Ukraine Struggles for Freedom, A History Moscow Can Not Erase

A Cradle Older Than Moscow

Kyiv’s golden domes have witnessed over a millennium of history. Long before Moscow was even a idea on a map, Kyiv stood as the vibrant heart of the Kyivan Rus – the medieval kingdom that first united the Eastern Slavs. In the mid-9th century, Scandinavian Viking princes made Kyiv their capital, fostering a powerful civilization while Moscow’s forests remained untouched. That ancient Rus’ state laid the cultural foundations for Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus alike. The fact that Kyiv predates Moscow by centuries matters: it debunks the lie that Ukraine is some “younger sibling” with no history of its own. Ukrainians today draw pride and strength from knowing their capital was the cradle of Eastern Slavic culture, a cosmopolitan center trading with Byzantium and Europe while Moscow lagged far behind.

Centuries Under the Imperial Yoke

After the Kyivan Rus fell to Mongol invasion in the 13th century, Ukraine’s lands endured centuries of foreign rule – but its people never ceased yearning for self-determination. For hundreds of years, much of Ukraine was dominated by expanding empires. By the 18th century, the Russian Tsars had subjugated most of Ukraine, swallowing it into an empire that viewed Ukrainian identity as a threat. The very name “Ukraine” – meaning “borderland” – was often suppressed in favor of calling it “Little Russia.” Tsarist authorities went so far as to ban publications in the Ukrainian language and even claim that this language “never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.” Such was the arrogance of imperial rulers like Alexander II’s ministers in the 1860s, who decreed that Ukrainian was nothing but a corrupted dialect of Russian. Despite these efforts to erase their culture, Ukrainians stubbornly preserved their language, folklore, and sense of nationhood in secret poetry circles, village songs, and family traditions.

Through the 19th century, Ukrainian intellectuals and peasants alike pushed back against Russification. Poets such as Taras Shevchenko – now a national hero – wrote in Ukrainian and championed the common people, for which the Tsar exiled and imprisoned him. Peasant rebellions flared and Cossack traditions of self-rule lingered as folk memory. By the dawn of the 20th century, the idea of an independent Ukraine had taken root in many hearts, even as the Romanov empire tried to extinguish it. The Russian imperial yoke was heavy and cruel – yet it never fully broke the Ukrainian spirit. Every effort to paint Ukrainians as “just Russians” only steeled their resolve to be seen and respected as a distinct people.

The Soviet Nightmare: Famine and Terror

In 1917, during the chaos of revolution and World War I, Ukrainians seized a brief window to declare independence. They formed the Ukrainian People’s Republic and fought for their freedom. But independence was short-lived: by the early 1920s, the Red Army had crushed the young republic and forcibly incorporated Ukraine into the new Soviet Union. What followed was a nightmare of Soviet domination that nearly destroyed Ukraine – but ultimately failed to kill its identity.

Under Lenin and Stalin, Ukrainians faced policies alternating between token tolerance and vicious repression. In the 1920s, the Soviet regime initially allowed a policy of “Ukrainization,” permitting the Ukrainian language in schools and government. It was a cynical ploy to win support – one that Stalin soon reversed with lethal force. In 1932–33, Soviet authorities engineered one of the most horrendous crimes in European history on Ukrainian soil: the Holodomor, or death-by-hunger. As Stalin pushed brutal collectivization of agriculture, his regime requisitioned grain at gunpoint and sealed off villages. Millions of Ukrainian peasants were deliberately starved to death in what scholars recognize as a genocide. Families in Europe’s fertile breadbasket died surrounded by stalks of grain they were forbidden to eat. Mothers cradled starving children; some people in desperation resorted to eating grass or worse. At least three to four million Ukrainians perished in that man-made famine. Stalin targeted Ukraine’s grain not just to crush private farmers, but to break the backbone of the Ukrainian nation. While hunger ravaged the countryside, Stalin’s secret police also executed and imprisoned Ukrainian intellectuals, clergy, and anyone deemed a “nationalist.” This simultaneous assault – killing the body through famine and the soul through purges – aimed to erase Ukraine as a nation once and for all.

