The name of Ukraine, krajina, comes from a term that in its language and others related to it means border. It is not an easy place to live, especially if it is the border of an empire and two worlds, as is the case here. The Ukrainian lands were the cradle of Rus, the origin of Russia, but the prodigious expansion of that fruit ended up being a problem when Russia became an empire that advanced like an oil slick or, as Stalin preferred to say, like a glacier.

Expansion has been a constant in Russian history. It intensified since the XVIII century. Already in that century it posed problems with Moscow that insisted on imposing its government and also its language and even its subject of population with repopulations that reach our days as internship politics in Russia. The First World War and another of its unexpected fruits, the communist revolution that triumphed in Moscow, were the opportunity for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian identity. It proclaimed itself independent with a territory that basically coincides with the current one. But it was not lucky. It was defeated in the wars that followed the Great War and the revolution. It lost territories to Poland and the Russian Socialist Federation. When it became a socialist republic, it did so with a smaller territory and, in the internship, submitted to Moscow, even though it was nominally one of the founders of the Soviet Union.

Stalin provoked a terrible famine among its people in the early thirties to show the peasants who was in charge there, and left the potential rebels exhausted. The humiliation experienced caused some to welcome the German invasion during World War II as a liberation. Again it was a mirage: the brutality of the Nazis competed to overshadow that of Stalin. The war devastated the country, which emerged from the conflict in the heart of the Soviet Union more subjugated than ever to Moscow. There was no shortage of attempts at partisan uprisings in the postwar period, which were mercilessly crushed.

The next big turning point came with Gorbachev's Perestroika in the second half of the 1980s. Everything accelerated in 1989 when Soviet domination over its satellites in Europe collapsed. The Polish example of the liberation of socialism and then of the Hungarians, the Czechs, and even the Romanians and East Germans, was more than much of the Ukrainian population and its political leaders could resist. The internal struggle within the USSR, brought about first by Kazakhstan and, above all, later by the Baltic republics, led many to believe that Moscow was losing control. Not a few communists became nationalists as fast as they could. In Ukraine it did not take much to achieve this, although the measures taken in the past meant that the eastern part of the country had a larger Russian or Russophile population than the Ukrainian population proper.

Gorbachev, who had compromised with the nominally independent European countries, found in 1990 that he had a similar problem within the USSR. The Union republics were demanding freedom and regaining sovereignty. The moment the Russian Republic joined the movement hand in hand with Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev lost his footing.

Yeltsin should, therefore, have been generous with those who wanted to leave the USSR: he himself had done so. Ukraine thus regained its independence in 1991, in the heat of the 1991 attempted revolutionist coup d'état which, when it failed, gave Yeltsin the opportunity to seize power. The USSR disappeared a few months later.

The transition to democracy in Ukraine was largely unsuccessful. The old communists held the reins of power, but divided into new factions and mired in corruption. Economic failure exacerbated political infighting in Ukraine and one faction ended up calling Russia to its aid while the other invoked the European and American umbrella. Russia stepped in and in 2014 invaded by subterfuge the eastern part of the country and Crimea, a peninsula traditionally dependent on Moscow that was annexed after an urgent and dubiously clean referendum. This was a flagrant violation of the agreements adopted when Ukraine seceded from the USSR. But for Vladimir Putin, the ruler at the time, this was of no importance. The prestige he gained at home with such an action compensated him for the risk of the external sanction which, on the other hand, was neither harsh nor long-lasting.

In 2022 the glacier roars again. For the time being, only the cracked ice sounds and it is not known whether the front will advance or not. But these are difficult times again for those who live on the Russian border.