Posted on 03/30/2026 7:02:10 AM PDT by MtnClimber
When Vladimir Putin has been asked to justify his war for control over Ukraine, his answer is typically that Ukraine and Russia have always been one country. And there is some truth to that. The Russian state traces its roots back to something called the Kievan Rus in the 9th century, with its capital at Kyiv. In the period prior to the 20th century, there were times when parts of today’s Ukraine were controlled by other states (like Poland or Lithuania), but never a time when Ukraine was a fully independent country separate from Russia.
And yet somehow a tremendous desire for independence from Russia seems to have arisen among the Ukrainians. In December 1991, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up, a referendum was conducted throughout Ukraine asking the people whether they wanted to join with Russia or become an independent country. A huge supermajority of Ukrainians — 90.32% overall — voted for independence. When the vote is broken down by province, every single province supported independence, most by well over 90%. The vote was close only in Crimea, but even there 54% supported independence. Other from Crimea, all the provinces gave more than 80% support to independence, with percentages under 85% found found only in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Here is a map of Ukraine showing the 1991 vote in favor of independence by province:
So what had happened to turn the Ukrainians so thoroughly and near-unanimously against Russia? I’ve long had a general sense that Ukraine was treated rather poorly by the Russians during the Communist era, but I only had a vague understanding of any details. Then recently I picked up the book Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum. Applebaum is a historian, perhaps best known for writing for the Atlantic. She is by no means a conservative. The book was published in 2017, which is after Putin had annexed Crimea (2014) but before the current Ukraine war began in 2022.
The heart of the book covers the period of about 1929 to 1933, during which the Soviet state, headed by Stalin, built up to and then conducted an intentionally-imposed famine on the Ukrainian people, killing multiple millions. The background to those events was a Ukrainian independence movement, that had begun growing during czarist times in the 19th century, and then broke out more seriously during the chaos at the end of World War I. In the early 1920s, the bolsheviks crushed the independence movement as part of their consolidation of power throughout the Soviet Union. By the end of that civil war, the Soviet state controlled an unhappy and untrusted Ukraine.
And then came the events of 1929-33. First came “collectivization.” I had long known that the Soviet agricultural system was characterized by large “collective” farms, but I had never given much thought to how they had come into existence. In practice, people who had only recently been independent entrepreneurial farmers were forced to turn over their land and other possessions (animals, buildings, equipment) to the state without compensation. From Red Famine, page 135, describing events of approximately 1929/30:
[Collective farms] would require their members to give up their private property — their land as well as horses, cattle, other livestock, and tools — and to turn all of it over to the collective. Some peasants would remain in their houses, but others would eventually live in houses or barracks owned by the collective, and would eat all of their meals in a common dining room. None of them would own anything of importance, including tractors, which were to be leased from centralized state-owned Machine Tractor Stations. . . .
The process of seizing all the farmland for the state led to mass protests and resistance, which were ruthlessly suppressed. Little information about the process was reported to the outside world. Meanwhile, the loss of their land and independence removed all incentive from the peasants to actually go out and produce a harvest, and the size of the harvest collapsed. From Red Famine page 190, describing events of approximately 1931-32:
Threatened by violence and afraid of hunger, hundreds of thousands of peasants finally relinquished their land, animals and machines to the collective farms. But just because they had been forced to move, they did not become enthusiastic collective farmers overnight. The fruits of their labour no longer belonged to them; the grain they sowed and harvested was now requisitioned by the authorities. . . . As a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible. Farm machines were not maintained and frequently broke down . . . .
But at the same time the central authorities had imposed the first of their famous “five year plans” (1928-32), supposedly mandating how much would be produced; and then they sent out agents to the countryside to collect food. In effect, the authorities took all the food and left the peasants to starve. As an example, there is this from page 265 of Red Famine, describing events of the winter of 1932-33:
That winter the teams operating in villages all across Ukraine began to search not just for grain but for anything and everything edible. The were specifically equipped to do so with special tools, long metal rods, sometimes topped by hooks, that could be used to prod any surface in search of grain. . . . Thousands of witnesses have described how they were used to search ovens, beds, cradles, walls, trunks, chimneys, attics, trunks, in doghouses, down wells and beneath piles of garbage. The men and women who used them stopped at nothing, even trawling through cemeteries, barns, empty homes and orchards. . . .