But Ukraine survived. Broken, grieving, and shackled, yet still Ukraine endured.

World War II: Blood and Resistance

No sooner had Ukraine staggered out of the famine than it was engulfed in the inferno of World War II. Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, turning Ukraine into one of the war’s deadliest battlefields. Millions of Ukrainians fought and died – some as Red Army soldiers defending the motherland, others as partisans dreaming of an independent Ukraine, and countless civilians caught in between. The capital Kyiv was leveled by combat and occupation. The Nazis carried out genocidal slaughter on Ukrainian territory: the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv, where over 30,000 Jews were murdered in two days, is just one searing example. Across Ukraine, villagers were burned alive in reprisal attacks, and entire towns were reduced to ash. By 1945, over 5 million Ukrainians (soldiers and civilians) had lost their lives in the war against Hitler. Ukraine’s rich soil was soaked in blood.

When the war ended, Soviet control over Ukraine was reimposed even more tightly by Joseph Stalin – now paranoid about any hint of Ukrainian disloyalty. Partisan fighters in Western Ukraine who had battled both Nazis and Soviets were hunted down by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) well into the late 1940s. Perhaps the most tragic postscript of World War II in Ukraine was Stalin’s revenge against the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic Muslim people indigenous to Crimea. In May 1944, as the war still raged, Stalin ordered the mass deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population from their homeland. In a matter of days, Soviet troops forced roughly 200,000 men, women, and children – every Tatar they could find – into cattle cars and exiled them thousands of miles away to Central Asia. This cruel collective punishment was justified by a false accusation that the Tatars had collaborated with the Nazis. Families were given mere minutes to pack; many were loaded onto trains with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The journey into exile was horrific: overcrowded, sealed train cars with little food or water for weeks. Nearly half of all Crimean Tatars died from hunger, thirst, and disease during the deportation and in the first years of exile. An entire people was ripped from their ancestral land in an act of cultural genocide. Crimea was then “Russified” – repopulated with Russians – and even the Tatars’ mosques and books were destroyed. This was the brutal culmination of imperial Russian policies toward Crimea dating back to Catherine the Great’s conquest of the peninsula in the 18th century.

For Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars alike, the Soviet victory in WWII did not bring true liberation – it meant a return to oppression. Yet they kept their hope alive in secret. In the Gulag prison camps of Siberia, Ukrainian poets scribbled verses on scraps of paper. In dusty Uzbek towns, Crimean Tatar grandparents told grandchildren stories of their lost seaside homeland. The flame of identity was kept alive under ashes of tyranny.

Independence and the Hard Road Ahead

When the Soviet Union finally crumbled in 1991, Ukraine finally stepped forward to claim its rightful independence. On August 24, 1991, Ukraine’s parliament declared the nation sovereign, and an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians approved in a December referendum – including a majority in Crimea, voting to be part of an independent Ukraine. For the first time in centuries, Ukrainians had a state of their own, not as a province or colony, but a nation on the world stage. There was euphoria and profound relief: a sense that countless generations of sacrifice had at last borne fruit. Kyiv’s streets flooded with blue-and-yellow flags, and people knelt to kiss the ground in thankful prayer.

