Ukrainian nationalism in the context of "Ukrainian War of Independence"

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR, UkrSSR, and also known as Soviet Ukraine or just Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991. Under the Soviet one-party model, the Ukrainian SSR was governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union through its republican branch, the Communist Party of Ukraine.

The first iterations of the Ukrainian SSR were established during the Russian Revolution, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution. The outbreak of the Ukrainian–Soviet War in the former Russian Empire saw the Bolsheviks defeat the independent Ukrainian People's Republic, during the conflict against which they founded the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets, which was governed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), in December 1917; it was later succeeded by the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1918. Simultaneously with the Russian Civil War, the Ukrainian War of Independence was being fought among the different Ukrainian republics founded by Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian anarchists, and Ukrainian separatists – primarily against Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian SSR, with either help or opposition from neighbouring states. In 1922, it was one of four Soviet republics (with the Russian SFSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR) that signed the Treaty on the Creation of the Soviet Union. As a Soviet quasi-state, the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945 alongside the Byelorussian SSR, in spite of the fact that they were also legally represented by the Soviet Union in foreign affairs. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian SSR emerged as the present-day independent state of Ukraine, although the modified Soviet-era constitution remained in use until the adoption of the modern Ukrainian constitution in June 1996.

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno (Ukrainian: Нестор Іванович Махно, pronounced [ˈnɛstor iˈwɑnowɪtʃ mɐxˈnɔ]; 7 November 1888 – 25 July 1934), also known as Bat'ko Makhno (Ukrainian: Бáтько Махно́ [ˈbɑtʲko mɐxˈnɔ], lit. 'Father Makhno'), was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. He established the Makhnovshchina (loosely translated as "Makhno movement"), a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown of Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine, specifically in what is now the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine.

Raised by a peasant family and coming of age amid the fervor around the 1905 Revolution, Makhno participated in a local anarchist group and spent seven years imprisoned for his involvement. With his release during the 1917 Revolution, Makhno became a local revolutionary leader in his hometown and oversaw the expropriation and redistribution of large estates to the peasantry. In the Ukrainian Civil War, Makhno sided with the Soviet Russian Bolsheviks against the Ukrainian nationalists and White movement, but his alliances with the Bolsheviks did not last. He rallied Bolshevik support to lead an insurgency, defeating the Central Powers' occupation forces at the Battle of Dibrivka and establishing the Makhnovshchina. Makhno's troops briefly integrated with the Bolshevik Red Army in the 1919 Soviet invasion of Ukraine, but split over differences on the movement's autonomy. Makhno rebuilt his army from the remains of Nykyfor Hryhoriv's forces in western Ukraine, routed the White Army at the Battle of Perehonivka, and captured most of southern and eastern Ukraine, where they again attempted to establish anarchist communism.

The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine, was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized, and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish them for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.

Various factions fought over Ukrainian territory after the collapse of the Russian Empire following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and after the First World War ended in 1918, resulting in the collapse of Austria-Hungary, which had ruled Ukrainian Galicia. The crumbling of the empires had a great effect on the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and in a short period of four years a number of Ukrainian governments sprang up. This period was characterized by optimism and by nation-building, as well as by chaos and civil war. Matters stabilized somewhat in 1921 with the territory of modern-day Ukraine divided between Soviet Ukraine (which would become a constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922) and Poland, and with small ethnic-Ukrainian regions belonging to Czechoslovakia and to Romania.

The Special Police Forces (Ukrainian: Спеціальні поліцейські сили, romanized: Spetsialni politseiski syly) is a Ukrainian volunteer corps of law enforcement units, part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. They were formed during the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine to strengthen the state’s capacity to maintain public order and security, and were later deployed to Eastern Ukraine as a paramilitary force to fight against Pro-Russian separatists.

The units were primarily composed of volunteers, including former police officers, reservists, and civilians. Similar to the Territorial Defence Battalions, which were under the Ministry of Defence, the Special Police Forces were volunteer formations but fell under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In addition, many of the units also had links with far-right and nationalist groups. In the first months of the War in Donbas, these volunteer forces took brunt of the fighting.

Petro Oleksiiovych Poroshenko (born 26 September 1965) is a Ukrainian politician and oligarch who served as the fifth president of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019. He served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2010, and as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012. From 2007 until 2012, he headed the Council of Ukraine's National Bank. He was elected president in 2014.

During his presidency, Poroshenko led the country through the first phase of the war in Donbas, pushing the Russian separatist forces into the Donbas Region. He began the process of integration with the European Union by signing the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement. Poroshenko's domestic policy promoted the Ukrainian language, nationalism, inclusive capitalism, decommunization, and administrative decentralization. In 2018, Poroshenko helped create the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, separating Ukrainian churches from the Moscow Patriarchate. His presidency was distilled into a three-word slogan, employed by both supporters and opponents: armiia, mova, vira (English: military, language, faith). As a candidate for a second term in 2019, Poroshenko was defeated by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.