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Although Russia is contracted to keep moving gas through Ukraine for several more years, some critics in the United States and Europe warn that Nord Stream 2 will allow Russia to bypass Ukrainian pipelines if it wants and gain greater geopolitical leverage in the region. However, in mid-2021, Russia completed construction of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany.
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Prior to its invasion of Crimea, Russia had hoped to pull Ukraine into its single market, the Eurasian Economic Union, which today includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.Įnergy. Russia has relied on Ukrainian pipelines to pump its gas to customers in Central and Eastern Europe for decades, and it continues to pay billions of dollars per year in transit fees to Kyiv. China now tops Russia in its trade with Ukraine. Trade. Russia was for a long time Ukraine’s largest trading partner, although this link has withered dramatically in recent years. The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the dominant maritime force in the region. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.” However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both Russia and Crimea have longed for a return of the peninsula. Losing a permanent hold on Ukraine, and letting it fall into the Western orbit, was seen by many as a major blow to Russia’s international prestige.Ĭrimea. Superpower image. After the Soviet collapse, many Russian politicians viewed the divorce with Ukraine as a mistake of history and a threat to Russia’s standing as a great power. Moscow claimed a duty to protect these people as a pretext for its actions in Ukraine. Russian diaspora. Among Russia’s top concerns is the welfare of the approximately eight million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, according to a 2001 census, mostly in the south and east. And it was Christianity that served as the anchor for Kievan Rus, the early Slavic state from which modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians draw their lineage. It was in Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries that Christianity was brought from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is sometimes referred to as “the mother of Russian cities,” on par in terms of cultural influence with Moscow and St. Russia and Ukraine have strong familial bonds that go back centuries. Russia has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Ukraine, and in many ways Ukraine is central to Russia’s identity and vision for itself in the world.įamily ties. More than fourteen thousand people have died in the conflict, the bloodiest in Europe since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Russia’s seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II that a European state annexed the territory of another. Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and began arming and abetting separatists in the Donbas region in the country’s southeast. A more nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking population in western parts of the country has generally supported greater integration with Europe, while a mostly Russian-speaking community in the east has favored closer ties with Russia. However, Kyiv has struggled to balance its foreign relations and to bridge deep internal divisions. In its nearly three decades of independence, Ukraine has sought to forge its own path as a sovereign state while looking to align more closely with Western institutions, including the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Ukraine was so vital to the union that its decision to sever ties in 1991 proved to be a coup de grâce for the ailing superpower. Behind only Russia, it was the second–most populous and powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, home to much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries, and military, including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union, the archrival of the United States during the Cold War.
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