This will be a brief (shut up, it is) Primer on the country of Ukraine because it's been in the news lately and a lot my American readers have a loose understanding of the country's current state.
Friends Like Russia
Let's start with useless trivia because, why not, right? You might see Ukraine sometimes referred to as "The Ukraine". This is because "Ukraine" literally means "Frontier", so it's "The Frontier". Specifically it's the frontier for Russia as both are Slavic regions and historically linked. The Ukraine flag is easy to understand because it's just a blue sky over a field of golden grain because Ukraine has traditionally been the bread basket of Russia. That being said, Russia's relations with countries that it needs could be likened to that of an abusive partner.
Ukrainians have always had a bit of independent streak, but this didn't really create an issue until the 1930's when Stalin decided that shit had to go. This started the Holodomor as it's called regionally or an engineered famine as we'd call it. Due to the amount of control over the media in the USSR and the iron curtain, the west didn't really hear about this at all until the 90's after the collapse of the USSR. What basically happened was that, despite Ukraine producing enough food to feed all of the USSR, there was a massive famine in the region. To give you an idea of the scale, most estimates put the casualties for the Holodomor at around 7 million with the low numbers being a "mere" 3.3 million. Indeed, there are reports of it being so bad people turned to cannibalism and ate their families. By all definitions, it was a genocide, and a large one even by modern standards. If you'd like to know more, the search term Holodomor should get you to the right Wikipedia article and it appears correct from a cursory reading. Russia does not admit this happened which remains a bit of a sticking point between the two countries.
Next up was a small event called Chernobyl where a nuclear plant had a meltdown. Despite being physically in Ukraine near Pripyat, the Ukrainians themselves didn't actually learn about Chernobyl until people were already starting to get sick. This created a lot of mistrust between the Ukrainians and the Soviet Union in general and Russia specifically. To this day, northern Ukraine has issues with high cancer rates and is kind of stuck holding the bill from Chernobyl after the collapse of the USSR.
Despite this, parts of Ukraine are still very Russo-centric, specifically the east near the Russian border and the Crimea that has a large native Tartar population. These regions were less affected or unaffected by both the Holodomor and Chernobyl and are geographically linked to Russia. Well, the Crimea isn't specifically, but it's also the home of Sevastopol which is where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based. Combined with the general lack of accurate information in the USSR and a lot of anti-west propaganda, they've maintained strictly pro-Russian sensibilities.
Ukraine has been making moves to integrate closer to the west with attempts at EU membership and an eye towards NATO. NATO membership would be very problematic for Russia as it literally puts NATO right across the border with no buffer (although not as problematic as the Republic of Georgia joining NATO, bonus points if you can guess why). On top of that, because Russian troops are currently within the territorial borders of Ukraine, if they joined now they would likely invoke Article 5 which would put NATO at war with the Russian Federation (Article 5 has only been invoked once in the history of NATO, guess when). EU membership is more realistic although still a stretch in their current situation. And really, that's probably the point. We've seen this before in Georgia where Russia basically occupies part of the country on some pretense to make very clear to NATO what that country joining would mean. Russia is a rational state actor, and this needs to be remembered when talking about and analyzing their actions.
We also have to briefly talk about infrastructure. In the USSR, everything followed a "all roads lead to Rome" philosophy with most of the key infrastructure in Russia, such as power, oil and natural gas. Natural gas presents the biggest problem because it's very hard to transport long distances without a pipeline. The last time I checked, the number of registered liquid natural gas tankers in the world was single digits due to complexity, cost and the very high volatility. Liquid natural gas transit by truck is actually illegal in a lot of places due to high volatility. This puts a lot of power in the hands of Gazprom, the natural gas company based in the Russian Federation. Despite being publicly traded, the majority shareholder in Gazprom is the Russian state. Russian economic warfare is an entirely different article, but suffice to say that Gazprom has the most disputes in pricing with countries that are not friendly with Russia and mostly does it in the dead of winter when turning off the gas means people freezing to death...and sometimes "accidentally" turns it off anyways. Note on the map below, the pipeline doesn't end in Germany, it just transfers to a different company meaning way more of Europe than most people think is being influenced by Russia's economic war.
