Owen Polley: It is tragic to see war unfolding over Ukraine, in a region I love

I’ve visited many of the places that are currently in the news; Kiev, Donetsk, Crimea, Belarus and Russia itself.

I’ve struggled in vain to learn the Russian language but taken years of pleasure from the history, literature and culture of these two great, intimately linked nations.

I would not presume to write a political column, analysing Vladimir Putin’s motivations or trying to explain the war’s likely impact, but I will make some observations about Ukraine and Russia, drawn from personal experiences and much reading.

Firstly, the history of these countries is undeniably closely intertwined, which is part of the problem.

They both trace their origins to a mediaeval kingdom established by Prince Rurik, in the sleepy Russian town of Novgorod. The capital of this realm was later moved to Kiev, by Rurik’s son, Oleg, establishing ‘Kievan Rus’, which Russians and Ukrainians claim as the forerunner of their modern states.

About a century later, another of the Rurik dynasty, Prince Vladimir, christianised the territory. He chose Orthodox christianity over the Latin version and established a key pillar of eastern Slavic identity.

Russia sees Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, as an important source of its own culture, nationhood and religion. This has sometimes fuelled a sense of brotherhood, but it has also caused tensions and violence, most recently in 2014 and now in the current conflict.

The name ‘Ukraine’ is derived from Slavic words for ‘borderland’. It is a place where nations, empires and cultures met and clashed, over centuries.

Donetsk, an industrial city famed for coal-mining, is now at the heart of one of the breakaway ‘republics’ whose independence Putin recognised last week. When I visited, back in 2003, it was fully part of Ukraine.

Even then, on a visit to watch the Northern Ireland football team, there were signs of competing identities and political differences. Some of the locals were keen to emphasise that they were Russian and did not support Ukraine. I was stopped by two men in the street who showed me their Russian passports and expressed hopes for a Northern Ireland victory.

When I visited Crimea a decade later, it too was part of Ukraine, but feelings of Russianness were even more firmly rooted. Outside the train station in its capital, Simferopol, I saw a taxi-driver having an argument with a potential customer, after he tried to order a cab in the Ukrainian language.

The cabbie shouted that his prospective fare was a ‘Banderite’; a reference to the extreme Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war. He thought the man was being deliberately provocative by speaking Ukrainian in such a Russified place. Less than a year later, Russia annexed Crimea.

In 2014 in Kiev, President Yanukovych was overthrown during street protests known as Euromaidan. The demonstrators were angry when he scrapped an association agreement with the EU in favour of maintaining a closer relationship with Moscow.

Fearing a rise in Ukrainian nationalism, pro-Russia militia took control of government buildings in Simferopol. Then, with dizzying speed, Putin sent in his ‘little green men’ and seized control of the Crimean peninsula.

Something similar happened in other regions of eastern Ukraine, where there were large populations of Russian speakers, with links to Moscow. The result was a vicious civil war, and the creation of two breakaway republics, in Donetsk and Luhansk, which Kiev said were propped up by Russian troops.

The latest war is closely linked to that period. At the boundary between ‘Ukraine proper’ and the two republics, fighting never ended completely. Between 2015 and 2021, 1,300 civilians died in the Donbas (the area around Donetsk and Lugansk).

Russia now claims it invaded to defend people in these regions from Ukrainian shelling. It accuses Kiev of discriminating against Russian speakers throughout the country, pursuing anti-Russian policies and including extreme nationalists in its government.

Ukraine points out that Moscow grabbed Crimea, armed rebel regions, denied its independence and created two de-facto Russian enclaves in Ukrainian territory. Now Moscow has launched an all-out invasion, endangering millions of lives and jeopardising peace in eastern Europe and beyond.

Whatever your views on this war, and I think the invasion is inexcusable, we can all agree that what is happening is heartbreakingly sad.

Ukraine was always a fragile state, whose stability could be threatened by Russia and ‘the West’ using it in their geopolitical struggles.

It gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and, for many years, it maintained a delicate balance between competing languages, cultural identities and political allegiances. Its politics were fractious and corrupt, but they remained peaceful, barring the odd fisticuffs in parliament.

The current scenes on our TV screens should be a source of profound sorrow for us all.