Ukraine is split along a centuries-old cultural boundary between western and eastern halves

Evidence

Ukraine, however, is a cleft country with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centuries. At times in the past, western Ukraine was part of Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. A large portion of its population have been adherents of the Uniate Church which practices Orthodox rites but acknowledges the authority of the Pope. Historically, western Ukrainians have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 449

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to current events and to the 2014/2022 Ukraine conflicts; also echoes Huntington’s civilizational fault-line thesis from the rest of this book.
• SEED: An essay angle: how democracy itself (the 1994 election) crystalized rather than healed a civilizational fault line — the 52% vote as a knife’s-edge division.
• ADDENDUM: The fault-line-between-cultures theme parallels gift/sacrifice-style structural divisions, though not a direct fit to the three listed articles; perhaps closest as infrastructure-of-identity.