Ever wonder (probably not) if Ukraine is so important to Russia why then did they allow it to break away?

The news from Ukraine is redundant….pretty much the same day after day…..US spends like a drunken sailor for Ukraine…..Refugees are still pathetic…..Russia fires a rocket somewhere and the words of defiance on both sides continue….

Now a little historic background for those that have an inquiring mind…..

As the conflict drags on and involves more and more participation by the West, mainly the US, some of us struggle to understand just what went wrong.

With the war raging in Ukraine some people, granted not many, have asked the question how did it all come to this?

Basically they are asking what happened to the old USSR that it eventually lead to the many conflicts that have popped up over the last 25 years or so.

For answer we need to look back in Russian history just a bit….that is if you would like to understand what has happened to bring about the wrath on Ukraine.

The break up of the Soviet Union led eventually to the conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine….the only way to understand the situation is to look back to 1991 when the break up began…..

“Why did the Russians, despite all that one would expect from them given the histories of the downfalls of empires, decide not to fight and to let the empire fall?” asked Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, at a 29 April 2013 lecture at the Kennan Institute. Plokhii discussed the fall of the Soviet Union in the context of the last five months of the Soviet Union in order to explain why it was not accompanied by the violent conflicts triggered by the collapse of previous empires.

Plokhii argued that the fall of the Soviet Union is a unique case in the history of empires: “Russia let most of the republics go without a fight, without a struggle.” While there were slogans and campaigns for independence among the Union republics in the months before the collapse, none were campaigning for the complete disintegration of the empire. Rather, each was struggling against the central authority to augment its own independent power base. Even the Baltic states, the most independently minded of the republics, operated along these lines. Other republics, such as those in Central Asia, were not struggling at all against the Union for political independence.

It is common for scholars to mark the Soviet Union’s de facto end in August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin suspended the activities of the Communist party on the territory of the Russian Federation. However, Plokhii stated that this action alone did not precipitate the end of the USSR and independence of its constituent parts. Plokhii contended that only the exit of the Baltic States was inevitable at that moment; the status of other republics like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Ukraine was not fully understood until December 1991.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-let-the-republics-go-revisiting-the-fall-the-ussr

If more info is needed then another source may assist your understanding…..

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/24/1066861022/how-the-soviet-unions-collapse-explains-the-current-russia-ukraine-tension

Sad few will actually care what the causes are…they have boiled their knowledge down to Ukraine good…..Putin Bad……and the US needs to risk everything to prove the points.

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