But the road after 1991 was not easy or straightforward. Decades of Soviet rule had left deep scars: a wrecked economy, entrenched corruption, and officials still beholden to Moscow’s way of thinking. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Ukraine navigated the turbulent transition to democracy and a market economy. There were triumphs – like the peaceful Orange Revolution of 2004, when mass protests overturned a fraudulent pro-Kremlin regime – and there were setbacks, as oligarchs and corrupt politicians hindered progress. Yet civil society grew stronger with each challenge. The pivotal moment came in 2013–2014 with the Euromaidan Revolution, when Ukrainians rose up once more, at great personal risk, to demand their dignity and a future aligned with Europe rather than a corrupt Russian-backed autocracy. Facing snipers and brutal crackdowns, protesters in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) stood their ground through a freezing winter. Over a hundred brave Ukrainians were killed by government forces in those fateful days – they are now remembered as the “Heavenly Hundred.” Their sacrifice forced the collapse of the kleptocratic regime of Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine paid in blood yet again to reclaim its democracy and orient itself toward freedom and the West.

For Vladimir Putin a democratic, independent Ukraine choosing its own path was intolerable. Almost immediately, in 2014, Russia struck back. Putin’s forces – wearing unmarked uniforms – invaded and illegally annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula that held strategic and emotional importance for both Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars. Not stopping there, Moscow fomented a separatist war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, sending weapons, mercenaries, and even regular troops to carve out puppet “republics.” Ukraine suddenly found itself in a de facto war, even as the world hesitated to call it that. By the end of the 2010s, parts of eastern Ukraine lay in ruins and some 13,000 people had been killed in the smoldering conflict – all a direct result of Putin’s refusal to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty.

A War for Survival in the 21st Century

On February 24, 2022, that simmering conflict exploded into a full-scale invasion – the largest act of aggression in Europe since Hitler’s time. Russia launched a brutal, unprovoked war aimed at decapitating the Ukrainian state and wiping Ukraine off the map as an independent entity. Once again, Ukrainians were forced to fight for their very survival as a nation. The Kremlin’s propaganda had long painted Ukraine as “not a real country,” and now Putin attempted to make that a reality through bombs and tanks. The world watched in shock as Russian missiles rained down on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and countless other cities. Millions of civilians – mothers, children, the elderly – huddled in basements and subway stations or fled as refugees to neighboring countries. Mass graves were discovered in liberated towns like Bucha, testifying to the deliberate slaughter of Ukrainian civilians under Russian occupation. Hospitals, theaters, and apartment blocks were reduced to smoking rubble. The horrors that Ukraine suffered under Stalin and Hitler seemed to be revisiting in the 21st century, as Putin’s armies targeted the Ukrainian people and their identity once more.

In this darkest hour, the resilience of Ukraine has shone brighter than ever. The Ukrainian people, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, astonished the world by resisting the full might of the Russian military. Volunteers of all ages took up arms; schoolteachers and IT workers made Molotov cocktails; grandmothers defiantly cursed Russian drones. The spirit of independence that had been forged over centuries – from the Kyivan princes, to Cossack rebels, to partisan fighters, to Maidan protesters – now fuels a unified national resistance. Ukrainians understand exactly what they are fighting for: not just territory, but their right to exist as a free people with their own language, history, and culture. The blue and yellow flag flying over a recaptured town is more than a piece of cloth – it symbolizes the survival of a nation that others have tried again and again to erase. Every day this war drags on, Ukrainians pay with their lives in defense of the simple idea that Ukraine is real, Ukraine is independent, and Ukraine will never return to bondage.

The Battle of Narratives: Confronting Lies and Revisionism

As Ukrainians spill their blood on the battlefield, another battle rages in parallel – the battle of narratives. Vladimir Putin has weaponized history and propaganda to justify his aggression. He insists Ukraine “has always been part of Russia” and that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” These lies are aimed at undermining Ukraine’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world and even demoralizing Ukrainians themselves. In Putin’s twisted version of history, Ukraine’s distinct identity is an illusion created by meddling outsiders, and its statehood an accident of the Soviet collapse. This pernicious narrative is nothing new – it is the same chauvinistic drumbeat Ukrainians heard from tsars and Soviet commissars. What is new and deeply alarming is that such false narratives have been echoed in recent years by prominent voices in the United States, a country that once proudly championed freedom and truth.

