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Contextualizing putin's "on the historical unity of russians and ukrainians".

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent essay, "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians," which was published on the Kremlin's website in Russian , English and Ukrainian , elaborates on his frequently stated assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people." In what Anne Applebaum called “ essentially a call to arms ," Putin posits that Ukraine can only be sovereign in partnership with Russia, doesn't need the Donbas and nullified its claims on Crimea with its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, and has been weakened by the West's efforts to undermine the unity of the Slavs.

Responses to the 5000-word article have ranged from deep concern to near dismissal , with some likening its statements to a justification for war and others pointing to its lack of novelty and suggesting that the primary audience is President Volodymyr Zelensky as he met with leaders in the West. (Zelensky, for his part, offered the tongue-in-cheek response that Putin must have a lot of extra time on his hands.) The discussions inspired by the essay have explored questions such as: Why is Russia so obsessed with Ukraine ? Where do the facts diverge from myth? What is Putin's motivation for writing this document? 

In August 2017, we published an interview with Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) about his book  Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation , which addresses many of the themes emerging in discussions in the wake of Putin's statements. We are reposting the interview below for those who are interested in learning more about Russian nationalism and the intersection of history and myth, past and present.

In the coming weeks, we will also publish excerpts from Plokhii's forthcoming book The Frontline  in open access on our HURI Books website. 

August 2017 Interview

Covering the late 15th century through the present, this book focuses specifically on the Russian nationalism, exploring how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin instrumentalized identity to achieve their imperial and great-power aims. Along the way, Plokhy reveals the central role Ukraine plays in Russia’s identity, both as an “other” to distinguish Russia, and as part of a pan-Slavic conceptualization used to legitimize territorial expansion and political control. 

HURI:  Did you come across anything in your research that surprised you?

Plokhy:  A monument to St Volodymyr/ St Vladimir was recently constructed in the most coveted, the most prestigious, the most visible place in the Russian capital, right across from the Kremlin. To me, this was striking enough that I made it the opening of my book.

St. Volodymyr, the Prince who ruled in Kyiv, is more prominent in the Russian capital in terms of the size and location of the statue than the alleged founder of Moscow, Yuriy Dologorukii. Some pundits say that St. Volodymyr is a namesake of Vladimir Putin, so this is really a celebration of Putin, but excepting all of that, there has to be a very particular understanding of Kyivan history to allow one to place in the very center of Moscow a statue of a ruler who ruled in a city that is the now the capital of a neighboring country. 

That means the things I've discussed in the book are not just of academic interest for historians; the history of the idea of what historian Alexei Miller called the “big Russian nation,” is important for understanding Russian behavior today, both at home and abroad. 

HURI:  Do you have any sense of the attitude of Russian people toward the monument?

Plokhy:  Muscovites protested against the plan to place the monument at Voroviev Hills, overseeing the city, but I do not think anyone said that it honored the wrong person or anything like that.

HURI:  In a book that covers 500 years of history, some interesting common threads must appear. What are some of these constants?

Plokhy:  One common thread is the centrality of Ukraine in defining what Russia is and is not. The historical mythology of Kyivan Rus' is contested by Russians and Ukrainians. But no matter how strong or weak the argument on the Ukrainian side of the debate, Russians today have a difficult time imagining Kyiv being not part of Russia or Russia-dominated space and Kyivan Rus' not being an integral part of Russian history.

Ukraine and Ukrainians are important for Russian identity at later stages, as well. For example, the first published textbook of “Russian history” was written and published in Kyiv in the 1670s. This Kyivan book became the basic text of Russian history for more than 150 years.

In the 20th century and today, we see the continuing importance of Ukraine in the ways the concept of the Russian world is formulated, the idea of Holy Rus', church history and church narrative, and so on.

That is one of the reasons why post-Soviet Russia is not only engaged in the economic warfare, or ideological warfare with Kyiv, but is fighting a real physical war in Ukraine. On the one hand, it's counter-intuitive, given that Putin says Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, but, given the importance of Ukrainian history for Russia, it's a big issue for which they are prepared to fight.

HURI:  Can you talk about a few important actions or moments when Ukraine saw itself as a distinct group from the projected pan-Russian nation, and maybe when it saw itself as part of it?

The development of a separate Ukrainian identity, literature, and language was met in the 19th century with attempts to arrest that development. HURI recently published an important collection of articles,  Battle for Ukrainian , which (among other things) shows how important language is for the national formation and identity. The Russian Empire also treated language as a matter of security. That's why in 1863 it was the Minister of Interior who issued the decree limiting use of the Ukrainian language, not the Minister of Education, not the President of the Academy of Sciences, but the Minister of Interior. It was a matter of security.

The battles start then and focus on history and language, but for a long time the goal of Ukrainian activists was autonomy, not independence per se. The idea of Ukrainian independence in earnest was put on the political agenda in the 20th century and since then it's refused to leave. In the 20th century, we had five attempts to declare an independent Ukrainian state. The fifth succeeded in 1991, and then the question was, “Okay, you have a state, but what kind of nation does or will Ukraine have? Is it ethnic? Is it political? What separates Russia from Ukraine?” These are the questions that found themselves in the center of public debate. There’s probably no other country where the president would publish a book like  Ukraine Is Not Russia  (President Kuchma). You can't imagine President Macron writing France Is Not Germany or anything like that.

HURI:  Anne Applebaum said  during a lecture  at the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, “If Stalin feared that Ukrainian nationalism could bring down the Soviet regime, Putin fears that Ukraine’s example could bring down his own regime, a modern autocratic kleptocracy.” Putin emphasizes the “sameness” of the nations, which would seem to increase the power of Ukraine’s example to undermine his regime. Do you think the the drive to call Ukrainians the same as Russians is informed not only by foreign policy, but also by domestic considerations? 

Plokhy:  I think so. Historically the two groups have a lot in common, especially since eastern and central Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire for a long period of time, starting in the mid-17th century. Therefore, common history is certainly there, and the structure of society, the level of education, the level of urbanization, and other things are similar.

Because of these connections, if Ukraine could do certain things, it would be much more difficult to say it can’t be done in Russia, that Russia has a special destiny, that democracy would never work in Russia, and so on and so forth. That would be not just a geopolitical setback for Russia, but would undermine the legitimizing myth Russia needs in order to have an authoritarian regime. 

HURI:  Are there any important differences between the behavior of Putin and previous leaders?

The policies introduced in the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea offer very little space for Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture. That's a big difference in thinking from what we had in most of the 20th century, when there were all sorts of atrocities but at least on the theoretical level the Ukrainian nation’s right to exist was never questioned. Now it is. The recent attempt to declare “Little Russia” in Donbas and under this banner to take over the rest of Ukraine, promoted by Mr. Surkov, has failed, but it shows that the Russian elites prefer to think about Ukraine in pre-revolutionary terms, pretending as though the revolution that helped to create an independent Ukrainian state and the Soviet period with its nation-building initiatives had never taken place.

HURI:  How about the mentality of Russian citizens toward Ukrainians?

Plokhy:  When the conflict started, Putin was voicing the opinion of the majority of Russians that there is no real difference between Russians and Ukrainians, but the war is changing that. We see a much bigger spike of hostility toward Ukraine on the side of Russian population as compared to the spike of anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine, which also reveals a lot about the two societies and how state propaganda works.

HURI:  Speaking of Russian nation-building and nationalism, what about the non-Slavic peoples, particularly those living to the east of the Urals? Has their inclusion and sense of belonging in the Russian state (or empire) changed over time?

Plokhy:  I leave this subject largely outside the frame of this book, which focuses mainly on relations between Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians, and how the sense of Russian identity evolved over time. But non-Slavs are extremely important part of Russian imperial history as a whole.

Russia today, compared to imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, has lost a lot of its non-Russian territories, including Ukraine and Belarus, but still a good number of non-Slavs live in the Russian Federation. On the one hand, the government understands that and tries not to rock the boat, but exclusive Russian ethnic nationalism is generally on the rise in Russia. The Russians who came to Crimea, the people who came to Donbas, like Igor Girkin (Strelkov), they came to Ukraine with a pan-Russian ideology. It's not just anti-Western, it puts primacy on the ethnically, linguistically, culturally understood Russian people, which certainly threatens relations with non-Russians within the Russian Federation.

What we see is the ethnicization of Russian identity in today's Russia. It has a lot of ugly manifestations, but overall it's a common process for many imperial nations to separate themselves from their subjects and possessions. Russians redefine what Russians are by putting emphasis on ethnicity. We witnessed such processes in Germany, and in France, and in both countries there were a lot of unpleasant things, to put it mildly.

Plokhy:  For a long time, Russian ethnic nationalism, particularly in the Soviet Union, was basically under attack. Russian as lingua franca was of course supported and promoted, the dominance of Russian cadres in general was supported, but the emphasis on ethnicity, on Russian ethnicity in particular, was not welcome because that could mobilize non-Russian nationalism as a reaction, and that was a threat to the multi-ethnic character of the state.

Today, Russia is much less multi-ethnic than it was during Soviet times, and the regime is much more prepared to use ethnic Russian nationalism for self-legitimization or mobilization for war, like the war in Ukraine. All of that contributes to the rise of ethnic nationalism. The government relies more on its support and it provides less of a threat to the state, given that the state is less multi-ethnic.

HURI:  With the belief that Russia's borders should come in line with the ethnic Russian population, doesn't that create a danger with Chechnya and other autonomous republics in the Caucasus having a reason to leave?

Plokhy:  It does. One group of ethnicity-focused and culture-focused Russian nationalists are saying that Russia should actually separate from the Caucasus. If you bring ethnonationalist thinking to its logical conclusion, that's what you get, and that's what some people in Russia argue. They're not an influential group, but they argue that.

HURI:  And what about, say, eastern Russia?

Plokhy:  Yes, in terms of geography, it is easier to imagine Chechnya and Dagestan leaving than Tatarstan. That is why extreme Russian nationalism is an export product for the Russian government, rather than the remedy the doctor himself is using at home. It is used to either annex or destabilize other countries, but within the country itself there is an emphasis on the multi-ethnicity of the Russian political nation. Putin has to keep the peace between the Orthodox and Muslim parts of the population.

