The History of Ukraine (Part II in a series) – including timeline 1991-2012
This article will provide two decades of history in order to better understand the evolution of the current US/NATO/Ukraine war on Russia
See previously published: The History of Ukraine (Part I) 800 AD-1990
Overview
Ukraine did not become a country until 1922, when it was created as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) – and has always been an amalgamated country consisting of multiple, disparate ethnicities and languages. It became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union – a regional empire which would only last for the next seven decades.
After the gradual dismantling of the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, the 1990s would become a landmark decade in the thousand-year history of Russia and also the country known as Ukraine – which had existed less than one century. The idea of the alcoholic Boris Yeltsin becoming president of Russia was like a dream come true for the United States, which was overcome with ecstasy to be able to declare itself – for the first time in its history – “the world’s only superpower”.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union opened up the capitalist floodgates to Russia, creating a new class of oligarchs who quickly established financial links to the US/West. This vacuum kicked off a bonanza of buying up Russian/Ukrainian land and former Soviet state-owned industrial enterprises. In the 1990s, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian Jew, would find himself on a meteoric rise to the “head of the class” of these newly spawned Western-affiliated oligarchs.
Much of this hemorrhaging of Russian wealth from the homeland in the early 1990s would make a beeline to South Florida, a state that allows an unlimited homestead exemption which protects the super-wealthy should they ever experience any inclination to declare bankruptcy for any reason – and allow them to keep their luxury estates no matter how much money they owe their creditors.
Hundreds of these “overnight” Russian / Ukrainian multi-millionaires or billionaires purchased mansions or luxury condos from Donald Trump properties in both New York City and along the Southeast coast of Florida – sales which were perfectly legal. In the Florida resort town of Sunny Isles Beach, an area with the highest number of Russian-born residents in the U.S., the Trump brand has six residential towers.
Because of the tumultuous, “wild west” situation in Russia, many of these very wealthy Russians and Ukrainians were looking to get their money out of Russia to more stable places, money which would often land in the United States. Since Trump legally financially benefited from so many of these Russian buyers, he would naturally not be quick to develop any anti-Russian sentiment, which many in the Washington, DC “Deep State” had been urging him to have during his presidential term 2017-21. Since so many of these wealthy Russian tenants were paying skyrocketing rent in Trump’s high rise luxury apartments, the US mainstream media parlayed this into the stretch of Trump being “friendly to Russian president Vladimir Putin”, when Putin himself had nothing to do with these real estate purchases.
Since becoming Russian prime minister in 1999, Vladimir Putin embarks on a quarter-century long quest to stem the tide of the tsunami of capitalism which has rapidly swept eastward across Europe well into Russia.
Putin would begin to gradually reign in this sudden onslaught of Western capitalism and its newly-created oligarchs which enveloped not only Russia, but also its historic “sister country” of Ukraine.
The US/West was immediately dismayed when Putin came to power. They correctly calculated that he would establish little political affinity to the oligarchic NATO governments which began to extend their tentacles around the former Soviet-bloc countries. His main base of support included the following four constituencies:
1) the average Russian citizen,
2) the Russian Orthodox Church,
3) the military,
4) Russian intelligence agencies
Putin began to phase out these Western-style oligarchs from influencing the Russian government, who had shortly before been hatched and thrived under Boris Yeltsin. Not surprisingly, this caused a political fallout with US/Western governments, and they sensed that their “field day” in Russia may soon be coming to a close. Putin would allow them to keep their money, but only on the condition that they not interfere in Russian politics – which was anathema to Western-style governments. The US/West feared, and rightly so, that Putin would tamp down the capitalist explosion into the Russian 1990s, and bar new Russian billionaire oligarchs – many of whom were Russian Jews – from political power.
This condition was considered abhorrent especially to the US government, who then staked out a long path to displace Putin, which would eventually rise to a crescendo in the February 2014 Maidan coup d’etat, when the Washington, DC Uniparty [1] commissioned senators John McCain, Chris Murphy, along with State Department henchwoman Victoria Nuland to Kiev to overthrow democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was committed to maintaining Ukraine’s neutrality between NATO and Russia. The US overthrow of Yanukovych was essentially akin to a “dress rehearsal” to “Act II” in the set, which was the overthrow of Putin in Moscow, which would come to loggerheads in February 2022. The Zio-con Nuland had worked for both Dick Cheney (Republican) and Joe Biden (Democrat) while each had served two terms each as vice president over the period from 2001-2017. She was put on hiatus under the Trump administration, but came right back with Biden in 2021.
The District of Columbia’s scheme was use Ukraine as a battering ram against Putin. But well into 2024, Putin and the Russians were dug in like “tarheels” – standing their ground in the Donbass region, while fending off VP Joe Biden’s decade-long gambit to purge Russian influence from Ukraine – which included the Russian language, Eastern Orthodox Church, and Russian culture – all of which had been an inbred part of Ukraine for more than 1,000 years.
Timeline (1991-2012)
1991 (24 August) – As the last Soviet Socialist Republic to break away from the Soviet Union, Ukraine declares its independence from the USSR, completing the demise of the longest-running and largest bloc of communist countries. Being that Ukraine was the last republic to break off from the primarily Russian-controlled Soviet Union, indicates that of all the former Soviet-bloc countries, Ukraine is the one most closely linked to Russia linguistically, geographically, and culturally and clearly the most indispensable to Russia. An analogy can be made that as Canada is to the US, Ukraine is to Russia.
Upon the historic breakup of the USSR, the Russian Federation is declared, which renounces communism, and hastily commences its chaotic advance toward a capitalist economy. Russia reverts back to its historic national flag of horizontal stripes of white, blue, and red that it had used for many centuries before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when it changed its flag to the red and yellow hammer and sickle, which only survived three-quarters of a century.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Simferopol, located in South Central Crimea, became the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea within Ukraine. Most of Crimea’s population was composed of ethnic Russians, many of whom were retired military, with the rest being mostly Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities. Virtually all of Crimeans spoke Russian. Tatars was the Russian name assigned to people of Turkic descent who had lived in Crimea for several centuries while it was part of the Ottoman Empire, based in what is now Turkey. the Ottoman Empire was lost in World War I to the Allies, which included Russia.
1991 – Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev reaches a verbal agreement with the United States’ George Bush I administration that if he officially dissolves the Soviet Union, the US would not expand its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “one inch eastward” beyond the existing 16 countries at the time. Many other top leaders of NATO countries’ reiterated this “not one inch eastward” promise, including Bush I’s Secretary of State James Baker, CIA Director Robert Gates, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner. Other than these “nobodies”, no promises were made to Gorbachev!
All of these leaders made this promise verbally – as if it were choreographed – which appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows all over the world. But Gorbachev would never receive this universal decree in writing, which left the door open for the US to deliberately toss said vow into the ash heap – continuing to expand NATO – which would eventually, by March 2024, expand to 32 countries, exactly double the number that it had promised to Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand it beyond.
Boris Yeltsin – a US “yes man” – is elected as the first post-Soviet president of the Russian Federation. see History of NATO article
In 1991, billions of dollars of gold held by the Soviet Union was being plundered – much of it ending up in Israel – with Israeli-firster Robert Maxwell (birthname: Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia) being one of the chief conduits of this national looting. [2] Maxwell had been both a British publishing magnate and also a Mossad asset.
Maybe not surprisingly, he mysteriously turned up dead on 5 November 1991, as his body was recovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, after having somehow fallen overboard from his luxury yacht near the Canary Islands, Spain. He was buried in Jerusalem.
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