Introduction: After the Conflict
After two and a half years of conflict in the Ukraine, we have at last arrived at the end-game. There may even be less than six months to go, as the conflict could even end on about its 1,000th day, in mid-November. What will happen once the end-game is over, whether that is in 2024 or in 2025? Once the war is won, how will the peace be won? What will post-conflict Ukraine look like? What are the differences in intentions between the ‘moderates’ and the ‘hardliners’ in Moscow?
Provinces Returned to the Russian Federation?
At first, in 2014, the profoundly Russian Crimea and Sevastopol (which also counts as a province) returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent after sixty years of Communist-enforced separation. This was extremely popular. Then, because of Kiev’s genocidal aggression there, in February 2022 the two provinces of the Russian Donbass also returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent. Next, because of Kiev’s threats to the Crimea, in late 2022, Russian Zaporozhie and Kherson also returned to Russia, again by overwhelming popular vote in referenda. Both the moderates and the hardliners in Moscow agree about the return of these six Russian provinces with their pre-war population of twelve million, as also about the neutrality of the Ukraine, that it will never become part of NATO.
Unlike the moderates in Moscow, however, the hardliners want Russia to take back the rest of Novorossija, another four provinces, namely, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa, though also by referenda, which are still to be held. Moreover, the fate of the three provinces of Sumy, Chernigov and Poltava, which are also on the west bank of the Dnieper, hangs in the balance as well -the hardliners want them too. If they transfer to Russia, then much of the territory conquered by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, his son, Tsar Peter the Great and Tsarina Catherine the Great some 300 years ago, will be restored to Russia. If these seven provinces returned to Russia, this would reduce the New Ukraine to fourteen provinces out of the original twenty-seven.
A Province Returned to Romania?
As a result of Kiev’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk province, continual drone attacks on and terrorist threats to civilians and installations far inside Russia, most of the remainder of the Ukraine is probably going to end up as a third Union State, independent in local affairs, but otherwise more or less under Russian control, in effect a client state similar to Belarus. However, from this remainder of the Ukraine, the very small province of Chernivtsy (North Bukovina), or most of it, may, if it chooses to do so by referendum, return to Romania, from where it was taken in 1945. This transfer could perhaps take place in exchange for Transdnestria and Gagauzia, which overwhelmingly want to leave Romanian-speaking Moldova and join Russia. However, that will depend on Moldova, not on Romania.
If the rest of Moldova then chooses to rejoin Romania by referendum, perhaps on the Russian condition that all NATO bases are closed in Romania, that will be their choice. However, we think it much more likely that Moldovans will choose to remain independent of EU Romania and so free to receive cheap Russian energy. In that case, in an independent Moldova, the Moldovan Orthodox Church must receive joint autocephaly from the Russian and the Romanian Orthodox Churches, with all so-called ‘defrocked’ clergy (defrocked for purely political and non-canonical reasons) ‘refrocked’, as is always done in the case of political defrockings. Church unity can then be achieved there.
Provinces Returned to Hungary, Slovakia and Poland?
As for Hungary, it should also take back the tiny slice of Hungarian territory on the edge of the Ukrainian border. This would be taken from the strangely-named province of Zakarpattia, which could get back its old name of Podkarpatska Rus (Subcarpathian Rus) and also possibly return to Hungary or else to Slovakia.
Then there comes the situation of the Western provinces of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and possible the next three other far western, formerly Polish provinces of Volyn, Rovno and Ternopol. Should they be separated from the future New Ukraine and return to Poland, as the moderates recommend? True, the CIA and MI6 financed and supplied anti-Russian, Neo-Nazi terrorism in far western Ukraine from 1948 until at least 1958 and many Russian patriots died there.
For this reason, the moderates do not want to touch this territory. However, now that most of the Neo-Nazis have been killed in the conflict or have fled to the West, there would be much less opposition there to remaining in a New Ukraine, which would have a measure of independence. Surely Russia is obliged to secure its borders by controlling this territory, rather than giving it back to Poland? The danger is after all that any unliberated territory, or territory handed over to Poland, will be turned into use as a NATO terrorist base against you. So argue the hardliners, who would thus reduce the New Ukraine to seven provinces.
Conclusion: The New Ukraine
This New Ukraine or Malorossija would be left perhaps with a minimum of seven provinces and a maximum of twenty-one, counting the City of Kiev and the Kiev province separately. It would have a population of between about nine and twenty-five million, providing that all ten million or so who left to work in the West in the last ten years return, which is highly unlikely. Essentially, it will be a landlocked, southern and large Belarus. Although it will be bankrupted, it will never pay the debts of the old regime back to the West, especially to the City of London, and will be rebuilt by Russia and China. Surely, however, its canonical Church would have to receive autocephaly from Moscow and become a centre of national unity and identity, just as in the future Moldova.