Answers: Ukraine and Russia
Ukraine became an independent state in 1991 after being dominated for centuries by outside powers including Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ukraine’s national poet and cultural icon Taras Shevchenko was imprisoned by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century saw parts of Ukraine change hands multiple times. Ukrainian nationalists found common cause with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in a region that had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. What is known as ‘Holocaust by Bullets’ in Ukraine preceded concentration camps such as Auschwitz. At the same time millions of Ukrainians served in the Red Army and took part in some of the fiercest fighting against the Nazis.
The 1990s saw tensions over how to split the Black Sea Fleet. A 1995 deal allowed Russia to continue operating the naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union but fully dismantled its arsenal under an agreement in 1994 with the U.S., UK and Russia known as the Budapest Memorandum. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.
While Russia was enveloped in political and economic turmoil and a brutal conflict in Chechnya, U.S. President Bill Clinton announced plans in 1996 to expand NATO membership to Eastern Europe’s former Soviet Bloc countries. In 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined the military alliance. Subsequent years saw the entry of ex-Soviet states with the admission of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In 2008 NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia they would eventually be able to join the alliance. Months later Russia fought a short war with Georgia and ousted Georgian forces from the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Ukraine has continued to pursue NATO membership. A 2019 constitutional amendment enshrines its commitment to becoming a member of NATO and the European Union.
The Orange Revolution in 2004 was touted as a watershed moment with the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko defeating the Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych to clinch the presidency. But infighting and corruption scandals undermined Yushchenko’s term. Yanukovych, leaning heavily on the predominantly Russian-speaking east, was elected president in 2010.
Yanukovych’s rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union paved the way for mass protests and the toppling of the elected leader in the 2014 revolution. A backlash in eastern Ukraine supported by Russia followed. Crimea was swiftly annexed by Moscow and separatists took control of parts of the Donestsk and Luhansk Oblasts, setting the stage for what appeared to be another ‘frozen conflict’ in a post-Soviet state. More in my earlier quiz here.
Indications of the Russian President’s intentions for Ukraine emerged in July 2021 in an article published by the Kremlin in Vladimir Putin’s name. He asserted that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’. You can read the article here and a commentary on it here. Among Putin’s concerns was the status of the Russian language in Ukraine as a new language law gave primacy to Ukrainian in public life. Other minorities have also expressed concern in multi-lingual, multi-ethnic Ukraine. Language has emerged as a key part of Ukraine’s identity, as news organisations switch from Kiev to Kyiv, Odessa to Odesa and Kharkov to Kharkiv.
Answers
1) He helped set up a comedy troupe called Kvartal 95. In the television show ‘Servant of the People’, he played a school teacher whose rant against corrupt politicians was secretly filmed. The (fictional) video went viral, propelling him to the presidency. Who?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy. More about the television show here. Zelenskyy named his political party Servant of the People and secured a landslide win over Petro Poroshenko in 2019.
2) This ravine on the northwestern edge of Kyiv was the site of one of the worst massacres of the Second World War in 1941. Name the place.
Babyn Yar. More here and here.
Attitudes towards Jews has changed markedly in a country with a history of persecution through pogroms and the Holocaust. Volodymyr Groysman, who is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust became speaker and then prime minister in 2016. When Zelenskyy was elected president in 2019 Ukraine was briefly the only country outside Israel to have a Jewish head of state and head of government at the same time.
3) This Ukrainian nationalist orchestrated the assassination of Poland’s Interior Minister in 1934. He collaborated with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during the Second World War but was later imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp. He settled in West Germany after the war but was assassinated by KGB agents. Who?
Stepan Bandera. More here and here.
President Vladimir Putin and Russian state media often use the term ‘Banderite’ to accuse the Ukrainian government of being ‘neo-Nazi’. More here. The Second World War saw many nationalists and anti-colonial figures align with the Nazis. While some such as the Bosnian Muslim intellectual Mustafa Busuladzic supported Adolf Hitler, others such as Lithuania’s Jonas Noreika were among the perpetrators of the Holocaust. From outside Europe, figures such as Palestine’s Haj Amin al-Husseini and India’s Subhas Chandra Bose sought help from Nazi Germany.
4) She was born in Kyiv in 1898. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was eight amid anti-Semitic violence. She was briefly a school teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Later she was ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister and Prime Minister. Who?
Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. More here, here and here.
Three Israeli Prime Ministers and two presidents were born in Ukraine. More here
5) What international agreement was reached at the Montreux Convention in Switzerland in 1936?
The Montreux Convention gave Turkey the right to control access to the Dardanelles and the Bosporus straits, effectively allowing it to control access to the Black Sea. More here, here and here.
6) Russia and Ukraine together make up about 30 percent of global exports of this crop. Egypt is the world’s largest importer of this crop. Name the crop.
Wheat. More here and here. The Russian Empire was a major grain exporter. But agricultural collectivism under Stalin limited output and caused the ‘Holodomor’ famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. The Soviet Union had to import wheat and corn from the U.S. in the 1970s. After the end of the Soviet Union, both Russia and Ukraine re-emerged as agricultural powerhouses as state control receded.
Russia and Ukraine are also major producers of corn, barley and sunflower oil, while Russia and its ally Belarus are key fertiliser exporters.
The UN is warning of the increasing risk of hunger and famine. Ukraine was supplying more than half of the UN World Food Programme’s wheat supply for at-risk countries. Food prices hit an all-time high in March.
7) Welsh journalist Gareth Jones is remembered for a clandestine trip to Ukraine. What Jones revealed is now recognised as a genocide by 18 countries. What was exposed by Jones?