During the Trump administration, Ukrainians watched with dismay as some American leaders began parroting Kremlin talking points. President Donald Trump himself displayed a disturbing nonchalance toward Russia’s assaults on Ukraine and often repeated myths straight from Putin’s playbook. In one 2018 meeting of world leaders, Trump reportedly remarked that Crimea was rightfully Russian because “everyone there speaks Russian.” By that warped logic, he effectively endorsed the conquest of a neighbor’s land based on linguistic imperialism – as if might makes right and native peoples have no say. Trump also allegedly told aides that Ukraine was “not a real country” and had “always been part of Russia,” dismissing the nation’s very existence and history. Those shocking words mirror exactly what Putin has been saying to justify his war. Furthermore, in public, Trump frequently derided Ukraine as “so corrupt,” as if to suggest it wasn’t worth defending or respecting. Perhaps most cruelly, even as Russian bombs fell in 2022, Trump suggested that Ukraine should have just “made a deal” to avoid the war – implying that the victim, not the aggressor, was to blamefor the carnage. Such rhetoric wasn’t confined to Trump alone; other political figures and commentators on the American far-right have amplified narratives that Ukraine is culturally indistinguishable from Russia or undeserving of sovereignty.

Let us call this what it is: dangerous historical revisionism that insults the memory of millions of Ukrainians who suffered and died to assert their identity. The claim that “Ukraine is fundamentally Russian” or that the Ukrainian language is somehow artificial is a lie – one that has been debunked by centuries of Ukrainian literature, art, and resistance. Ukrainian is the mother tongue of millions; it developed from the language of Kyivan Rus, enriched by folk traditions and literary triumphs, not concocted in some lab. To suggest Ukraine’s identity is negligible is to ignore the rich tapestries of culture – from the folk songs of the Carpathian mountains to the Orthodox churches painted in Ukrainian Baroque style – that make Ukraine unmistakably its own. Moreover, it negates the profound sacrifices Ukrainians have made resisting forced “Russianization.” When American leaders or pundits belittle the Ukrainian nation, they are not being “objective” or “realist” – they are abetting the Kremlin’s information warfare. They are repeating the same excuses used by emperors and dictators to justify oppression.

Honoring the Truth, Standing with Ukraine

Why does this history matter to the world? Because Ukraine’s struggle is a crucible for the ideals of freedom and truth. Today, Ukrainians stand on the frontline of a fight against imperial tyranny and historical falsehood. They remind us that independence and identity are not granted; they are won through courage and maintained at great cost. When we see Ukrainians defending their cities and speaking their language under dire threat, we are witnessing a nation asserting its right to exist – a right earned through centuries of suffering and perseverance.

We must not allow the cynics or deceivers to rewrite Ukraine’s story. Not when mass graves from Stalin’s famine still testify to the cost of subjugation. Not when survivors of Soviet gulags and Nazi camps have left their memoirs in the Ukrainian language as proof of life. Not when the Crimean Tatars, in living memory, were packed into trains for no crime but their ethnicity. And not when today’s Ukrainian soldiers, teachers, farmers, and nurses risk everything so that their children can grow up free and Ukrainian. To trivialize or distort this history is to side with the oppressor over the oppressed. It means failing a moral test of our time.

In the face of Russia’s brutal attempt to extinguish Ukraine, neutrality is not an option – not in deeds, and not in words. The West, and indeed all people of conscience, must reject the propaganda that Ukraine “isn’t a real nation.” We have seen the mass graves and bombed schools; we have heard the survivors of famine and exile. We know Ukraine’s nationhood is written in the blood of patriots and the prayers of its grandparents. It is as real as France’s or America’s, and arguably earned with an even greater struggle.

Ukraine’s fight for independence and cultural identity is one of the most epic and impassioned struggles for freedom the world has known. It did not begin in 2022, or 2014, or 1991 – it began many lifetimes ago and has been passed like a sacred torch from generation to generation. Now that torch is under attack by a despot’s missiles and a liar’s tongue. But it still burns bright.

