That the tide in the war might be turning in Ukraine’s favor is being hinted at today in reports that Russia is abandoning its goal of conquering its neighbor. The reports come after Prime Minister Johnson observed that Ukraine has already achieved a victory of sorts over President Putin. “Far from extinguishing Ukraine as a nation,” Mr. Johnson said, “he’s solidifying it.”

Well put, in our view, echoing a point the Sun made in January 1918, when Ukraine emerged, if only briefly, into its own light from the shadowy dominion of Russia. The Sun’s editorial, “An Independent Ukraine,” noted that “the Ukrainians in Europe and their countrymen spread over the world began an agitation for national independence” even as Ukraine’s young men were enlisted to fight in the Tsar’s armies in World War I.

The war, though, would prove disastrous for Russia and its Romanov dynasty, which was toppled in February 1917. Those events sparked a resurgence of Ukrainian national sentiment that had been repressed for centuries. Once the Bolsheviks triumphed late in 1917 and sought a humiliating separate peace with Germany, “the Ukrainians refused to accept the interference in their affairs of the Bolshevik Government.” 

That, said the Sun, reflected Ukrainians’s national character:  “They are a sturdy, hard headed people, and the qualities that led them to fight on rather than accept such an ignoble peace were the same that kept them steadfast in their struggle for independence. They never lost sight of that ideal. The result, according to a dispatch from Petrograd, is that the Government yesterday decided to acknowledge their independence.”

At the time, President Wilson was promoting a new ideal of statehood based on national identity. It was a theme in his soon-to-be unveiled “Fourteen Points.” The Sun reckoned that the “fact that there was once a Ukraine and that the Ukrainians constituted a Slavic people as clearly defined as the Czechs, Bulgarians, Poles or Russians, was almost unknown to the world until they began their fight for a separate national existence.”

The very name Ukraine, the Sun noted, had been “lost after the struggles of Mazeppa, whose deeds and fate are preserved by romance, and the fateful battle of Pultowa” — better known as  Poltava — and the country had “remained a vassal state of Russia since the Treaty of Perejaslav in 1654.” The Ukrainians were renamed in the Tsar’s realm as  South Russians or Little Russians. In Austria they were called Russanjaks or Ruthenians.

The Sun sketched the map of the country as encompassing “the southern part of the European plains extending from the Carpathians to the Caucasus, and from the Black Sea and the Danube delta to the forests of the Polisaje at the middle course of the Dnieper. Within this boundary lie the immense fertile plains of southern Russia, ‘the Black Earth’ provinces and a land rich in coal, iron, salt and petroleum.”

The fecundity of Ukraine’s soil was, as the Sun saw it, “one of the important considerations in the establishment of this new state,” as “Ukraine has been the great storehouse of Russia,” and “from its abundance the Ukrainians have furnished supplies to the really Russian provinces to the north.”  As a result “Ukraine has undoubtedly resources within itself sufficient to make her a self-supporting nation.”

In respect of Ukraine’s future, the Sun took an optimistic line: “Should she continue in her same sturdy course she will not only form a strong buffer state between Russia and Austria-Hungary, but a nation with which Teutonism must reckon in the future.” History, it turned out, had other plans. Stalin called Ukraine’s leaders “traitors to socialism” and threatened “bloodshed.”

Ukraine was then unable to escape from Russia’s orbit, falling to the Red Army in 1922. A century later, the Ukrainians have shown themselves less likely to yield, even at terrible cost. The courage of that “sturdy, hard headed people” — despite nearly insurmountable odds — has, as Mr. Johnson notes, already generated a moral victory. We don’t want to declare victory prematurely, but the idea of independent Ukraine looks alive.