The goal is to keep the post-Soviet space within the Russian sphere of influence. In the case of Georgia and Ukraine, the goal is also to preclude a drift over to the West; in the Baltic States, to question the underlying principle of NATO, that countries like the US or Germany would be prepared to risk a war over a small country like Estonia. Large NATO countries don't have the answer to that dilemma yet, and Putin is trying to create a situation where the answer will be “no.” So it's great power politics, it's sphere-of-influence politics.

Putin and the people around him are not ideologically driven doctrinaires. They use ideology to the degree that it can support great power ambitions and their vision of Russia’s role in the world. They jumped on the bandwagon of rising Russian nationalism, seeing in it an important tool to strengthen the regime both at home and abroad.

Ukraine became a polygon where the strength of Russian nationalism as a foreign policy was tested for the first time. The Baltic states have a big Russian-speaking minority where the "New Russia" card can be played if the circumstances are right.

HURI:  Was there a point after the fall of the Soviet Union when Russia turned back to an imperial model of Russian identity? Or was it never going to become a modern nation state?

Plokhy:  The shift started in the second half of the 1990s, but it really began to solidify when Putin came to power in 2000.

The 1990s for Russia were a very difficult period as a whole. Expectations were extremely high, but there was a major economic downturn, the loss of the status of a super power. This discredited the liberal project as a whole, in terms of foreign policy, in the organization of a political system, in the idea of democracy itself. The only thing from the West that Russia adopted to a different degree of success was a market economy. The market per se and private property, despite the high level of state influence, is still there, but the democracy did not survive. The Yeltsin-era attempt to shift from “Russkii” to more inclusive “Rossiyanin” as the political definition of Russianness also found itself under attack. The rise of ethnic Russian nationalism undermines the liberal model of the political Russian nation.

Society’s disappointment in the 1990s led to a search for alternatives, which were found in the idea of strengthening the power of the state and led to the rise of authoritarian tendencies. At the same time came Russia’s attempt to reclaim its great power status, despite an extreme gap between its geopolitical ambitions and economic potential. Today, Russia isn't even part of the ten largest world economies, so its GDP is smaller than Italy’s and Canada’s and is on par with South Korea’s. Think about Italy or Canada conducting that kind of aggressive foreign policy. You see the discrepancy right away.

This aggressive policy is a terrible thing for Ukraine and other countries, but it's also not good at all for Russia’s society, for the Russian economy, for the future of Russia as a state.

HURI:  What do you think of the term "managed democracy"? Do you think that's an accurate term?

Plokhy:  That's certainly the term that you can use to destroy democracy and get away with it.

Post-imperial countries - and that applies to the new nations in the post-Soviet space - face special difficulties in that regard. The majority of countries that were subjects of empires probably go through a period of authoritarian rule, and that's because they have to organize themselves, they have to build institutions. Think about Poland or Romania during the interwar period. You see the same situation in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia fell in that category as well. It was running an empire and had a long tradition of institutions, but none of those institutions were democratic.

Ukraine is an outlier in that sense. It's maintained its democratic institutions. It's paying a price for that, but the society is quite committed to keep going as a democratic country. There were two attempts -- one under President Kuchma, which resulted in one Maidan, and one under President Yanukovych, which resulted in another Maidan -- attempts to strengthen the presidential branch and join the post-Soviet authoritarian sphere. Both attempts were rejected by the Ukrainian society.

Foreign factors paid their role as well. But one should not overestimate those. On a certain level, the US was trying to help strengthen the democratic society and Russia was trying to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies in Yanukovych's regime, but in the end, it wasn’t up to outside players. The Ukrainian society made the decision, and in the last 25 years both attempts at authoritarianism failed.

They're issued by different publishers that view their readership differently. The title is the part of the book where the publisher has as much influence as the author, or maybe even more, and marketing people are also involved. The titles reflect the different ways publishers understand what is most important and can be conveyed in the most direct way to the readership.

HURI:  And I would guess it’s the same with the different cover art? What’s the significance of the images?

The same thing with the images. With the American one, there was a number of possibilities, and the publisher listened to my preference. The European one just produced something, and I accepted it.

So it's directly related to the story told in the book, but I also liked it as an image because it's extremely detailed, with a lot of things happening at the same time. It is easy to get lost in these details of battle. It fits the main title of the book,  Lost Kingdom , pretty well. The idea is that with all these wars and interventions, Russia lost its way to modern nationhood.

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On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians

Source: original from Kremlin Archived

ON THE HISTORICAL UNITY OF RUSSIANS AND UKRAINIANS

By Vladimir Putin

During the recent Direct Line, when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole. These words were not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context. It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe. I therefore feel it necessary to explain my position in detail and share my assessments of today’s situation.

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule. There is nothing new here. Hence the attempts to play on the “national question” and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another.

To have a better understanding of the present and look into the future, we need to turn to history. Certainly, it is impossible to cover in this article all the developments that have taken place over more than a thousand years. But I will focus on the key, pivotal moments that are important for us to remember, both in Russia and Ukraine.

Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today.

The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in Ancient Rus. This had been the custom since the late 9th century. The Tale of Bygone Years captured for posterity the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kiev, “Let it be the mother of all Russian cities.“

Later, like other European states of that time, Ancient Rus faced a decline of central rule and fragmentation. At the same time, both the nobility and the common people perceived Rus as a common territory, as their homeland.

The fragmentation intensified after Batu Khan’s devastating invasion, which ravaged many cities, including Kiev. The northeastern part of Rus fell under the control of the Golden Horde but retained limited sovereignty. The southern and western Russian lands largely became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which – most significantly – was referred to in historical records as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia.

Members of the princely and “boyar” clans would change service from one prince to another, feuding with each other but also making friendships and alliances. Voivode Bobrok of Volyn and the sons of Grand Duke of Lithuania Algirdas – Andrey of Polotsk and Dmitry of Bryansk – fought next to Grand Duke Dmitry Ivanovich of Moscow on the Kulikovo field. At the same time, Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila – son of the Princess of Tver – led his troops to join with Mamai. These are all pages of our shared history, reflecting its complex and multi-dimensional nature.

Most importantly, people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language. Their faith was Orthodox. Up to the middle of the 15th century, the unified church government remained in place.

At a new stage of historical development, both Lithuanian Rus and Moscow Rus could have become the points of attraction and consolidation of the territories of Ancient Rus. It so happened that Moscow became the center of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood. Moscow princes – the descendants of Prince Alexander Nevsky – cast off the foreign yoke and began gathering the Russian lands.

In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, other processes were unfolding. In the 14th century, Lithuania’s ruling elite converted to Catholicism. In the 16th century, it signed the Union of Lublin with the Kingdom of Poland to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish Catholic nobility received considerable land holdings and privileges in the territory of Rus. In accordance with the 1596 Union of Brest, part of the western Russian Orthodox clergy submitted to the authority of the Pope. The process of Polonization and Latinization began, ousting Orthodoxy.

As a consequence, in the 16–17th centuries, the liberation movement of the Orthodox population was gaining strength in the Dnieper region. The events during the times of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky became a turning point. His supporters struggled for autonomy from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In its 1649 appeal to the king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Zaporizhian Host demanded that the rights of the Russian Orthodox population be respected, that the voivode of Kiev be Russian and of Greek faith, and that the persecution of the churches of God be stopped. But the Cossacks were not heard.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky then made appeals to Moscow, which were considered by the Zemsky Sobor. On 1 October 1653, members of the supreme representative body of the Russian state decided to support their brothers in faith and take them under patronage. In January 1654, the Pereyaslav Council confirmed that decision. Subsequently, the ambassadors of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Moscow visited dozens of cities, including Kiev, whose populations swore allegiance to the Russian tsar. Incidentally, nothing of the kind happened at the conclusion of the Union of Lublin.

In a letter to Moscow in 1654, Bohdan Khmelnytsky thanked Tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich for taking “the whole Zaporizhian Host and the whole Russian Orthodox world under the strong and high hand of the Tsar”. It means that, in their appeals to both the Polish king and the Russian tsar, the Cossacks referred to and defined themselves as Russian Orthodox people.

Over the course of the protracted war between the Russian state and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, some of the hetmans, successors of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, would “detach themselves” from Moscow or seek support from Sweden, Poland, or Turkey. But, again, for the people, that was a war of liberation. It ended with the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667. The final outcome was sealed by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1686. The Russian state incorporated the city of Kiev and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper River, including Poltava region, Chernigov region, and Zaporozhye. Their inhabitants were reunited with the main part of the Russian Orthodox people. These territories were referred to as “Malorossia” (Little Russia).

The name “Ukraine” was used more often in the meaning of the Old Russian word “okraina” (periphery), which is found in written sources from the 12th century, referring to various border territories. And the word “Ukrainian”, judging by archival documents, originally referred to frontier guards who protected the external borders.

On the right bank, which remained under the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the old orders were restored, and social and religious oppression intensified. On the contrary, the lands on the left bank, taken under the protection of the unified state, saw rapid development. People from the other bank of the Dnieper moved here en masse. They sought support from people who spoke the same language and had the same faith.

During the Great Northern War with Sweden, the people in Malorossia were not faced with a choice of whom to side with. Only a small portion of the Cossacks supported Mazepa’s rebellion. People of all orders and degrees considered themselves Russian and Orthodox.

Cossack senior officers belonging to the nobility would reach the heights of political, diplomatic, and military careers in Russia. Graduates of Kiev-Mohyla Academy played a leading role in church life. This was also the case during the Hetmanate – an essentially autonomous state formation with a special internal structure – and later in the Russian Empire. Malorussians in many ways helped build a big common country – its statehood, culture, and science. They participated in the exploration and development of the Urals, Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Far East. Incidentally, during the Soviet period, natives of Ukraine held major, including the highest, posts in the leadership of the unified state. Suffice it to say that Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, whose party biography was most closely associated with Ukraine, led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for almost 30 years.

In the second half of the 18th century, following the wars with the Ottoman Empire, Russia incorporated Crimea and the lands of the Black Sea region, which became known as Novorossiya. They were populated by people from all of the Russian provinces. After the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire regained the western Old Russian lands, with the exception of Galicia and Transcarpathia, which became part of the Austrian – and later Austro-Hungarian – Empire.

The incorporation of the western Russian lands into the single state was not merely the result of political and diplomatic decisions. It was underlain by the common faith, shared cultural traditions, and – I would like to emphasize it once again – language similarity. Thus, as early as the beginning of the 17th century, one of the hierarchs of the Uniate Church, Joseph Rutsky, communicated to Rome that people in Moscovia called Russians from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth their brothers, that their written language was absolutely identical, and differences in the vernacular were insignificant. He drew an analogy with the residents of Rome and Bergamo. These are, as we know, the center and the north of modern Italy.

