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61 " Vilnius University, which rivaled the University of Oxford in enrollment for some time, was closed in 1832. The government had no more patience with a school it considered a hotbed of Polish nationalism. Other Polish-run educational institutions in the region also shut their doors, among them a lyceum in the town of Kremianets in Volhynia. The government transferred the lyceum’s rich library, collection of sculptures, and trees and shrubs from the botanical garden to Kyiv, where it created a new imperial center of learning to replace Vilnius University in 1834. The Polish language was banned there; Russian was the only language of instruction. The new university was named after Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great—the first Orthodox autocrat and a Russian to boot, as far as official historiography was concerned. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
62 " Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The "
63 " Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order—a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west—Russia and the European Union—and thus the future of Europe as a whole. "
64 " The Orthodox intellectuals of the commonwealth, long without a king of their own, embraced the opportunity to enter an idealized Orthodox world inspired by the Byzantine vision of symphony between an autocratic ruler and the one true church. "
65 " Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium. "
66 " Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials. "
67 " The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas—Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves. Those folk heroes were known as Cossacks. They fought the Tatars, undertook seagoing expeditions against the Ottomans, and, indeed, freed slaves from time to time. "
68 " Ukraine’s political engagement with the West began in earnest in January 1994 with the signing of a deal brokered by the United States, according to which Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR—potentially the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In the Budapest Memorandum signed in December of that year, the United States, Russia, and Great Britain provided security assurances to Ukraine, which joined the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a nonnuclear state. While many in Kyiv questioned the prudence of giving up nuclear weapons (the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of the Budapest Memorandum guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, would strengthen their case in 2014), there were significant benefits to be gained at the time. Ukraine ended its de facto international isolation as a country previously refusing to join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and became the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt. "
