On loan when Russian forces took control of Crimea in 2014, the collection was assembled from four museums and represented fragments of the ancient empires that used the region as a trade crossroads.
Our interests are best served by the establishment and continuation of healthy, independent and progressive nation states -- both Russia and Ukraine; not two states at daggers drawn.
Kiev feels like a Russian city, architecturally and linguistically. But recent months brought subtle changes. The young consider speaking Ukrainian cool. Some older Ukrainians have adopted the attitude that Russia does not own the culture.
While Snyder is surely right to remind us that most Ukrainian nationalists aren’t fascists, as Putin claims, that doesn’t make them as democratic and freedom-loving as Snyder keeps telling us.
By invoking inflammatory slogans like “Putin is Hitler” and “Ukrainians are fascists”, both Russian and western leaders distort the realities of 21st Century Ukraine.
The most basic Ukrainian problem is not Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs—which no doubt exists—but the absence of a strong national consensus among Ukrainians.
Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks.