Exiles, Revolutions and Actors
So, for the politics, we're just going to look at 3 of the most relevant actors in relation to the current situation (and yes, I can spell all of these names from memory)
Viktor Yanukovych
Yanukovych was a pro-Russian politician and is currently in exile in Russia. You're probably asking "why do I care?", but he's actually the source of the current problems...well, his predecessor started it, but meh. In the early 2000's Yanukovych ran for president against Yuschenko. There was an election, Yanukovych won, end of story...oh wait, no, there were a lot of problems with that election and the opposition movement (known as the orange revolution), headed by Yulia Tymoshenko who we'll talk about later, lobbied the constitutional court to overturn the results and the election was nullified with a run off election following shortly thereafter. Spoiler, the guy who cheated (likely with the help of the Kremlin) did not win the runoff putting Yuschenko in charge. Yanukovych did get way more of the vote than you'd think with around 40% (I think, but I don't' care enough to check specifically and it doesn't matter that much). He was against the run off on the basis that he had no chance in a run off that was only being held because he cheated...which is technically correct I guess, but you could always not cheat. There were a lot of conspiracy theories about this centering around NATO or western influence. Incidentally, Yanukovych and Yuschenko had a meeting (not unusual since they were in charge of the two largest political parties) and after breaking bread together, Yuschenko came down with an illness that looked a lot like Ricin poisoning, a favored assassination method of the KGB because of how hard it is to trace.
Later, after much messing around that was vaguely interesting but has no impact on the current situation, Yanukovych ran for president again and won. In a move that will come as a surprise to nobody, he was a Russian puppet and got ousted by a coalition led by Yulia Tymoshenko's supporters (again, we'll talk about her in a minute). He fled into exile and currently resides in Russia, but the real impact of this event was a significant rise in anti-Russian sentiment. This prompted Russia to move to protect their interests in the Crimea under the pretense of a local revolution. So, kind of directly responsible for the current situation.
Yulia Tymoshenko
Yulia Tymoshenko has been referred to as the Hillary Clinton of Ukraine, but realistically, Hillary wishes she was the Yulia of the United States. If you wanted to know everything about the last two decades or so of Ukrainian politics, just check out the Political Career part of her Wiki page and click links as desired...see, the people that didn't check out her Wiki page are thinking "that's hyperbole", but the one or two that did are thinking "holy shit, he wasn't kidding". We'll go with the short version.
Yulia has been Prime Minister of Ukraine about three times, has also ran for president three times (and came pretty close for two of them). She's started her own political party called the Yulia Tymoshenko Party (no, I'm not kidding, but I recall they changed names at one point). she's been accused, indicted and convicted of multiple corruption-related crimes (bribery, embezzlement, etc) and her defense would likely be that these charges were politically motivated. Considering that, like most former Soviet republics, Ukraine had a lot of problems with corruption especially in the late 90's->early 2000's, the people who usually get charged with corruption are not the people who are most corrupt, but those with the most high level enemies. This is also why she spent some time in jail when Yanukovych was president (apparently he was still a little upset over that whole starting a revolution thing...then again, she wasn't the one who ended up in exile). Her husband also went into hiding a few times...as you do. There was also a suspicious car accident that may or may not have been KGB related, but the deniability really kind of is the point. She's been directly or indirectly involved a number of revolutions, ousting some people from office and ruining some political careers. She famously speaks way more Ukrainian than Russian in public speeches.
Yulia Tymoshenko's interests and the interests of Ukraine have overlapped a lot, so it's hard to make a true judgement call on how much is fighting for Ukraine vs. Self Interest, but she's been undeniably effective as the Prime Minister in the past which points towards the former and her bio really does read like a complete history of Ukrainian politics as she's directly involved in almost everything. That being said, her wiki article was definitely written by supporters, so bear that in mind. Depending on how the current situation is resolved in Ukraine, she could be making an appearance on the political stage soon. Much like Omega in Mass Effect, Ukrainian politics appear to also have one very important rule...
Volodymyr Zelensky
I legitimately thought I was out of touch with Ukrainian politics because I had never heard of this guy associated with any party. Turns out, that was actually accurate because he's not a politician, he's an actor. He played the President of Ukraine in a TV series and his supporters (read "fans") started their own party. That probably tells you everything you need to know about him, honestly. I expect his political career to be as entertaining as it is short and possibly ending with his resignation on Tymoshekno's wall with the rest of her victims.
Current Military Status
The Ukrainians inherited both a large military and a lot of industry from the USSR (about 30% of total Soviet production) although the Army was significantly larger than the relatively small Air Force and Navy. There's a fairly large industry in Ukraine for refurbishing and upgrading old Soviet equipment to more modern standards, including aircraft and they've even started producing some domestic designs. In addition, when Ukrainian forces have deployed for joint operations, such as OIF, Kosovo, etc, they've also gotten free training from US advisors. We had a small contingent of Ukrainians with us in Kosovo and I jokingly asked one how much for an AK-47, to which he responded $200 US. If I could've thought of a way to get it back to Germany, much less stateside, I probably would've taken him up on it.
So, they have a good industry, a lot of equipment and have even gotten some training and experience from peacekeeping operations, so they have a good Army right? Not so much. Funding in the 90's and early 2000's for the military was very lacking. Ukraine actually sold off a lot of it's equipment, although it did keep it's slightly more advanced stuff (favoring T-64's, T-80's and T-90's over less advanced T-72's). More useless trivia, T-64's were never exported by the Soviet Union and to date, a small sale of T-64's by Ukraine remains the only export sale of that vehicle. There also just wasn't enough funding to maintain proper readiness of personnel and equipment. On top of that, the military had some issues (and likely still does) with administrative corruption i.e. commanders siphoning money that's supposed to be used for training or maintenance. Although operationally, the corruption hasn't resulted in issues, in a time where funds are tight even light siphoning can have a big impact.
To try and put the current conflicts in Ukraine in some sort of perspective, it's been going on since 2014 and has about the same casualties in terms of Ukrainian soldiers killed as Coalition soldiers killed in all of Iraq, a war that officially lasted almost twice as long. Out of the original 500 or so T-64's Ukraine had at the start of the conflict, it's lost about a third of them (over 160 tanks). That's not tanks in active service, that's every tank in Ukraine including war reserves. Here's a battle map from one of the engagements:
If you want to know everything happening here, a Wikipedia article on NATO symbology will help, but for a cursory glance, I'm guessing between 15,000 and 20,000 troops are involved in this battle on both sides (assuming standard Soviet organizational structure and no units significantly above or below doctrinal fighting strength...obviously) along with armored, mechanized, motorized, recon and artillery. It's practically a World War 2 battle.
The conflict is also still ongoing. Ceasefires have been infrequent and short (the longest one was six weeks at this point). Ukrainian defense spending as a product of GDP has steadily risen since the fighting kicked off, but it's unlikely we'll see serious movement any time soon. Very optimistic guesses put it about 2 years out, but I'm more of the mind that we're probably looking at 4-5 (assuming military budget as a function of GDP continues to increase at standard rate) before the Ukrainian Army is a serious threat to the current separatist/Russian Federation positions.
Conclusion
This is the part where I tell you (probably an American) why you should care. This is pretty easy actually. If you haven't read my article on the MOWAG Piranha I'll save you some reading time, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (2nd ACR) requested a specific Stryker Variant, (named the Dragoon after the unit) armed with a 30mm cannon for taking on Soviet BMPs, but where could the 2nd ACR be stationed where they would expect to fight BMPs?...seriously, you're not going to check? Fine, it's Vilseck, Germany....lazy bastards. They are a short drive through Poland away from Ukraine...and I know because they've done it in training exercises with the Ukrainians multiple times (in fact that earlier picture in this very article was one such exercise). 2nd ACR, alongside Polish units, are training and equipping for this situation to escalate and, if it does, that could result in a serious conflict.
It's also pretty noteworthy that if the President of Ukraine is requesting Javelin anti-tank missiles, it's not hypothetical requirement or threat that is prompting the request, but rather the Russian Federation tanks occupying his country. In that respect, it could be said that such a request would have a bit of urgency to it.
Ukraine occupies a unique and unenviable position, directly on the border of a superpower that it really wants to distance itself from, but unable to ever truly separate itself from Russia and with a strong internal split in the population on whether or not such a move would even be desirable.
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