The recent ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia and daily headline the event creates can’t be overlooked as background noises even for those who tries to focus on daily learning & sharing schedule. What is going on in Ukraine is horrible from humanitarian ground and the conflict should be settled by negotiations and not by barrel of guns.

Though I have been keeping an eye on those events, as a non-political person, I don’t express my own opinion about except supporting those suffered in the conflict.

Not being a student of history, the root cause of historical conflict between Ukraine and Russia are clear. This historical article The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on Smithsonian magazine provides essential background to understand the current conflict from historical perspective.

The debate over how to remember this wartime history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict.

For example, why the terms like “Ukrainian nationalists”, “Nazis”, “denazification” are used by President Putin describing the current conflict.

Ukrainian nationalists were “bad guys” because “they fought the Soviet state.” Putin and other critics often draw on Ukrainians’ wartime collaboration with the Nazis to baselessly characterize the modern country as a Nazi nation; in a February 24 speech, the Russian president deemed the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine” key goals of the invasion.

– Oxana Shevel, a political scientist at Tufts University (source: Smithsonian magazine)

“[Russian leaders] basically don’t recognize any Ukrainian historical agency except the agency that they imagined for them,”

– Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute (source: Smithsonian magazine)