Many centuries of fragmentation and living within different states naturally brought about regional language peculiarities, resulting in the emergence of dialects. The vernacular enriched the literary language. Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Grigory Skovoroda, and Taras Shevchenko played a huge role here. Their works are our common literary and cultural heritage. Taras Shevchenko wrote poetry in the Ukrainian language, and prose mainly in Russian. The books of Nikolay Gogol, a Russian patriot and native of Poltavshchyna, are written in Russian, bristling with Malorussian folk sayings and motifs. How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine? And why do it?

The south-western lands of the Russian Empire, Malorussia and Novorossiya, and the Crimea developed as ethnically and religiously diverse entities. Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Karaites, Krymchaks, Bulgarians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, and other peoples lived here. They all preserved their faith, traditions, and customs.

I am not going to idealise anything. We do know there were the Valuev Circular of 1863 an then the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which restricted the publication and importation of religious and socio-political literature in the Ukrainian language. But it is important to be mindful of the historical context. These decisions were taken against the backdrop of dramatic events in Poland and the desire of the leaders of the Polish national movement to exploit the “Ukrainian issue” to their own advantage. I should add that works of fiction, books of Ukrainian poetry and folk songs continued to be published. There is objective evidence that the Russian Empire was witnessing an active process of development of the Malorussian cultural identity within the greater Russian nation, which united the Velikorussians, the Malorussians and the Belorussians.

At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such “hypotheses” became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states.

Since the late 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian authorities had latched onto this narrative, using it as a counterbalance to the Polish national movement and pro-Muscovite sentiments in Galicia. During World War I, Vienna played a role in the formation of the so-called Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Galicians suspected of sympathies with Orthodox Christianity and Russia were subjected to brutal repression and thrown into the concentration camps of Thalerhof and Terezin.

Further developments had to do with the collapse of European empires, the fierce civil war that broke out across the vast territory of the former Russian Empire, and foreign intervention.

After the February Revolution, in March 1917, the Central Rada was established in Kiev, intended to become the organ of supreme power. In November 1917, in its Third Universal, it declared the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) as part of Russia.

In December 1917, UPR representatives arrived in Brest-Litovsk, where Soviet Russia was negotiating with Germany and its allies. At a meeting on 10 January 1918, the head of the Ukrainian delegation read out a note proclaiming the independence of Ukraine. Subsequently, the Central Rada proclaimed Ukraine independent in its Fourth Universal.

The declared sovereignty did not last long. Just a few weeks later, Rada delegates signed a separate treaty with the German bloc countries. Germany and Austria-Hungary were at the time in a dire situation and needed Ukrainian bread and raw materials. In order to secure large-scale supplies, they obtained consent for sending their troops and technical staff to the UPR. In fact, this was used as a pretext for occupation.

For those who have today given up the full control of Ukraine to external forces, it would be instructive to remember that, back in 1918, such a decision proved fatal for the ruling regime in Kiev. With the direct involvement of the occupying forces, the Central Rada was overthrown and Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi was brought to power, proclaiming instead of the UPR the Ukrainian State, which was essentially under German protectorate.

In November 1918 – following the revolutionary events in Germany and Austria-Hungary – Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who had lost the support of German bayonets, took a different course, declaring that “Ukraine is to take the lead in the formation of an All-Russian Federation”. However, the regime was soon changed again. It was now the time of the so-called Directorate.

In autumn 1918, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic (WUPR) and, in January 1919, announced its unification with the Ukrainian People's Republic. In July 1919, Ukrainian forces were crushed by Polish troops, and the territory of the former WUPR came under the Polish rule.

In April 1920, Symon Petliura (portrayed as one of the “heroes” in today's Ukraine) concluded secret conventions on behalf of the UPR Directorate, giving up – in exchange for military support – Galicia and Western Volhynia lands to Poland. In May 1920, Petliurites entered Kiev in a convoy of Polish military units. But not for long. As early as November 1920, following a truce between Poland and Soviet Russia, the remnants of Petliura's forces surrendered to those same Poles.

The example of the UPR shows that different kinds of quasi-state formations that emerged across the former Russian Empire at the time of the Civil War and turbulence were inherently unstable. Nationalists sought to create their own independent states, while leaders of the White movement advocated indivisible Russia. Many of the republics established by the Bolsheviks' supporters did not see themselves outside Russia either. Nevertheless, Bolshevik Party leaders sometimes basically drove them out of Soviet Russia for various reasons.

Thus, in early 1918, the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic was proclaimed and asked Moscow to incorporate it into Soviet Russia. This was met with a refusal. During a meeting with the republic's leaders, Vladimir Lenin insisted that they act as part of Soviet Ukraine. On 15 March 1918, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) directly ordered that delegates be sent to the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, including from the Donetsk Basin, and that “one government for all of Ukraine” be created at the congress. The territories of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic later formed most of the regions of south-eastern Ukraine.

Under the 1921 Treaty of Riga, concluded between the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and Poland, the western lands of the former Russian Empire were ceded to Poland. In the interwar period, the Polish government pursued an active resettlement policy, seeking to change the ethnic composition of the Eastern Borderlands – the Polish name for what is now Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and parts of Lithuania. The areas were subjected to harsh Polonisation, local culture and traditions suppressed. Later, during World War II, radical groups of Ukrainian nationalists used this as a pretext for terror not only against Polish, but also against Jewish and Russian populations.

In 1922, when the USSR was created, with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic becoming one of its founders, a rather fierce debate among the Bolshevik leaders resulted in the implementation of Lenin's plan to form a union state as a federation of equal republics. The right for the republics to freely secede from the Union was included in the text of the Declaration on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, subsequently, in the 1924 USSR Constitution. By doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the CPSU was gone, the party itself collapsing from within. A “parade of sovereignties” followed. On 8 December 1991, the so-called Belovezh Agreement on the Creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States was signed, stating that “the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality no longer existed.” By the way, Ukraine never signed or ratified the CIS Charter adopted back in 1993.

In the 1920's-1930's, the Bolsheviks actively promoted the “localization policy”, which took the form of Ukrainization in the Ukrainian SSR. Symbolically, as part of this policy and with consent of the Soviet authorities, Mikhail Grushevskiy, former chairman of Central Rada, one of the ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, who at a certain period of time had been supported by Austria-Hungary, was returned to the USSR and was elected member of the Academy of Sciences.

The localization policy undoubtedly played a major role in the development and consolidation of the Ukrainian culture, language and identity. At the same time, under the guise of combating the so-called Russian great-power chauvinism, Ukrainization was often imposed on those who did not see themselves as Ukrainians. This Soviet national policy secured at the state level the provision on three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, instead of the large Russian nation, a triune people comprising Velikorussians, Malorussians and Belorussians.

In 1939, the USSR regained the lands earlier seized by Poland. A major portion of these became part of the Soviet Ukraine. In 1940, the Ukrainian SSR incorporated part of Bessarabia, which had been occupied by Romania since 1918, as well as Northern Bukovina. In 1948, Zmeyiniy Island (Snake Island) in the Black Sea became part of Ukraine. In 1954, the Crimean Region of the RSFSR was given to the Ukrainian SSR, in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time.

I would like to dwell on the destiny of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of Czechoslovakia following the breakup of Austria-Hungary. Rusins made up a considerable share of local population. While this is hardly mentioned any longer, after the liberation of Transcarpathia by Soviet troops the congress of the Orthodox population of the region voted for the inclusion of Carpathian Ruthenia in the RSFSR or, as a separate Carpathian republic, in the USSR proper. Yet the choice of people was ignored. In summer 1945, the historical act of the reunification of Carpathian Ukraine “with its ancient motherland, Ukraine” – as The Pravda newspaper put it – was announced.

Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

When working on this article, I relied on open-source documents that contain well-known facts rather than on some secret records. The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external “patrons” prefer to overlook these facts. They do not miss a chance, however, both inside the country and abroad, to condemn “the crimes of the Soviet regime,” listing among them events with which neither the CPSU, nor the USSR, let alone modern Russia, have anything to do. At the same time, the Bolsheviks' efforts to detach from Russia its historical territories are not considered a crime. And we know why: if they brought about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishes are happy with that.

Of course, inside the USSR, borders between republics were never seen as state borders; they were nominal within a single country, which, while featuring all the attributes of a federation, was highly centralized – this, again, was secured by the CPSU's leading role. But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.

What can be said to this? Things change: countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!

You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But what are the terms? I will recall the assessment given by one of the most prominent political figures of new Russia, first mayor of Saint Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. As a legal expert who believed that every decision must be legitimate, in 1992, he shared the following opinion: the republics that were founders of the Union, having denounced the 1922 Union Treaty, must return to the boundaries they had had before joining the Soviet Union. All other territorial acquisitions are subject to discussion, negotiations, given that the ground has been revoked.

In other words, when you leave, take what you brought with you. This logic is hard to refute. I will just say that the Bolsheviks had embarked on reshaping boundaries even before the Soviet Union, manipulating with territories to their liking, in disregard of people's views.

The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country. Throughout the difficult 1990's and in the new millennium, we have provided considerable support to Ukraine. Whatever “political arithmetic” of its own Kiev may wish to apply, in 1991–2013, Ukraine's budget savings amounted to more than USD 82 billion, while today, it holds on to the mere USD 1.5 billion of Russian payments for gas transit to Europe. If economic ties between our countries had been retained, Ukraine would enjoy the benefit of tens of billions of dollars.

Ukraine and Russia have developed as a single economic system over decades and centuries. The profound cooperation we had 30 years ago is an example for the European Union to look up to. We are natural complementary economic partners. Such a close relationship can strengthen competitive advantages, increasing the potential of both countries.

Ukraine used to possess great potential, which included powerful infrastructure, gas transportation system, advanced shipbuilding, aviation, rocket and instrument engineering industries, as well as world-class scientific, design and engineering schools. Taking over this legacy and declaring independence, Ukrainian leaders promised that the Ukrainian economy would be one of the leading ones and the standard of living would be among the best in Europe.

