Historian: Western countries didn't want to do more to help Ukraine break free of Russian influence

Ahead of the 35th anniversary of Ukraine's Independence Day, Ukrainska Pravda published an interview with historian Vladlen Maraiev, co-author of the YouTube channel "History Without Myths," about the long road to Ukrainian statehood and the opportunities that were used or missed along the way.

Maraiev notes that Ukraine had several chances to build its own state during the 20th century — during the revolution of 1917-1921, and again in Carpathian Ukraine in 1938-1939 and in 1941, when a Ukrainian state was proclaimed by Stepan Bandera's organization. These attempts failed because two totalitarian regimes saw no place for an independent Ukraine on the map of Europe, and unlike Poland, Ukraine lacked strong foreign backers.

He rejects the Russian narrative that Ukraine's independence was accidental. According to the historian, the collapse of the USSR had deep, systemic causes — technological lag behind the West since the early 1970s, a demographic crisis stemming from Stalinist repressions and World War II, and the system's inability to modernize while preserving its political structure.

Maraiev recalls US President George H. W. Bush's speech in Kyiv on August 1, 1991, in which he urged Ukraine to remain within the USSR, as the world feared chaos and nuclear proliferation if the union broke apart. He argues the West could have done more to help pull Ukraine out of Russia's orbit, but chose not to: until late 1991 it wanted a disarmed, semi-democratic USSR to survive, and it largely viewed Ukraine as part of Russia's sphere of influence.

Discussing the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Maraiev says keeping the strategic nuclear arsenal was never realistic, since it was controlled from Moscow, but Ukrainian diplomacy might have pushed harder for clearer security guarantees in exchange for disarmament. Some lawmakers warned of the risk at the time, but most of the political elite could not imagine a future war with Russia.