The Left-bank Ukraine of 1663, then a Russian protectorate, and a one time Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth entity, comprised of modern-day provinces of Chernihiv and Poltava in the north and central respectively as well as northeastern Sumy, a considerable part of the capital Kiev and agricultural-rich Cherkasy, along Europe's fourth-longest river Dnieper. This geopolitically important area was followed by New Russia (Novorossiya) a tsarist province, which was created under the resolute and ruthless empress of German stock, Catherine the Great in 1764.
An impetus for both war with arch-rivals the Ottomans and invaluable Greek Project, which subsequently established an early solution to the complex Eastern Question, New Russia formerly Wild Fields owing to its sparse population, saw a horde of settlers. Among the immigrants that thereafter witnessed the building of Kiev together with strategic cities such as Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipro and Crimea's largest city and major Black Sea port Sevastopol, were military colonists and regiments. They were joined by Hungarians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Cossacks, as well as Russian peasants. For centuries, the country through the indisputably regional geo-economic and geostrategic peninsula the Crimea, which is almost surrounded by both the fiercely captivating warm Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov, has borne the brunt of ruthless political and military overlordship, together with inherent dynamics that lie within. First annexed by Russia in 1783, as a result of her victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, thereby fulfilling a grand quest for year-round navigable ports that contrast sharply with those of commercially-daunting Northern Sea Route, has seen the geopolitically vulnerable Ukraine on the receiving end of demeaning political concessions, and at times on the verge of capitulation. Hence, the many foreign powers such as the Ottomans, Greeks, Polish and Lithuanians that preceded Russia's imperialism in Ukraine amidst a relentless contest, occupation, partitioning, resettlement and rechristening of the country. An unfortunate and severe chapter in the nation's history while relatively modern, is the man-made famine of 1932-33, under communist leader Joseph Stalin, which claimed the lives of 3,9 million Ukrainians according to some estimates. Despite being recognized by more than a dozen countries including the United States and Vatican as genocide and observed in November, the famine that is known as Holodomor, is virtually questioned by several Moscow allies as well as fervent ideological sympathizers. The Ukrainian war, which began early last year thereby succeeding the country's smaller armed conflicts in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, following Russia's annexation of Crimea in a disputed referendum of 2014, has the full wrath of the Soviet Union's intractable belligerence and imperialism. Undoubtedly an aggressive counter-measure toward the deployment in May 2016, of NATO missile defense system in Romania, an Eastern Bloc member-state during the Soviet era, has seen Russia which projects itself as the dominant economic, military and political power in the region, overlooking even some international norms along the way, solely to defend so-called territorial interests. While Germany is hosting the NATO Ballistic Missile Defence (NATO BMD) command center at Ramstein. And both Turkey and Poland flaunting US BMD radar and Aegis Ashore in Kurecik and Redzikowo respectively in addition to four multi-mission BMD-capable Aegis ships in Rota, Spain, the Kremlin believes it is strategically vulnerable beyond NATO-dominated Medierranean, notably along the Bosporus and ironically, Dardanelles. An important international waterway that is host to both Turkish Asia and Turkish Europe as well as the coveted continental boundary, the Dardanelles in 1829, became embroiled in the Treaty of Adrianople between the Ottoman and Russian empires, that granted among others additional territory to the latter along the Black Sea, and vast commercial rights throughout the very strategic strait. In addition, an exclusive and controversial pact of July 8, 1833, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, bestowed upon Russia's bellicose terms an ambiguous guarantee, that coerced the Ottomans to close the Dardanelles to any foreign warships, particularly those of great powers of Europe. But how did the Russia of the 21st century, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at $1,48 trillion, and modestly behind smaller countries such as France, Italy and the United Kingdom, while in the eyes of a technologically advanced and educated generation declare a callous, controversial and gigantic conflict without considering any global socioeconomic and political implications therein?
The utter revanchism and geopolitical scapegoating of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president and strongman who once described the dissolution of the USSR, as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," predates the deployment of NATO's missile defense systems in member states, as is the case with the "Russification" in 2008, of former Soviet states such as Abkhazia and Ossetia.
Indeed, upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which ushered in Ukrainian independence with Crimea becoming an autonomous republic of Kiev, and Sevastopol retaining a special status therein, the pro-Kremlin Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet in 1997, became the de facto foundation of Moscow's geostrategic resurgence.
The treaty which granted headquarters to Russia's Sea Fleet in Sevastopol beside Ukrainian Naval Forces, saw another agreement the Kharkov Pact of 2010, extending its lease of the naval facilities in exchange for further discount of natural gas with Ukraine.
This very pact had succeeded a January, 2000 (Quarantine Pier) Odessa Commercial Sea Port, that declared the port an economically free zone for a period of 25 years.
Together with other Black Sea ports Yuzhne and Chornomorsk, Odessa constitutes an important transport hub that interconnects the city's oil and chemical processing facilities by strategic pipelines to Russian, and other European networks.
Hence Ukraine, since the Tsarist and Soviet eras given its considerable ethnic Russian population comprising of 17,3 percent, according to the only post-Soviet census of 2001, has been Moscow's soft geopolitical domain, ideological fiefdom and inopportune strategic theater against the West, as experienced during the mid-19th century Crimean War, and now, the economically intertwined and interdependent world.
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