By Alexander J. Motyl, opinion contributor,

From: The Hill — As Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk Province continues apace, Ukrainians may decide to celebrate the liberation of their former capital.

No, not Kyiv — Russians failed to “liberate” that city in 2022. The capital in question is Sudzha, a seemingly insignificant town of about 6,000 inhabitants located a few miles from the Russian Federation’s border with Ukraine.

Sudzha was the short-lived capital of the Soviet Ukrainian government in late 1918. And the neighboring city of Belgorod subsequently had that status for a few weeks, until Vladimir Lenin’s puppet Bolshevik Ukrainian regime finally based itself in Kharkiv, which served as Soviet Ukraine’s capital until 1934.

According to Russia’s 1897 census, 61 percent of Sudzha’s residents identified themselves as Ukrainian. By 2020, that number had shrunk to 1 percent.

The Bolsheviks’ choice of Sudzha as their capital was thus not arbitrary. The town was Ukrainian. More than that, in the second half of the 17th century it had served as the capital of a Ukrainian Cossack military-administrative unit. So, Sudzha as Soviet Ukrainian capital made perfect sense. It was Ukrainian and had been Ukrainian, it had a Cossack tradition and it could easily serve as a Ukrainian springboard for the subsequent Russian invasion — er, liberation — of Ukraine.

Belgorod also made political sense, as a good portion of the region’s population — up to 70 percent in one district — identified themselves as Ukrainian in the 1897 census.

Whatever reasons Ukraine had for launching its own “special military operation” into Kursk Province, it’s likely that President Volodymyr Zelensky and his army commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, were fully aware of Sudzha and Bilhorod’s historical connection with Ukraine. It must have occurred to them that, technically, they could turn the table on Putin and claim they weren’t invading Russia, but “liberating” Ukraine’s age-old territories.

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