Today, high-tech industrial giants that were once the pride of Ukraine and the entire Union, are sinking. Engineering output has dropped by 42 per cent over ten years. The scale of deindustrialization and overall economic degradation is visible in Ukraine's electricity production, which has seen a nearly two-time decrease in 30 years. Finally, according to IMF reports, in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, Ukraine's GDP per capita had been below USD 4 thousand. This is less than in the Republic of Albania, the Republic of Moldova, or unrecognized Kosovo. Nowadays, Ukraine is Europe's poorest country.

Who is to blame for this? Is it the people of Ukraine's fault? Certainly not. It was the Ukrainian authorities who wasted and frittered away the achievements of many generations. We know how hardworking and talented the people of Ukraine are. They can achieve success and outstanding results with perseverance and determination. And these qualities, as well as their openness, innate optimism and hospitality have not gone. The feelings of millions of people who treat Russia not just well but with great affection, just as we feel about Ukraine, remain the same.

Until 2014, hundreds of agreements and joint projects were aimed at developing our economies, business and cultural ties, strengthening security, and solving common social and environmental problems. They brought tangible benefits to people – both in Russia and Ukraine. This is what we believed to be most important. And that is why we had a fruitful interaction with all, I emphasize, with all the leaders of Ukraine.

Even after the events in Kiev of 2014, I charged the Russian government to elaborate options for preserving and maintaining our economic ties within relevant ministries and agencies. However, there was and is still no mutual will to do the same. Nevertheless, Russia is still one of Ukraine's top three trading partners, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are coming to us to work, and they find a welcome reception and support. So that is what the “aggressor state” is.

When the USSR collapsed, many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual and economic ties would certainly last, as would the commonality of our people, who had always had a sense of unity at their core. However, events – at first gradually, and then more rapidly – started to move in a different direction.

In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. The common tragedy of collectivization and famine of the early 1930s was portrayed as the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Radicals and neo-Nazis were open and more and more insolent about their ambitions. They were indulged by both the official authorities and local oligarchs, who robbed the people of Ukraine and kept their stolen money in Western banks, ready to sell their motherland for the sake of preserving their capital. To this should be added the persistent weakness of state institutions and the position of a willing hostage to someone else's geopolitical will.

I recall that long ago, well before 2014, the U.S. and EU countries systematically and consistently pushed Ukraine to curtail and limit economic cooperation with Russia. We, as the largest trade and economic partner of Ukraine, suggested discussing the emerging problems in the Ukraine-Russia-EU format. But every time we were told that Russia had nothing to do with it and that the issue concerned only the EU and Ukraine. De facto Western countries rejected Russia's repeated calls for dialogue.

Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia. Inevitably, there came a time when the concept of “Ukraine is not Russia” was no longer an option. There was a need for the “anti-Russia” concept which we will never accept.

The owners of this project took as a basis the old groundwork of the Polish-Austrian ideologists to create an “anti-Moscow Russia”. And there is no need to deceive anyone that this is being done in the interests of the people of Ukraine. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never needed Ukrainian culture, much less Cossack autonomy. In Austria-Hungary, historical Russian lands were mercilessly exploited and remained the poorest. The Nazis, abetted by collaborators from the OUN-UPA, did not need Ukraine, but a living space and slaves for Aryan overlords.

Nor were the interests of the Ukrainian people thought of in February 2014. The legitimate public discontent, caused by acute socio-economic problems, mistakes, and inconsistent actions of the authorities of the time, was simply cynically exploited. Western countries directly interfered in Ukraine's internal affairs and supported the coup. Radical nationalist groups served as its battering ram. Their slogans, ideology, and blatant aggressive Russophobia have to a large extent become defining elements of state policy in Ukraine.

All the things that united us and bring us together so far came under attack. First and foremost, the Russian language. Let me remind you that the new “Maidan” authorities first tried to repeal the law on state language policy. Then there was the law on the “purification of power”, the law on education that virtually cut the Russian language out of the educational process.

Lastly, as early as May of this year, the current president introduced a bill on “indigenous peoples” to the Rada. Only those who constitute an ethnic minority and do not have their own state entity outside Ukraine are recognized as indigenous. The law has been passed. New seeds of discord have been sown. And this is happening in a country, as I have already noted, that is very complex in terms of its territorial, national and linguistic composition, and its history of formation.

There may be an argument: if you are talking about a single large nation, a triune nation, then what difference does it make who people consider themselves to be – Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians. I completely agree with this. Especially since the determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice.

But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Our spiritual unity has also been attacked. As in the days of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a new ecclesiastical has been initiated. The secular authorities, making no secret of their political aims, have blatantly interfered in church life and brought things to a split, to the seizure of churches, the beating of priests and monks. Even extensive autonomy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church while maintaining spiritual unity with the Moscow Patriarchate strongly displeases them. They have to destroy this prominent and centuries-old symbol of our kinship at all costs.

I think it is also natural that the representatives of Ukraine over and over again vote against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Marches and torchlit processions in honor of remaining war criminals from the SS units take place under the protection of the official authorities. Mazepa, who betrayed everyone, Petliura, who paid for Polish patronage with Ukrainian lands, and Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis, are ranked as national heroes. Everything is being done to erase from the memory of young generations the names of genuine patriots and victors, who have always been the pride of Ukraine.

For the Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army, in partisan units, the Great Patriotic War was indeed a patriotic war because they were defending their home, their great common Motherland. Over two thousand soldiers became Heroes of the Soviet Union. Among them are legendary pilot Ivan Kozhedub, fearless sniper, defender of Odessa and Sevastopol Lyudmila Pavlichenko, valiant guerrilla commander Sidor Kovpak. This indomitable generation fought, those people gave their lives for our future, for us. To forget their feat is to betray our grandfathers, mothers and fathers.

The anti-Russia project has been rejected by millions of Ukrainians. The people of Crimea and residents of Sevastopol made their historic choice. And people in the southeast peacefully tried to defend their stance. Yet, all of them, including children, were labeled as separatists and terrorists. They were threatened with ethnic cleansing and the use of military force. And the residents of Donetsk and Lugansk took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives. Were they left any other choice after the riots that swept through the cities of Ukraine, after the horror and tragedy of 2 May 2014 in Odessa where Ukrainian neo-Nazis burned people alive making a new Khatyn out of it? The same massacre was ready to be carried out by the followers of Bandera in Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk. Even now they do not abandon such plans. They are biding their time. But their time will not come.

The coup d'état and the subsequent actions of the Kiev authorities inevitably provoked confrontation and civil war. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that the total number of victims in the conflict in Donbas has exceeded 13,000. Among them are the elderly and children. These are terrible, irreparable losses.

Russia has done everything to stop fratricide. The Minsk agreements aimed at a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Donbas have been concluded. I am convinced that they still have no alternative. In any case, no one has withdrawn their signatures from the Minsk Package of Measures or from the relevant statements by the leaders of the Normandy format countries. No one has initiated a review of the United Nations Security Council resolution of 17 February 2015.

During official negotiations, especially after being reined in by Western partners, Ukraine's representatives regularly declare their “full adherence” to the Minsk agreements, but are in fact guided by a position of “unacceptability”. They do not intend to seriously discuss either the special status of Donbas or safeguards for the people living there. They prefer to exploit the image of the “victim of external aggression” and peddle Russophobia. They arrange bloody provocations in Donbas. In short, they attract the attention of external patrons and masters by all means.

Apparently, and I am becoming more and more convinced of this: Kiev simply does not need Donbas. Why? Because, firstly, the inhabitants of these regions will never accept the order that they have tried and are trying to impose by force, blockade and threats. And secondly, the outcome of both Minsk‑1 and Minsk‑2 which give a real chance to peacefully restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine by coming to an agreement directly with the DPR and LPR with Russia, Germany and France as mediators, contradicts the entire logic of the anti-Russia project. And it can only be sustained by the constant cultivation of the image of an internal and external enemy. And I would add – under the protection and control of the Western powers.

This is what is actually happening. First of all, we are facing the creation of a climate of fear in Ukrainian society, aggressive rhetoric, indulging neo-Nazis and militarising the country. Along with that we are witnessing not just complete dependence but direct external control, including the supervision of the Ukrainian authorities, security services and armed forces by foreign advisers, military “development” of the territory of Ukraine and deployment of NATO infrastructure. It is no coincidence that the aforementioned flagrant law on “indigenous peoples” was adopted under the cover of large-scale NATO exercises in Ukraine.

This is also a disguise for the takeover of the rest of the Ukrainian economy and the exploitation of its natural resources. The sale of agricultural land is not far off, and it is obvious who will buy it up. From time to time, Ukraine is indeed given financial resources and loans, but under their own conditions and pursuing their own interests, with preferences and benefits for Western companies. By the way, who will pay these debts back? Apparently, it is assumed that this will have to be done not only by today's generation of Ukrainians but also by their children, grandchildren and probably great-grandchildren.

The Western authors of the anti-Russia project set up the Ukrainian political system in such a way that presidents, members of parliament and ministers would change but the attitude of separation from and enmity with Russia would remain. Reaching peace was the main election slogan of the incumbent president. He came to power with this. The promises turned out to be lies. Nothing has changed. And in some ways the situation in Ukraine and around Donbas has even degenerated.

In the anti-Russia project, there is no place either for a sovereign Ukraine or for the political forces that are trying to defend its real independence. Those who talk about reconciliation in Ukrainian society, about dialogue, about finding a way out of the current impasse are labelled as “pro-Russian” agents.

Again, for many people in Ukraine, the anti-Russia project is simply unacceptable. And there are millions of such people. But they are not allowed to raise their heads. They have had their legal opportunity to defend their point of view in fact taken away from them. They are intimidated, driven underground. Not only are they persecuted for their convictions, for the spoken word, for the open expression of their position, but they are also killed. Murderers, as a rule, go unpunished.

Today, the “right” patriot of Ukraine is only the one who hates Russia. Moreover, the entire Ukrainian statehood, as we understand it, is proposed to be further built exclusively on this idea. Hate and anger, as world history has repeatedly proved this, are a very shaky foundation for sovereignty, fraught with many serious risks and dire consequences.

All the subterfuges associated with the anti-Russia project are clear to us. And we will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country.

The incumbent authorities in Ukraine like to refer to Western experience, seeing it as a model to follow. Just have a look at how Austria and Germany, the USA and Canada live next to each other. Close in ethnic composition, culture, in fact sharing one language, they remain sovereign states with their own interests, with their own foreign policy. But this does not prevent them from the closest integration or allied relations. They have very conditional, transparent borders. And when crossing them the citizens feel at home. They create families, study, work, do business. Incidentally, so do millions of those born in Ukraine who now live in Russia. We see them as our own close people.

Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues. But it is important for us to understand that our partner is defending its national interests but not serving someone else's, and is not a tool in someone else's hands to fight against us.

We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians' desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous.

I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.

Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be “anti-Ukraine”. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.

This work is from the website of the President of the Russian Federation and is copyrighted. It is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In short: you are free to distribute and modify this work as long as you attribute www.kremlin.ru.

The permission letter from the Press Secretary for the President of the Russian Federation is available as Kremlin authorisation-English.pdf .

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An analysis of Putin's imperial ambitions and Ukraine's 300-year road to statehood

By  Olivia Durand

Vladimir Putin has long insisted Ukraine is part of the country he rules. This was painted more starkly than ever as he announced that Russian troops were undertaking a “special military operation” in its western neighbour. But to the rest of the world, what Russia is undertaking is simply an invasion.

Putin has been softening up the world for its latest foreign policy adventure for some years now.

'Kiev is the mother of Russian cities,' he wrote in March 2014 . 'Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.'

A few days later, Russia completed the annexation of Crimea. Eight years later, during which time more than 14,000 people have died in a Russian-instigated war of insurgency in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, he has returned to this theme – backed by the might of Russia’s armed forces.

The Russian president made this intention crystal clear in an hour-long and fairly wide-ranging speech on February 21.

'Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us,'  he told the Russian people in a national broadcast. 'It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.'

He [Putin] repeatedly denied Ukraine’s right to independent existence – and, at times, that the country exists at all as an independent entity. Instead he appeared to accept the unity of the two countries as historical fact

He repeatedly denied Ukraine’s right to independent existence – and, at times, that the country exists at all as an independent entity. Instead he appeared to accept the unity of the two countries as historical fact. In doing so, he revealed the structures of an imperial ideology with a chronology and ambition that goes far beyond post-Soviet nostalgia to the mediaeval era. But to what extent is that ideology shared by Russians?

One of the striking elements of Putin’s latest speech about Ukraine, which accompanied the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states , was his insistence that Ukraine exists as a by-product of Russian history, 'Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.'

One of the striking elements of Putin’s latest speech about Ukraine...was his insistence that Ukraine exists as a by-product of Russian history...But he later undercut his insistence...stating, 'Modern Ukraine was entirely created by ...Bolshevik, Communist Russia

But he later undercut his insistence of these shared origins , stating, 'Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.'

To him, the making of modern Ukraine only started 'after the 1917 revolution', and Ukrainians have 'Lenin and his associates' to thank for their state. This was a reference to Lenin’s creation of a federation of Soviet states, the USSR, out of the ethnic diversity of the former Russian empire.

In reality, Ukrainian aspirations for statehood predated revolution by at least two centuries. From the Ukrainian Hetmanate’s 1710 Bendery Constitution to the 1917 establishment of the West and Ukrainian People’s Republics and appeals at the Paris Peace Conference for status, Ukrainians have continuously asserted themselves as a distinct people.

The formation of the USSR was, in part, conditioned by the previous creation of these two independent Ukrainian Republics in the aftermath of the revolution and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These republics stemmed directly from the 19th century Ukrainian romantic national movement that reassessed the impact of the Cossack past, fuelling the development of an identity centring on a distinct language, culture, and history.

In reality, Ukrainian aspirations for statehood predated [the Russian] revolution by at least two centuries

When the Bolsheviks, Lenin at their head, took control over the Ukrainian territories, the idea of Ukraine as an independent nation could not be ignored, and led to the independent status – on paper – of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1922.

What Putin’s address reveals is the desire to plot Russian and Ukrainian history through the lens of imperialism

What Putin’s address reveals is the desire to plot Russian and Ukrainian history through the lens of imperialism. He is attempting to establish a direct line from shared ancient origins to a first and second Russian empire: one under the Romanov Tsars (1721-1917) and the second as part of the USSR.

Across those two imperial epochs, Ukraine is reduced to a tributary state and mentions of national aspirations are smothered. This is precisely the message that the Kremlin continues to disseminate in the 21st century.

A lack of popular appetite

But what does the Russian public believe? Three decades ago, when the USSR collapsed, only rare and often ultra-nationalist politicians resorted to imperial history in imagining Russia’s post-soviet future. As early as the 1990s, ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky advocated ceasing coal supplies to Ukraine as a tactic to bring back Russia’s lost territories, but he remained a fringe figure in Russian politics.

Still, in 2011 and 2012 Global Attitudes surveys conducted by Pew Research Centre , support for imperial ideology was not insignificant. When asked whether 'it’s natural for Russia to have an empire', only 31% of Russian respondents disagreed. Whether nostalgia for empire translates to appetite for war to 'regain territory' remains unclear.

It is impossible to paint all Russian perceptions of Ukrainians with the same brush. Russian feelings toward their neighbour have historically ranged from genuine feelings of brotherhood and warmth to virulent expressions of xenophobia manifesting in episodes of ethnic cleansing, such as the 1932 orchestrated famine known as the Holodomor .

Only 26% of Russians wanted the Donbas to become part of Russia, while 54% are in favour of varying forms of independence...War remains an unpopular choice, with only 18% of Russians unreservedly supporting armed conflict 

But when it comes to the question of how Russia should position itself with regards to claiming eastern Ukrainian provinces as long-lost parts of the 'Russian empire', opinion is more clearly divided . Only 26% of Russians wanted the Donbas to become part of Russia, while 54% are in favour of varying forms of independence (within Ukraine or separate). War remains an unpopular choice, with only 18% of Russians unreservedly supporting armed conflict in defence of the two breakaway republics in a poll from April 2021.

Post-Soviet neo-imperialism

The rhetorical and physical erasure of Ukrainian history and identity makes it much easier to assert claims of shared Russian heritage

Ultimately, the use of 'empire' as an ideology reveals Russia’s yearning for – or sense of entitlement to – a third imperial regime. The rhetorical and physical erasure of Ukrainian history and identity makes it much easier to assert claims of shared Russian heritage. This will be important to bear in mind as we watch the development of this renewed conflict over Ukraine.

Olivia Durand  is a Postdoctoral associate in history, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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Putin Sees Himself as Part of the History of Russia’s Tsars—Including Their Imperialism

I n the Kremlin room with that long white table where Putin entertains his foreign visitors there is a quartet of statues of the tsars he most admires. Their achievements are his benchmark of success.

The first two statues are dedicated to the eighteenth-century rulers who established Russia as an empire on the European continent: Peter the Great, who conquered the Baltic lands in his wars against the Swedes; and Catherine the Great, who swallowed half of Poland, extended Russian power to the Black Sea through her wars against the Turks, and annexed the Crimea, from which the Russian navy dominated the Near East.

The speed of Russia’s growth alarmed the powers of Europe. Between the sixteenth century, when it began the conquest of Siberia, and the Revolution of 1917 the Russian Empire grew at a rate of 50 square miles every day . Western fears of Russia reached their peak following the defeat of Napoleon by Alexander I, the third tsar in Putin’s pantheon. Writers like the Marquis de Custine, in his bestselling Russian Travels (1839), argued that the country was fundamentally expansionist in character, a view later reinforced by the Cold War. Does Putin’s war of unprovoked aggression in Ukraine support this theory, or is it part of something new?

Russia grew on the forest lands and steppes between Europe and Asia. There are no natural boundaries, neither seas nor mountain ranges, to define its territory, which throughout its history has been colonised by peoples from both continents. Its openness made Russia vulnerable to foreign invasion. The Mongols and the Turkic-speaking tribes, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles and Swedes, the Ottomans—they all invaded Russia prior to Napoleon.

The Russian state developed to defend the country’s frontiers, subordinating society to its military needs. Social classes were organised to benefit the state as taxpayers and military servitors. Territorial aggrandisement was its method of protecting Russia’s frontiers. History shows that Russia tends to advance its security by keeping neighbouring countries weak, and by fighting wars beyond its borders to keep hostile powers at arm’s length.

Ukraine long played a special role as a “borderland” (the meaning of the Slav word ‘ ukraina ‘) between Russia and the West. From its incorporation into Russia in the seventeenth century , Ukraine served as a conduit for Western ideas, technologies, and fashions in Russia. But it was an open door for Europe’s armies to attack Moscow, if they got the Cossacks or Ukrainians to join their side.

Read More: Russia Declares Energy War With Leaking Pipelines

This last point was emphasized by Putin in his long essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, published in July 2021, which can now be read as his justification for the invasion of Ukraine . At many points throughout its history, Putin argued, Ukraine had been used by hostile foreign states—the Poles and Swedes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Austrians and the Germans in the First World War, the allied powers in the Russian Civil War, the Nazis after 1941—as a Trojan horse against Russia. The West today, he claimed, was doing just the same. Russia was at war, not with the Ukrainians, but with their masters in NATO.

Many Russians are persuaded by this narrative because it builds on Cold War fears. It also makes sense to them in the framework of the history they were taught at school and have been fed through films and TV programmes over many years: that Russia does not start aggressive wars but is a victim of attacks by hostile Western powers, and therefore, needs a strong state and leader to defend itself against the West.

That was the lesson they had learned from Alexander Nevsky, the saintly prince of Novgorod, who in 1242 defeated the Teutonic Knights (German crusaders who had set out to impose Catholicism on Orthodox Russia) in a battle on the ice of Lake Peipus in today’s Estonia—a victory that looms large in the national consciousness because it forms the central episode of Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein’s great patriotic film, which was seen by millions in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany . It too was the lesson they had learned from 1812, the Patriotic War against Napoleon; and the story they were told about World War Two, which they date from 1941, when the Soviet Union was invaded by the Germans, not from 1939, when there was a Soviet-Nazi pact.

The other argument of Putin’s essay—that Ukraine is a historic part of Greater Russia and has never had an independent nationhood—also makes sense to the Russians’ understanding of their country’s history. From tsarist times the Russians have been taught to look down on the Ukrainians (the “Little Russians”) as their junior brothers in a family of Russians (with the Belarussians or “White Russians”) which made up the empire’s Slavic core. The Russians’ leading role in the Soviet Union was similarly emphasized, particularly after 1945, when Stalin credited the “Great Russians” for the Soviet victory and began a campaign of Russification in the newly annexed territories of west Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltics.

