Le origini storiche della guerra russo-ucraina

On February 24, 2022, an exhausting local war began with huge global impact. In addition to the disastrous consequences in terms of loss of human life and material damage, especially in Ukrainian territory, there are heavy repercussions in agriculture and food, energy, economic and political fields. Diplomacy is struggling and solutions seem far to seek. The reason for this diplomatic stalemate lays in the Russian elite’s unwillingness to sit with conviction at the negotiating table and the lack of a minimum common denominator on which to start working. In addition to contingent problems such as Ukraine’s pro-European positions and its possible entrance in NATO, unwelcome to Moscow, the unresolved issue of Donbass, which has been dragging on for ten years, the annexation of Crimea, the question of energy supplies and gas pipelines, as well as broader international scenarios, which also involve Washington and Beijing (and not only), the profound reasons for the conflict lie in a complex mixture of ethnic, territorial, geopolitical and economic problems, which have increased in the area over history. Explaining and understanding them means providing a diagnosis not only of the war, but also and above all of the remote causes that underlie it. The article reconstructs four salient moments of Ukrainian history, which represent as many fundamental turning points for determining the war’s profound reasons: the birth of Kievan Rus’ in medieval times; the creation of several Ukrainian republics during the Russian Revolutions and civil war; some of the problems of independent Ukraine born with the dissolution of the USSR; finally, the emergence of the reasons for the Euromaidan crisis of 2013-2014. Each of these phases reveals, with different intensity, how Ukraine is subject to incessantly changing dimensions, how fragile its identity is and how its independence has always been precarious.