Quotes About Ukraine

Moreover, until very recently Ukraine's neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland.

The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that 'without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

Here begins Ukraine's great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine 'Eastern Little Poland'; the Russian name for Ukraine was 'Little Russia'.

West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as 'Pan So-and-So'; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are 'Gospodin'. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate 'Uniate' church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.

That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila's marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time.

Ukraine's relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising;

Lviv, in present-day western Ukraine, became the only city in the world besides Rome to host three Christian archbishoprics – Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian.

UKRAINA is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland', and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Stalin's policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Let us all swear at this great moment as one man to take up the great cause unanimously, with one accord, and not to rest or cease our labour until we build that free Ukraine!' The crowd shouted back: 'We swear!

Kiev's attempts to exert economic pressure on Donbas (region of east Ukraine) and disrupt its daily life only aggravates the situation. This is a dead-end track, fraught with a big catastrophe.

Russia may well be willing to stop interfering in Eastern Ukraine in exchange for a degree of sanctions relief if it could be assured that ethnic Russians there would not face reprisals.

The fact that Russia has shown a willingness to disrupt elections and undermine institutions should come as no surprise. Just ask our allies across Europe, particularly in places like Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin's calculation is simple: a Ukraine with a permanent war in its eastern region will never be fully welcomed by Europe or the rest of the world.

The Ukrainians voted for a comedian and got a leader. A man with an unerring moral compass. We in the UK also voted for a comedian and got exactly that. Except his act had long since stopped being funny. It never occurred to us that the world was going to get this serious. First Covid. Then this.

Since the topic of Russia and Ukraine has become the news main, the duffers and idlers in other countries will discuss about the subject same just to drain their energy in vain talk forgetting about their own life pain. Each of them will senselessly claim to have all knowledge about the foreign ground plain. But a person who would refrain from all such worthless debate and discussion is a sane.

I've earned quite a lot of money in Donetsk.

Many years ago, large packs of wolves roamed the countryside in Ukraine, making travel in that part of the world very dangerous. These wolf packs were fearless. They were not intimidated by people nor by any of the weapons available at that time. The only thing that seemed to frighten them was fire.

If you really want to wreck Russia, encourage them to try and swallow Ukraine. That's like swallowing a porcupine.

Sparing Putin any serious penalty for his assault on our democracy doesn't just encourage further aggression, it tells the victims and potential victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and Montenegro, and in Russia itself, that the United States, the greatest power in the world, couldn't be relied on to defend its own democracy.

the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia's hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia's iron and 60 percent of its steel.

I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate.

the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do."16

I do not want to return to the Ukraine of the 1990s and the time of privatization. Ninety-eight percent of Ukrainian companies obey the laws.