The sense of cultural superiority which this inculcated in the Russian population may help to explain the brutality of Putin’s operation in Ukraine. The Russian killings of civilians, their rapes of women, and other acts of terror are driven by a post-imperial urge to take revenge and punish them, to make them pay for their independence from Russia, for their determination to be part of Europe, to be Ukrainians, and not subjects of the “Russian world.”

The “Russian world” is Putin’s mythic concept of a spiritual empire uniting Russia with Ukraine and Belarus in a tripartite nation going back to Kievan Rus in the first millenium. The idea was developed by the Russian Church to promote its spiritual inheritance from Kievan Rus, a link broken by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It was seized on by Putin, who used it as an arm of his foreign policy to defend the Russian speakers (he called them ‘our citizens’) left outside the territory of Russia after 1991. He justified his invasion of Ukraine on the bogus pretext of protecting them from the genocidal aims of what he called the Junta, the post-Maidan nationalist government in Kiev. The fact that these Russians were Ukrainian citizens, and identified themselves as such, did not count in Putin’s view.

This is where the last tsar in our quartet of statues, Nicholas I, appears closest to Putin in his vision of the Russian World. Devoutly Christian, Nicholas believed that Russia was an empire of the Orthodox uniting Moscow (‘the Third Rome’ or last remaining seat of the true faith) with Constantinople and Jerusalem. On these grounds, in 1853, he went to war against the Turks to force the sultan to concede to his demands for a privileged position for the Orthodox in the Balkans and the Holy Lands (both then ruled by the Ottomans). His fatal error was to underestimate the western powers’ willingness to support the Turks. In 1854 the British and the French sent their allied forces to the Crimea where they captured the Russians’ naval base at Sevastopol, forcing them to surrender.

Among Russia’s nationalists, including Putin, Nicholas I is a national hero because he stood up to the West for Russia’s spiritual interests, and because he made that stand alone, against the opposition of the western-looking liberal intelligentsia. Likewise, Putin cultivates the image of a man who stands alone for Russia, who is Russia in his patrimonial autocracy.

Whether he believes in the religious (‘Russian’) values which he places at the heart of his anti-Western nationalism is hard to say. Unlike Nicholas I, he was not brought up as an Orthodox believer, but had a KGB training, which lends more credence to the view that he is merely using these ideas —for instance his attacks on U.S. arrogance or LGBT rights—to stir up feelings of mistrust and hatred for the West. It is a hostility already felt by millions of Russians who lost out from the collapse of 1991, who never quite adjusted to the market system and democracy, and who now want a return to something like the Soviet Union.

Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine is a sign of the imperial expansionism that has defined the Russian state for so much of its history. But it is based as much on mythical ideas as on geo-politics in the conventional sense: ideas of a nationalist, socially conservative, anti-Western and religious character that underpin dictatorships in Russia, China, and Iran. Before us we can see a new type of empire arising in Eurasia, uniting countries with historic grievances against the West. It is an empire growing in supporters and ideas.

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How Ukraine's history differs from Putin's version

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Yale professor Timothy Snyder, about the difference between the history of Ukraine and the version of it told by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Putin’s War on History

The thousand-year struggle over ukraine, by anna reid.

On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Russian forces began the largest land invasion on the European continent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of NATO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russia’s border. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us,” Putin said. “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” Ukraine’s borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.”

To many Western ears, Putin’s historical claims sounded bizarre. But they were of more than casual importance. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putin’s argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 2013–14, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protests caught the West by surprise, and although they included a far-right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin published a 7,000-word essay under Putin’s byline with the title “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Both Russia and Ukraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Since its publication, the essay has become part of the required curriculum for all service members in the Russian armed forces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putin’s logic, all divisions between Russia and Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Poland in the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War II, they have periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In this reading, Kyiv’s pro-Western outlook over the past decade is only the latest form of external interference—this time by the European Union and the United States—aimed at dividing Russia against itself. Ukraine’s “forced change of identity,” Putin wrote, is “comparable...to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.” In Putin’s meaning, “us” included Ukrainians. Ukrainians and Ukraine, in other words, aren’t just naturally part of Russia; they don’t even really exist.

A variation on the “Ukraine doesn’t really exist” theme is the Kremlin’s assertion that Ukraine is a foregone failure. According to this view—long echoed in a more sophisticated form by Western commentators—thanks to its geography and political history, Ukraine is forever destined to be riven by internal division or torn apart by more powerful neighbors. This was the core narrative of Putin’s propaganda the last time he invaded Ukraine, when he grabbed Crimea and the Donbas following the Maidan protests in Kyiv. Then, Russian state media reported that Ukraine was a failed state taken over by a neo-Nazi junta and that Russian forces were riding to the rescue. The close Putin adviser who directed all this propaganda, the bodyguard turned strategist Vladislav Surkov, reprised the theme in an interview with the Financial Times last year. Ukraine, he said, using an odd analogy, was like the “soft tissue” between two bones, which, until it was severed, would rub painfully together. (With Russian journalists, he was more straightforward: the “only method that has historically proved effective in Ukraine,” he said, is “coercion into fraternal relations.”)

As the extraordinary resilience and unity of the Ukrainian population in the current war have demonstrated, these Russian claims are nonsense. Saying that Ukraine doesn’t really exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesn’t exist because it was long under British rule, or that Norwegians are really Swedes. Although they won statehood only 31 years ago, the Ukrainians have a rich national history going back centuries. The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield. As for the neo-Nazi insult, this is belied by the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and that in the most recent parliamentary elections, in 2019, Ukraine’s far-right party, Svoboda, won less than three percent of the vote. As Putin’s imagined Ukraine has increasingly diverged from Ukrainian reality, the myth has become harder to sustain, the contradictions too acute. But rather than adjusting his historical fantasy to bring it closer to the truth, Putin has doubled down, resorting to military force and totalitarian censorship in a vain attempt to make reality closer to the myth. He may now be learning that reality is hard to defy: the wages of bad history are disaster in the present.

Gathering Russia

Putin’s obsession with Ukraine’s past can be traced to the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until 1991, most of today’s Ukraine had been ruled by Russia for 300 years—slightly longer, in other words, than Scotland has been ruled by England. And with a population that is today nearly as large as Spain’s, Ukraine was by far the most significant Soviet republic besides Russia itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser, famously wrote, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.” This isn’t literally true. Russia today is still a vast multiethnic empire, taking in a 3,000-mile-wide slice of northern Asia and including more than a dozen Asian nationalities, from the 5.3 million Tatars on the Volga River to a few thousand Chukchis on the Bering Strait. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Moscow lost its West.

For Putin, Russia’s European empire was all-important. Although there has long been an exoticizing streak to Russia’s self-image—“Yes, we are Scythians!” the hitherto gentle poet Aleksandr Blok declared after the 1917 revolution—the country has always seen itself as a European, rather than an Asian, power. Its great composers, novelists, and artists have been European in orientation; its historic military triumphs—against Napoleon and Hitler—made it a senior player in Europe’s “concert of nations.” By pushing Russia back into her gloomy pine forests, away from such ringing old place names as Odessa and Sevastopol, the loss of Ukraine, in particular, injured the Russian sense of self.

At the heart of Russia’s Ukraine problem, then, has been a war over history. The first battle is over where the story begins. Conventionally, the story starts with a legend-wrapped leader from the Middle Ages, Volodymyr (or Vladimir in Russian) the Great. A descendent of Norse raiders and traders from Scandinavia, Volodymyr founded the first proto-state in Kyiv toward the end of the tenth century. A loose but very large fiefdom known as Rus, it was centered on Kyiv and covered today’s Belarus, northwestern Russia, and most of Ukraine. Volodymyr also gave Rus its spiritual foundations, converting his realm to Orthodox Christianity.

As Putin sees it, the West has been pulling Ukraine away from Russia for centuries.

Although Russians and Ukrainians concur on Volodymyr’s importance, they disagree over what happened after his kingdom broke up. Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it disintegrated into warring princedoms, and in the thirteenth, it was overrun by the Mongols, under Batu Khan. In Russian accounts, the population—and, with it, true Rus culture—fled the violence, heading northeast, to Moscow and Novgorod. Ukrainians, however, argue that Rus culture remained squarely centered on Ukraine and that what emerged in Moscow was a separate and distinct tradition. To Western readers, the argument seems trivial: it is as though the French and the Germans were locked in battle over whether Charlemagne, the ninth-century founder of the Carolingian Empire, belongs to modern France or modern Germany. Ukrainians, however, understand the significance of the Russian claims. One of Kyiv’s landmarks is a large nineteenth-century statue of Volodymyr the Great, holding a cross and gazing out over the Dnieper River. When Putin put up his own, even bigger Vladimir the Great outside the Kremlin gates in 2016, Ukrainians rightly saw it not as a homage to a tenth-century king but as a blatant history grab.

In fact, for most of the next seven centuries after Volodymyr’s reign, Ukraine was outside Muscovite control. As Mongol rule crumbled through the 1300s, the territory of present-day Ukraine was absorbed by the emergent Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in turn combined by dynastic marriage with Poland, so that for the next two and a half centuries, Ukraine was ruled from Krakow. Eventually, even Ukraine’s faith acquired a Western veneer: in 1596, the Union of Brest-Litovsk created the Greek Catholic, or Uniat, Church—a compromise between Catholic Poles and Orthodox Ukrainians that acknowledged the pope but was Orthodox in ritual and allowed priests to marry. A politically canny halfway house between the two religions, the union helped Polonize the Ukrainian nobility, part of what Putin sees as a long pattern of the West pulling Ukraine away from its rightful Orthodox home.

It was not until the late seventeenth century that Moscow forcefully entered the picture. A series of uprisings by Ukrainian Cossacks—militarized frontier groups, centered on the lower Dnieper—had weakened the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Then, following a long war with Poland over Ukraine, expanding Muscovy was finally able to annex Kyiv in 1686. For Ukrainians, it was an “out of the frying pan into the fire” moment: Polish rule was simply swapped for its harsher Muscovite counterpart. But in Putin’s telling, it was the beginning of the “gathering of the Russian world,” using an archaic phrase that he has resuscitated to justify his war against Ukraine today. Another century later, Poland itself was partitioned among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, with Russia ending up with what is today Belarus and central Ukraine, including Kyiv, and Austria with today’s western Ukraine, then known as eastern Galicia, which included Lviv.