This wasn’t a famine that arose as a by-product of drought or bad weather or war or violence. Rather, it was imposed personally and face-to-face in door to door searches and seizures. From page 267:
People who seemed able to eat were searched with special vigor; those who weren’t starving were by definition suspicious. One survivor mentioned that her family had once managed to get hold of some flour and used it to bake bread during the night. Their home was instantly visited by a brigade that had detected the noise and sounds of cooking in the house.
Here is a description of how bad it had gotten by March 1933 (page 305):
In March the OGPU in Kyiv province were receiving ten or more reports of cannibalism every day. In that month their counterparts in Vinnytsia province reported six incidents in the previous month of “cannibalism caused by famine, in which parents killed their children and used the flesh for food.” But these may have been serious underestimates.
And I’m just giving you a tiny sampling.
Anyway, if you wonder why the Ukrainians seem to feel strongly about their independence, this definitely explains it. The Ukrainians have experienced what our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls “the warmth of collectivism,” and for some reason they don’t want any more of it.
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In the meantime Ukraine has become a hub for organized crime including arms trafficking and human trafficking. I suspect that this is why the democRATs are so interested in Ukraine.
GENEVA – UN experts* today expressed grave concern over credible and well-documented allegations of long-standing trafficking and forced labour of migrant women in the Golyanovo district of Moscow, in Russia.
The victims, primarily from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have reportedly been subjected to extreme forms of exploitation and violence for decades.
“The facts described reveal deeply disturbing patterns of trafficking in persons and contemporary forms of slavery, enabled by systemic failures in the Russian legal and institutional framework,” the experts said. “The lack of effective and timely investigations and the fact that perpetrators are not held accountable fuels impunity which is unacceptable.”
According to information received, dozens of women were lured to Russia with false promises of legitimate employment in small shops. Once there, their documents were confiscated, and they were held in captivity, forced to work up to 20 hours a day in inhumane conditions without pay. Victims were reportedly subjected to torture, sexual violence and forced abortions, and their children were abducted.
“These women were isolated, abused, and stripped of all autonomy. The scale and duration of the abuse, coupled with the authorities’ failure to act despite repeated complaints, point to a deeply entrenched system of exploitation,” the experts said.
Despite dozens of complaints from victims and civil society organisations since the 1990s, Russian authorities have failed to conduct effective investigations, even refusing to register cases.
The experts noted that investigations were often closed on the false assumption that victims had given consent, ignoring compelling evidence of coercion and abuse.
Crimea voted something like 95% to join with Russia, with similar levels in the East.
Although Western Ukraine is the heart of the national-socialist-ethnic Ukraine groups, even prior to 2014, parties like “Right Sector” still only managed to get 2-3% of the vote.
This sturdy shows that the trafficking of women from the Russian Federation occurs on a global scale. Russian women are known to have been trafficked to between 40 and 50 countries worldwide, including most European countries, North American and parts of Asia and the Middle East.
https://publications.iom.int/books/mrs-no-7-trafficking-sexual-exploitation-case-russian-federation
Maybe they lived under Russia's thumb for decades and didn't like it.
Without the EU, I’m all for an independent Ukraine. Right now between Putin and the EU, there’s no good choice.
Didn’t take long for the Ukraine Apologist to try to deflect to Russia, as if that has anything to do with the story.
As long as Russians in Donbas are the majority there will continue to be problems. Would giving Donbas to Russia solve it? They’d still have Crimea and demand bits of too many others.
Currently and for the immediate future, Ukraine is and will be a vassal state. Just a matter of who it serves. And neither the EU nor Russia want Ukraine as a vassal of the other.
I don’t care what Ukraine wants. I care what WE want for the US and in the US.
It also is not their problem what we want.
This was an election under Russian control, was it not?
Zelensky and his cohorts claim they want Ukraine to be independent but they want Ukraine be a claimant state to the United States, with a one-way flow of funds from U.S. taxpayers to them.
Instead, most people I interviewed in Crimea saw Russian citizenship as illegal and pointless. Even if Russian citizenship had been accessible for them, it would still have been undesirable. Russian citizenship failed to offer much in the way of rights they needed or wanted.
Not all of Ukraine! Our rogue CIA did a regime change there! Part of the Anglo-Dutch imperial financial control plan.
Because the puppet government that the US installed in Ukraine says so, that’s why.
A good primer on one giant reason Ukrainians can never trust Russia.
Apparently in Siberia Russian “law enforcement” is rounding up livestock and killing and burning them pretext is disease, yup pitin is indeed recreating the Soviet Union
We can’t have peasants be self sufficient 😎
All may be true though Russia still leads in all those categories, doesn’t change the facts of the article.
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