti-Semitic and anti-Polish elements that collaborated with the Nazis, cannot be reconciled either with history or reality.

“Although the Soviet security forces took until the mid-1950s to finally eliminate the military challenge that Ukrainian fascism threatened, these ideas were driven underground in Soviet times only to re-emerge under NATO sponsorship in recent years.”

They wrap up their editorial by talking about the effects on today’s reality in Ukraine of the many years Ukrainian citizens lived in a multi-racial, multi-national socialist state. That resulted in many Ukrainian citizens becoming products of and enjoying the benefits of a mixed cultural and linguistic heritage.

Typical families in what is now called Ukraine have family members related to citizens of both Russia and other former Soviet socialist states.

This reality of current day Ukraine must figure into discussions as a negotiated peace is hammered out. Without recognizing it, no comprehensive peace is really possible.

U.S. and EU insistence on achieving NATO “protection” of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state are a losing proposition from the start because they require holding up a non-existent reality.

A negotiated peace that recognizes the reality of Ukraine today is the only thing that can achieve an end to the death and destruction.

U.S. efforts should be directed at this kind of diplomacy. Under the Biden administration, we have already wasted the chances for peace time and again with Cold War rhetoric and the pumping in of billions of dollars in weapons.

The only beneficiaries of the current U.S. policy are the arms dealers and the fossil fuel companies. If the U.S. keeps pushing NATO in that direction, it will bring the world closer to a world war that could doom us all.

As with all op-eds and news-analysis articles published by People’s World, the views represented here are those of the author.

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CONTRIBUTOR

John Wojcik

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.