As an international community – as fellow human beings who value liberty – we owe Ukraine more than just weapons and aid. We owe them the truth. We owe them an honest telling of their story and respect for their identity. That means calling out lies when we hear them, whether they come from the Kremlin or from a politician at a rally on American soil. It means remembering that Kyiv was a great city when Moscow was a swamp, that Ukrainians were cultivating their arts when imperial censors tried to silence them, and that this proud nation has again and again chosen freedom over servitude.

Ukraine’s long struggle is not only about Ukraine. It is about the principle that no people can be written out of history to satisfy an empire’s hunger. It is about affirming that truth matters – the truth that Holodomor was real and genocidal, that Crimea’s Tatars were victims of a great crime, that Ukraine is not Russia, and never has been. It is about ensuring that those who died for the dream of an independent Ukraine – from medieval knights to famine-starved farmers to modern-day soldiers on the eastern front – did not die in vain or only to have their legacy denied by comfortable demagogues thousands of miles away.

In honoring Ukraine’s fight and remembering its history, we uphold the ideals of human dignity and self-determination everywhere. The tears shed in Kyiv and Donetsk today echo those shed in previous generations, and they cry out for justice and recognition. Let us heed them. Let us refuse to let the darkness of historical revisionism cloud the bright truth of Ukraine’s story.

Ukraine’s past and present fight for independence teaches one resounding lesson: no matter how relentless the oppressor, the desire to live free and define one’s own identity will endure. Kyiv still stands. The Ukrainian flag still flies. No amount of propaganda can change the fact that Ukraine is – and always has been – a nation worthy of its freedom and proud of its unique culture. And no amount of terror can snuff out the flame of liberty that burns in the heart of every Ukrainian.

Ukraine has paid dearly for every ounce of its independence and cultural survival. The least we, as observers and allies, can do is speak the truth about that struggle and reject the lies that seek to undermine it. History, with all its pain and glory, is on Ukraine’s side. It falls to us to be there as well.

Sources for Further Reading

• Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine – Comprehensive history of the Ukrainian lands from ancient to modern times.
• Serhy Yekelchyk, “Sorry, Mr. Putin. Ukraine and Russia are Not the Same Country.” Politico Magazine, Feb. 6, 2022 – An analysis by a historian debunking the myth that Ukraine “has always been part of Russia” and exploring the distinct path of Ukrainian history.
• Myroslav Shkandrij, “Ukraine’s Century-Long Struggle to Keep Its Culture and Independence.” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 13, 2022 – Op-ed outlining key moments in Ukraine’s fight against Russian domination and the perseverance of Ukrainian identity.
• Bohdan Vitvitsky, “Disarming Putin’s History Weapon.” Atlantic Council – UkraineAlert, Jan. 23, 2022 – A critique of how Putin distorts historical facts about Ukraine, and a clear explanation of Ukraine’s true historical experience apart from Russia.
• Wilson Center – Mark Temnycky, “Crimean Tatars and Russification,” Sept. 13, 2022 – Overview of the historical persecution of Crimean Tatars, including Stalin’s 1944 deportations and current challenges under Russian occupation.
• Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine – A journalistic history detailing the Holodomor famine of 1932–33 and its impact on Ukraine’s national identity.
• BuzzFeed News – Alberto Nardelli & Julia Ioffe, “Trump Told G7 Leaders That Crimea Is Russian Because Everyone There Speaks Russian,” June 14, 2018 – Report on President Trump’s remarks echoing Russian justifications for seizing Ukrainian territory, illustrating the spread of Kremlin narratives.
• Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, “Putin’s War in Ukraine: A Conversation” – Brookings Institution, 2022 – Insightful discussion by two Russia experts on Putin’s worldview, including the false claim that Ukraine isn’t a “real country,” and the historical context refuting it.