State of Struggle

Ukraine’s modern national movement began in the 1840s, led by the first great Ukrainian-language writer, Taras Shevchenko. Born into an enserfed peasant family in a village near Kyiv, he exhorted Ukrainians to throw off the Russian yoke and excoriated the many who Russified themselves in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder. (These views earned him ten years in Siberia.) As the century progressed, and especially after Tsar Alexander II’s assassination by anarchists in 1881, tsarist rule became more repressive. Hundreds of Ukrainian socialists followed Shevchenko into exile, and Ukrainian-language books and education were banned. At this point, Ukraine’s east-west divide turned into an advantage—at least for those living in the western part—because in Austrian-ruled Galicia, Ukrainians were able to adopt the freer civic culture then taking root in Europe. In Lviv, they published their own newspapers and organized reading rooms, cooperatives, credit unions, choirs, and sports clubs—all innovations borrowed from the similarly Austrian-ruled Czechs. Although disadvantaged by a voting system that favored Polish landowners, they were able to form their own political party and sent representatives to Lviv’s provincial assembly, to which the typical Ukrainian deputy was not a fiery revolutionary but a pince-nez-wearing, mildly socialist academic or lawyer.

Ukraine’s reputation as a land cursed by political geography—part of the “bloodlands” in the title of the historian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling book—was earned during the first half of the twentieth century. When the tsarist regime suddenly crumbled in 1917, a Ukrainian parliamentary, or “Rada,” government declared itself in Kyiv, but it was swept away only a few months later, first by Bolshevik militias and then by the German army, which occupied Ukraine under the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After the armistice that November ending World War I, Germany withdrew again, leaving the Red Army, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Polish army, a Ukrainian army under the socialist Rada minister Symon Petlyura, and an assortment of independent warlords to fill the power vacuum. In the chaotic civil war that ensued, the group worst hit was Ukraine’s Jews. Scapegoated by all sides, more than 100,000 were killed in 1919, in a series of massacres unmatched since the 1600s. Beaten by the Reds, Petlyura formed a last-ditch alliance with Poland, before fleeing to Paris when Poland and the Soviet Union made a peace that divided Ukraine again, the Russians taking the east and the center, the Poles the west. Two small borderland regions—today’s Bukovina and Transcarpathia—went to newly independent Romania and Czechoslovakia, respectively.

Not surprisingly, Petlyura is a hotly contested figure. For Russians, he was just another pogromist warlord. (That viewpoint saturates the Kyiv-bred but ethnic Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard , for whose characters Petlyura’s army is a frightening mob.) For Ukrainians, conversely, he led their country’s first stab at independent statehood, which might have succeeded had the Allies only given him the same diplomatic and military support that they did the Balts and (less successfully) the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, and the Georgians. To accusations of ethnonationalism, they rejoin that the Rada government printed its banknotes in four languages—Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish—and that the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a distinguished Jewish lawyer, Arnold Margolin. Petlyura’s army rampaged, they concede, but he could not control it, and so did all the others. The controversy played out in 1926 in a Paris courtroom, after Petlyura was assassinated by a Jewish anarchist who claimed to be avenging family members killed by Ukrainian soldiers. The three-week trial was an international sensation, with the defense presenting a devastating dossier of evidence about the pogroms, while the prosecution sought to paint the assassin as a Soviet agent. After only half an hour’s deliberation, the jury declared him innocent, and debate over the affair still rages.

Between Stalin and Hitler

In fact, the violence and chaos of the Petlyura era were merely a prelude to much greater Ukrainian tragedies in the years that followed. Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomor—literally, “killing by hunger”—a program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraine’s rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraine’s urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns. Why Stalin perpetrated the famine is less clear. An estimated three million Kazakhs and Russians also starved to death during these same years, but he chose to hit Ukraine hardest, probably because it embodied his twin demons in one: the conservative peasantry and a large, assertive non-Russian nationality. Even today, however, there is an ongoing effort by Russia to block international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide. In his “Historical Unity” essay, Putin refers to the famine only once, in passing, as a “common tragedy.” Stalin’s name is not mentioned at all.

Less than a decade later, a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the country—the first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsia—a rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed. For a few months in 1943, a large ethnonationalist Ukrainian partisan army controlled most of northeastern Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and military hospitals. Remarkably, small units of this army carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign for years after the war ended, with the last insurgent commander killed in a shootout near Lviv in 1950.

Overall, 5.3 million Ukrainians died during the war years, an astonishing one-sixth of the population. Again, many died of hunger, after Germany began confiscating grain. And again, it was Jews who suffered most. Before the war, they made up a full five percent of Ukraine’s population, or some 2.7 million people; after it, only a handful remained. The rest had fled east or lay in unmarked mass graves in the woods or on the edge of cemeteries. (In the fall of 2021, as part of an effort to commemorate these events, Zelensky presided at the opening of a new complex at Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, the park next to a metro station where nearly 34,000 Kyivan Jews were massacred in September 1941. On the sixth day of Putin’s invasion this year, three Russian missiles landed in the park, causing damage to the Jewish cemetery there.)

5.3 million Ukrainians were killed during World War II.

For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The most controversial Ukrainian figure of the period is Stepan Bandera, the leader of a terrorist organization in Polish-ruled interwar western Ukraine. Having already been sour when the area was under Austrian rule, Polish-Ukrainian relations dramatically worsened with the new government’s Polonization drive, in the course of which Ukrainian-language schools were closed, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians banned from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. The repression radicalized rather than Polonized, so that the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the compromise-seeking Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, was increasingly squeezed out by Bandera’s underground nationalists. When the Wehrmacht entered western Ukraine in June 1941, Bandera joined forces with the Germans, organizing two battalions, Nachtigall and Roland, although he was almost immediately arrested by the Nazis, who found him too hard to control.

Ever since, Russia has used Bandera as a stick with which to beat the Ukrainian national movement. No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too. As in Soviet days, a standard epithet for Ukrainians in Russian state media today is Banderivtsi —“Banderites”—and Putin revisited the trope in an even odder than usual speech on February 25, the day after the Russian invasion began, in which he called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow the “drug addicts and neo-Nazis” in power in Kyiv.

After the end of World War II , and especially after Stalin’s death in 1953, Ukraine enjoyed several decades of relative stability. Compared with the other non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians were simultaneously extra repressed and extra privileged, making up the largest single group of political prisoners but also acting as Russia’s junior partner in the union. The Politburo was packed with Russians and Ukrainians, and in the non-Slavic republics, the usual pattern was for an ethnic national to be appointed first party secretary, while a Russian or a Ukrainian wielded real power as number two. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Ukraine floated to independence without bloodshed, after its own Communist Party leadership decided to cut the tow rope to the sinking mother ship. It is this late-Soviet “little brother” relationship that Putin grew up with—and which he may believe (or have believed) Ukrainians would be ready to return to were it not for the West’s interference.

Westward or Backward

Ukraine’s political path in the three decades since independence has accentuated all of Russia’s fears. At first, it seemed as if Russia and Ukraine would move on parallel tracks in the post–Cold War era. Both countries were riding the rapids of economic collapse combined with new political freedoms; neither seemed interested in the past. In Ukraine, nobody bothered to take down Kyiv’s Lenin statue or rename its streets. Russia’s new ruling class, for its part, seemed more interested in making money than in rebuilding an empire. It was easy to imagine the two countries developing along separate but friendly paths: like Canada and the United States or Austria and Germany.

That happy illusion lasted only a few years. The two hinge moments of Ukraine’s post–Cold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution , were a plot orchestrated by the West.

In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after the pro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainian treasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned and widely popular trade deal with the European Union, he abruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead. For Ukrainians, as for Putin, this was not just about how best to boost the economy but also about Ukraine’s very identity. Instead of heading westward—perhaps even one day joining the European Union—the country was being coerced back into the Russian orbit. Initially, only a few students came out in protest, but public anger grew quickly after they were beaten up by the police, whose upper echelons Yanukovych had packed with Russians. A protest camp on Kyiv’s central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compound—Hermès dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lion—went on display in Ukraine’s National Art Museum. In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect. New presidential elections brought in another pro-European, Petro Poroshenko, a Ukrainian oligarch who had made his money in confectionary rather than corruption-ridden mining or metals. Then, in the years that followed, a mass civilian effort supported Ukrainian forces in a low-level but grinding conflict with Russia in and around Donetsk and Luhansk. (Until the Ministry of Defense was reformed, the previously neglected Ukrainian army was literally crowdfunded by direct donations from the public.) Ukrainian support for NATO membership rose sharply, and in June 2014, Ukraine signed a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union. Most symbolic and popular—or, in Putin’s eyes, most cunning—was the EU’s 2017 granting to Ukrainians of bezviz , visa-free 90-day travel to the whole of the Schengen area. Russians still need visas, which are extortionately expensive and burdensome. The contrast grates: little brother has not only abandoned big brother; he is better traveled now, too.

Russian Bones, Ukrainian Soil

Ukraine’s progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.) But for all of the country’s problems, its history since independence has been one of real changes of power, brought about by real elections, between real candidates, reported by real free media. For Putin, the Ukrainian example had become a direct political threat. What if Russia’s own population—and not just the urban intelligentsia—started demanding the same freedoms? In his “Historical Unity” essay, Putin explained away the fact that Ukrainian presidents change as being the result of a “system” set up by “the Western authors of the anti-Russian project.” Ukraine’s pro-Russian citizens, he wrote, are not vocal because they have been “driven underground,” “persecuted for their convictions,” or even “killed.” Whether he actually believes this is unclear, but it might explain the slightly ad hoc tactics used by the Russian army in the first week of his war on Ukraine. Putin may really have expected his tank battalions to be greeted as liberators.

As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine’s fierce self-defense today is a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past. Putin’s obsession with history, in contrast, is a weakness. Although earlier in his presidency, banging the “gathering of the Russian world” drum boosted his approval ratings, it has now led him down what may turn out to be a fatal dead end. In terms of square mileage alone, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe, after Russia itself. If you placed it over the eastern United States, as The Washington Post recently observed, it would stretch “from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, and from Ohio to Georgia.” Occupying it permanently would be enormously costly in troops and treasure. Moreover, Putin’s war has unified Ukrainians as never before. And whether they are speaking Russian or Ukrainian, their sentiment is the same. Already, video clips have gone viral of babushkas telling Russian soldiers that they will leave their bones in Ukrainian soil and of Ukrainian soldiers swearing joyously as they fire bazookas at Russian tanks, all in the purest Russian. The war is likely to go on for a long time, and its final outcome is unknown. History, Putin may be learning, is only a guide when it’s the real sort.