Famine in the Soviet Union and especially in Ukraine. It is known in Ukraine as Holodomor (death by hunger in Ukrainian). More on the famine here and here. Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film Mr. Jones explored Gareth Jones and the Holodomor.
8) This city was founded by Welsh industrialist John Hughes and was named Hughesovka/Yuzovka. Under communist rule the city was renamed Stalino. It got its present name in 1961 following Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation measures.
Donetsk, the separatist-held capital of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Oblast. It is also the capital of the pro-Russia separatists’ ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ which was formally recognised by Moscow just before the war began in February.
Luhansk, the capital of the separatist ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ was also founded by a British industrialist.
9) What happened in the early hours of April 26, 1986 about 130 kilometers north of Kyiv, and about 20 km south of the border with Belarus?
Chernobyl nuclear disaster. More here and here.
About 70 per cent of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus. More here and here. Among the acclaimed works of the 2015 Nobel laureate for literature Svetlana Alexievich is her oral history account Voices from Chernobyl.
Russian forces seized the plant site in the early days of the conflict only to withdraw. They appear to have exposed themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation. More here and here.
10) Which iconic 1925 film was set in and off the coast of Ukraine’s port city of Odesa?
Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein. More here.
11) This city in Ukraine was known as Lemberg under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I the city was renamed under Polish control. It then faced Nazi occupation and at the end of the war Soviet control. The city was attached to Soviet Ukraine and got its current name. Which city?
Lviv. The city was Lwow under Polish control. More here. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’ and Hersch Lauterpacht, who devised ‘crimes against humanity’ in international law, both received their law degrees from the same university in Lviv. Both were involved in the Nuremberg Trials and their legacies were part of the 1945 UN charter.
12) Which city in southeastern Ukraine was founded by Greeks who were resettled from Crimea in the 18th century during the rule of Catherine the Great?
Mariupol. Greece’s consul general was the last EU diplomat to leave the besieged city. More here and here.
Filiki Etairia, a secret society founded by Greeks in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa in 1814 played an influential role in the successful overthrow of Ottoman rule over Greece. More here and here.
13) The singer Jamala from Ukraine won the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest with the politically charged ‘1944’ which did not go down well in Russia. What does ‘1944’ refer to?
Statin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and Siberia in 1944. More here and here.
More about Eurovision winner Jamala here and here.
14) What is the strategic significance of a 19-km-long bridge inaugurated by Russian President Vladimir Putin in May 2018 by driving a truck?
The bridge over the Kerch Strait connected Russian-annexed Crimea and the Russian mainland. More here, here and here.
15) Which company moved to Kyiv in 1952 and produced dozens of iconic Soviet planes for civilian and military transport as well as cargo?
Antonov. Mriya, the biggest plane in the world was destroyed as Russian forces attempted to seize Kyiv’s suburbs. Militaries in countries such as India extensively use Antonov planes for transport.
16) This cooperative society under Belgian law started operations in 1977. It is headquartered in La Hulpe near Brussels. What are we talking about?
Swift or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Some Russian banks have been barred from using its secure messaging facilities for their transactions. More here and here.
17) This Russia-backed breakaway region effectively shares a 400-km-long border with Ukraine’s southwest. It hosts an estimated 1,500 Russian troops. Name the region and the country it is internationally recognised as part of
Transnistria and Moldova. More here, here, here, here.
18) This country held out against invading Soviet forces for months in the 1939-40 ‘Winter War’ inflicting heavy casualties. It had to sign an armistice eventually, losing 11 percent of its territory. In 1948 it signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, promising neutrality in the Cold War. From the country’s name, which term used in diplomatic and academic circles was coined?
Finlandisation. More about the Winter War here and here.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, public attitudes in Finland and Sweden are shifting towards joining NATO. The NATO-Russia border will double if Finland joins.
April 2023 update:
19) What was opened by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in November 2011, with major geopolitical implications?
Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, which allowed Russian gas to flow directly to Germany bypassing Ukraine and Poland. Until then 80 per cent of Russian gas to Europe moved via pipelines across Ukrainian soil. More here.
Plans to launch the completed pipeline Nord Stream 2 are now suspended. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder is being increasingly condemned for his close ties to Russia. A generation of leaders including Angela Merkel are facing criticism for their ‘change through trade’ policy.
20) X was a non-executive director from 2014 to 2019 at Burisma, one of Ukraine’s leading natural gas companies. Burisma’s owner was a former Ukrainian minister who faced criminal investigations in Ukraine. Who is X?
Hunter Biden. More here, here and here.
21) What was recognised as an independent entity in January 2019 by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, angering the Kremlin?
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church became separate from the Russian Orthodox Church. But a significant chunk stayed under the Russian church and are known as Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Members of this group though have come out strongly against Russian Patriarch Kirill’s pro-Putin stance and endorsement of the war
Update: On May 27 leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate announced they were cutting ties with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
22) He made his fortune as Ukraine’s ‘chocolate king’. He set up a confectionary company that grew to be Ukraine’s largest. He returned to Ukraine this January to face treason charges. Who?
Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president from 2014 to 2019. Volodymyr Zelenskyy and most of the country’s business tycoons including Poroshenko appear to have set aside their differences to rally behind the war effort.
23) This economist was appointed head of Ukraine’s central bank in 1993 and oversaw the successful currency transition from the rouble to the hryvnia. His political career was less successful. Who?
Viktor Yushchenko. He was president from 2005 to 2010 following the Orange Revolution.
24) He was president of his country from 2004 until 2013. He took up Ukrainian citizenship in 2015 as President Petro Poroshenko appointed him governor of the Odesa Oblast. In just over a year he resigned accusing the Poroshenko government of enabling corruption. He was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and became stateless. In 2021 he returned to his home country and was jailed on charges of abuse of power. Who and which country?