The author is a professor at the Institute of Political Sciences, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania. He wrote this article especially for RI.

Ukraine is a territory in East Europe that was part of the western Russian Empire from the mid-17th century. Today it is a an independent state and a separate ethnolinguistic nation, a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s model of an “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of an artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity.

Before 2014, Ukraine was  home to some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to official data, around 77 percent declared themselves as Ukrainians. Yet many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or the Belarus as “foreign” but rather as regional branches of the Russian nationality.

Unlike Russia, the national identity of the Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed, but always changing and evolving. (On Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014).

The regions of Ukraine according to political orientation

Ukraine between Poland and Russia

The self-constructing identity of the Ukrainians after 1991 is basically seen vis-à-vis Ukraine’s two most powerful neighbors: Poland and Russia. In other words, the self-constructing Ukrainian identity (like the Montenegrin or the Belarus) is only able to claim that Ukrainians are neither Poles nor Russians. What they really are is debatable. The existence of an independent Ukraine as the national state of the Ukrainians is doubtful from both the historical and ethnolinguistic perspectives.

The Slavonic term Ukraine, for instance, in the Serbo-Croat Krajina, means a Borderland in English– a provincial territory situated on the border between at least two political entities, in this particular historical case, between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or Rzeczpospolita, the Republic of Both Nations (1569−1795),  and the Russian Empire. A German historical term for Ukraine would be mark – meaning a state’s borderland from the time of  Charlemagne, which mostly came into use after the 1667 Treaty of Andrussovo between Russia and the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In  other words, Ukraine and the Ukrainians as a natural objective-historical-cultural identity never existed, since they were considered as a geo-political territory between two other natural-historical entities (Poland and Russia).

All (quasi) historiographical mentioning of this land and the people as Ukraine/Ukrainians before the mid-17th century are scientifically incorrect and in most cases politically inspired for the purpose of presenting them as crucially different from the historical Russian ethnic genus (for instance: Alfredas Bumblauskas, Genutė Kirkienė, Feliksas Šabuldo (sudarytojai), Ukraina: Lietuvos epocha, 1320−1569, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2010).

The Role of the Vatican

It was the Vatican that was behind the creation of the “imagined community” of  “Ukrainians”,  for the purpose of separating the people of this borderland territory from the Orthodox Russian Empire.

The Vatican’s client Austria-Hungary did the same with respect to the national identity of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian population when it was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy from 1878 to 1918, creating a totally artificial ethnolinguistic identity – the “Bosnians”, as opposed to the (Orthodox) Serbs, who were at that time a strong majority of the provincial population) (Лазо М. Костић, Наука утврђује народност Б-Х муслимана, Србиње−Нови Сад: Добрица књига, 2000.)

The creation of an artificial ethnolinguistic Ukrainian national identity, followed by a separate nationality, was part of a wider Vatican political-confessional project in its struggle against Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the eastern “schism”), as part of the Pope’s traditional policy of proselytizing “infidels” with a view to their reconversion. One of the most successful instruments of soft-reconversion used by the Vatican was to force part of the Orthodox population to sign the Roman Catholic Church’s Union Act, thus recognizing the supreme power of the Pope and the dogmatic Filioque (“and from the Son”, i.e., the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son).

Former Orthodox believers became Uniate Brothers, or Greek Orthodox believers, then pure Roman Catholics, changing also their original Orthodox ethnolinguistic identity. For instance, it’s clear in the case of the Orthodox Serbs in the Zhumberak area of Croatia, who went from being Orthodox Serbs to Greek Orthodox, then Roman Catholics and finally today “Croats”.

The Brest Union

Something similar occurred in Ukraine. On October 9th, 1596 the Vatican announced the Brest Union with part of the Orthodox population within the borders of the Roman Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth (today Ukraine). (Arūnas Gumuliauskas, Lietuvos istorija: Įvykiai ir datos, Šiauliai: Šiaures Lietuva, 2009, 44; Didysis istorijos atlasas mokyklai: Nuo pasaulio ir Lietuvos priešistorės iki naujausiųjų laikų, Vilnius: Leidykla Briedis, (without year of publishing) 108.).

The crucial issue in this matter is that today, Ukraine’s Uniates and Roman Catholics have mostly anti-Russian, Ukrainian national idnetities. Basically, both the present-day Ukrainian and Belarus ethnolinguistic and national identities are historically founded on the anti-Orthodox policy of the Vatican within the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was in essence anti-Russian.

Lithuanian historiography on the Church Union of Brest in 1596 clearly confirms that:

“… the Catholic Church more and more strongly penetrated the zone of the Orthodox Church, giving a new impetus to the idea, which had been cherished since the time of Jogaila and Vytautas and formulated in the principles of the Union of Florence in 1439, but never put into effect – the subordination of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Orthodox Church to the Pope’s rule” [(Zigmantas Kiaupa et al, The History of Lithuania Before 1795, Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000, 288]).  

In other words, the rulers of the Roman Catholic Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the GDL) from the time of Lithuania’s baptizing in 1387−1413 by the Vatican, planned to convert all Orthodox believers of the GDL, whose overwhelming majority were Slavs. Relations with Moscow became very hostile, since Russia assumed the role of protector of Orthodox believers, making the Brest Church Union seem like a criminal act by Rome and its client-state, the Republic of Two Nations (Poland-Lithuania).

Сlear Divide   

Today, it is indisputable that the most pro-western and anti-Russian part of Ukraine is West Ukraine – the lands that were historically under the rule of the Roman Catholic former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the former Habsburg Monarchy. It is obvious from the presidential voting results in 2010, when the pro-western regions voted for J. Tymoshenko, while the pro-Russian regions went for V. Yanukovych. It reflects the post-Soviet Ukrainian identity dilemma between “Europe” and “Eurasia” – a dilemma that applies to all the Central and East European nations who have historically been buffer zones between the German Mittel Europa project and the Russian project of pan-Slavonic unity and reciprocity.

The 2010 Presidential election voting results

In general, the western territories of present-day Ukraine are mainly populated by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Uniates, and tend to be nationalistic and pro-western. Eastern Ukraine is in essence Russophone and subsequently “tends to look to closer relations with Russia” [John S. Dryzek, Leslie Templeman Holmes, Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses Across Thirteen Countries, Cambridge−New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 114].

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Source:http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/who-are-ukrainians/ri14726?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=650d9b3336-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-650d9b3336-199978933&ct=t%28Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014%29&mc_cid=650d9b3336&mc_eid=7e9449d7fb