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Eastern Europe conflict reaches beyond borders
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A Michigan State University professor says the war in Ukraine is a fresh chapter in a 250-year-old story that Russia is using to justify its invasion. Michigan State University Associate Professor Matthew Pauly said the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has a complicated history, going back to 1774 when Ukraine was initially part of the Russian empire. “Ukrainians have been in a long war,” Pauly said. “This is not the beginning of the war in 2022, this is merely an escalation.”
Pauly, a historian of Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Russia, said Russian President Vladimir Putin believes Ukraine is not separate from Russia and that Ukrainians and Russians are the same people. “Ukrainians of all different ethnicities, of all different linguistic persuasions are taking to arms to defend their homeland, and the choice for them is quite simple, really,” Pauly said.
“Do you have an independent state in which democracy, as imperfect as it is, is allowed to exist and you have the right to freedom of the press, the right to all of these key things that we assume to be integral to our democratic experience?
