Russia and Ukraine: Where Past Is Prologue

In his play “The Tempest”, Shakespeare wrote: "What's past is prologue."

Question: does the following recount a 2014 event?

“Having just returned from Crimea, he told (the Russian leader) that many Crimeans would ‘happily’ submit to Russian rule. Encouraged by this news, (the Russian leader) issued a formal proclamation of annexation… ‘Our only wish has been to bring peace to Crimea…and we were finally forced ... to annex the area.'” (1)

Why, this is a report about Vladimir Putin’s 2014 takeover of Crimea, isn’t it?

It’s not. It’s actually from a 1782 account of the annexation of Crimea by Russian Empress Catherine the Great. (1)

All right – how about this event?

“At the height of the...Ukrainian famine...starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. ... (A) young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients. ‘You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went.’” (2)

Now. Do you think that this is a recent story about the war in Ukraine?

The answer is no.

“The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for ‘starvation’ and ‘to inflict death’—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population (during the early 1930s). And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when (Josef Stalin) wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.” (2)

Prologue indeed.

Sources:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Empire

(2) https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin