Why the UNR did not form an army: autonomists versus independentists (10.05.2024)

A street video interview by Vitalii Dribnytsia. A Russian-speaking interlocutor asks why Ukraine, after the collapse of the empire, failed to form an army of its own. Dribnytsia explains the reason ideologically: the majority of the Central Rada were Ukrainian Social Democrats who saw Ukraine as an autonomy within a democratic federative Russia — and an autonomous state, under the legal thinking of the time, was not supposed to have an army of its own; the independentists (Mikhnovsky, Lypynsky) were a minority, so independence was proclaimed only in the Fourth Universal and already under the pressure of the Bolshevik invasion. The rest of the conversation (Zaporozhian raids, the taxes of the Hetmanate, corruption) is outside the article’s scope. A source for the article on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921.