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• ANNA REID is former Kyiv Correspondent for The Economist and the author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine .
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Vladimir Putin’s Revisionist History of Russia and Ukraine

In the past several days, Russian military activity in eastern Ukraine has escalated, with threats of a larger invasion looming. Vladimir Putin has made clear that he believes Ukraine has no historical claim to independent statehood; on Monday, he went as far as to say that modern Ukraine was “ entirely created by Russia .” Putin’s statements bristle with frustration with American and European leaders for what he perceives as bringing Ukraine into the Western orbit after the end of the Cold War. But at the heart of his anger is a rejection of the political project embodied in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For years, Putin has questioned the legitimacy of former Soviet republics, claiming that Lenin planted a “time bomb” by allowing them self-determination in the early years of the U.S.S.R. In his speeches, he appears to be attempting to turn back the clock, not to the heyday of Soviet Communism but to the time of an imperial Russia.

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I recently spoke by phone with Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian and Eastern European history at Harvard and the author of “ The Gates of Europe ,” an account of the emergence of Ukrainian identity. (His forthcoming book is “ Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters .”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the long-standing sources of Russian fears about Ukrainian language and identity, how Ukrainians might respond to further Russian incursions, and what Putin’s speech tells us about the complex relationship between the two nations.

How far back do you trace a type of Ukrainian identity that we would recognize today?

It depends on what element of that identity you are speaking of. If you are talking about language, that would be pretty much primordial. In terms of an identity with religious components, that would be more than a thousand years old. But the first modern Ukrainian political project started in the mid-nineteenth century, as with many other groups. The problem that Ukraine had was that it was divided between two powers: the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary. And, very early, the Russian Empire recognized the threat posed by a separate and particularly literary Ukrainian language to the unity of the empire. So, starting in the eighteen-sixties, there was a more than forty-year period of prohibition on the publication of Ukrainian, basically arresting the development of the literary language. That, along with the position between the two powers, was a contributing factor to the fact that, in the middle of World War One and revolution, with other nationalities trying and in some cases gaining independence, Ukrainians tried to do that but were ultimately defeated.

Why was Russia so threatened by Ukrainian identity and, specifically, language? Was it just typical imperial distrust and dislike of minority groups or languages?

The Russians were looking at what was happening in Europe at that time—in France in particular, where there was an idea to create one language out of different dialects or languages, which was seen as directly related to the unity of the state. So that is global. What is specific and certainly resonates today is the idea that there is this one big Russian or Slavic nation, with maybe different tribes, but, basically, they are the same nation. That is the model, from the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, which Vladimir Putin now subscribes to when he says Ukraine has no legitimacy as a nation. There is a direct connection with what is happening today.

You recently wrote , “The Soviet Union was created in 1922-1923 as a pseudo-federal rather than a unitary state precisely in order to accommodate Ukraine and Georgia, the two most independent-minded republics.” Can you talk more about this?

The Bolsheviks took control of most of the Russian Empire by recognizing, at least pro forma, the independence of the different republics that they were including. And, until 1922, Ukraine was briefly an independent country or state. When the Bolsheviks signed a 1922 agreement with Germany, the Treaty of Rapallo, questions emerged from Ukrainians as to why the representatives of the Russian Federation had any rights to sign agreements for them. They decided that something had to be done, and so they discussed creating a unified state. Stalin’s idea was to have unity with different republics joining. Lenin sided with the Ukrainians and Georgians who protested against that, saying that they should create a “union state,” because his vision was for world revolution.

Can you define a “union state” a little more fully?

Formally, the Soviet Union was about the equality of the republics, from big Russia to small Estonia. The reason to even play these games about independence was that these republics had declared or fought for their independence, but the Bolsheviks took over by accommodating some national and cultural aspirations, including by giving rights to languages.

How did the Russian-Ukrainian relationship change once Lenin died and Stalin took power?

It didn’t change right after Lenin’s death because Stalin continued Lenin’s policies. He launched a campaign to accommodate Ukrainians and others and their national languages and cultures. Georgians were speaking Georgian and Armenians were speaking Armenian, but the thought was to accommodate them as long as they would buy into the Communist idea and the Communist project.

And then, in the early nineteen-thirties, Stalin began to change that. You see the gradual revival of the symbolic importance of Russian language and culture, which, before that, had been seen as imperial and retrograde. But, even then, while they were not pushing other languages, they didn’t go after them per se. The Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 was in many ways a turning point because they didn’t just go after grain. They went after the Ukrainian language.

In a 1932 decree, Stalin ended support for the teaching of the Ukrainian language outside of Ukraine where Ukrainians were, whether in Russia or other places. They basically stopped any education or publication in Ukrainian outside of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And there were policies of even stricter control of Ukrainian cultural activities that were introduced within Ukraine as well. They did this to deal with the potential rise of Ukrainian nationalism. They also went after the key figures in the Ukrainian Communist Party and cultural establishment, at least two of whom ended up committing suicide, in 1933. It wasn’t just a famine; it was a broader phenomenon. The father of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, said that genocide was not just about famine in the Ukrainian case but this broader attack on institutions, languages and culture.

I want to move ahead to the end of the Soviet Union sixty years later, when we see an independent Ukraine. How do you look back on what happened in 1991 and those first few years of Ukrainian independence?

There was a huge difference between that period and 1917-18. In the first period, the idea of a Ukrainian nation and a Ukrainian revolution was basically about ethnicity, even though there were many minorities on the territory, including Russians and Poles, and many of them viewed the idea of Ukrainian independence with suspicion. But, by 1991, the idea of a nation and its connection to language and culture had changed. The Ukrainians were now imagined more as a civic nation in the making. The big industrial cities by that time were speaking Russian, and support for independence was more than ninety per cent in December of 1991. Ethnicity mattered and language mattered, but they were secondary. The majority of every region was for independence.

In what ways do language divisions manifest themselves among the population, beyond West vs. East?

Historically, Ukrainian was the language of the countryside. The twentieth century brought modernization and urbanization, and the integration of former peasants into the urban culture through the Russian language. So there was a group of people that was quite large that viewed Ukrainian as their mother tongue and had Ukrainian identity, despite the fact that they spoke Russian.

I would imagine this has reversed today a bit, in terms of what language people speak in the big cities.

This is a development of the past eight years. There may have been some movement before that, but this is really a reaction to the war. And the war started in 2014. The argument on the Russian side has been that we came to save you from cultural and various other types of oppression, and you are Russian speakers, so the assumption is that your loyalty should be with Russia. And, in many big cities, among young people and especially university students, there was a conscious choice to switch to Ukrainian. For people who grew up with the two languages, the barrier to switch is quite low. So there has been a tendency to switch languages, or associate yourself with Ukrainian language, and to send children to Ukrainian-language schools.

How did Putin’s speech this week fit into this conversation that we’re having?

It fits very well in the sense that what you see in his speech is a rejection of the Soviet-era policies. He blamed the Soviet Union for everything, even the creation of Ukraine. So what you see now is a return to a pre-revolutionary understanding of what Russians are. It is a very imperial idea of the Russian nation, consisting of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The last two groups don’t have a right to exist as separate nations. We are almost back to the mid-nineteenth century with imperial officers trying to hinder the development of Ukrainian culture and ideas.

Does the idea of a Russian imperial posture, and Ukrainian identity only existing within it, appeal to large groups of Ukrainians, even if they are far from a majority?

Certainly that idea found traction in 2014 in Crimea. The majority of the population there was ethnic Russians. And it got traction among part of the population in Donbas, which had a popular Soviet identification. The people there were really refusing this idea of an exclusionary identity, and that created certain grounds for the idea that, yes, maybe we are Ukrainians, but there is a place for a larger Russian role.

Is your sense that, within Russia, even among people who may not like Putin, there is a certain amount of jingoism about the Ukrainian question? Or do you sense more division within Russia?

There was a very strong feeling about Crimea being Russian. Putin had high approval ratings after that. With the rest of Ukraine, I think there is more ambiguity. The distance between Russia and Ukraine, from the perspective of how the populations view each other, has grown since this war started. I am not a sociologist, but my sense is that the Russian narrative of history around Ukraine is in decline. The beginning of Russian history is Kyiv. You go to school and learn about that. So that stuff is there, but realities make this historical mythology problematic.

It seems like you are suggesting that, by waging this war with Ukraine , Putin has made his own population less interested in thinking of the two sides as one country.

Yes, that is my impression, and there is also a Russian resistance that has contributed to that. If Putin keeps talking about the fascists and things like that, it doesn’t help to create a sense of unity. The Maidan protesters were described as radical nationalists by Russian propaganda. When you present the citizens of another country that way, it doesn’t help with the discourse of brotherhood and unity.

If Russia does invade much or all of Ukraine, how much resistance do you think there will be? Is your sense that it will be hard to tamp down even if the Ukrainian military is formally defeated?

Yes, that is my feeling. In part, it depends on the region. Putin may never come to western Ukraine. I imagine there will be extremely strong resistance in central Ukraine. What happened as a result of this war was not just that a Ukrainian identity strengthened, and Ukrainians connected more with their Ukrainian culture, but huge categories of people no longer see the idea of picking up arms for their country as radical. Thousands of people went through military training, and they will fight. I don’t know when and how, but I have no doubt that there will be resistance.

What have you made of how President Zelensky has handled this? It’s been eye-opening how he went from trying to tamp down panic to travelling to Germany and talking about appeasement.

There was a sort of denial for a long, long period of time. I don’t know exactly what the foundations of it were, but he was in tune with Ukrainian society in that people did not want the war, they were not ready for the war, and they didn’t want to think about the war. And there was hopeful thinking that, with all this attention on Putin, he would not dare do anything. What happened in the past couple of weeks was the sense that this was real. And that’s the reason for the change at the top.

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Putin is rewriting history to justify his threats to Ukraine

Putin pretends Russia and Ukraine are historically “one people.”

by Ellen Ioanes

As Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border and worries of an invasion grow , Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to push a familiar Russian line about the conflict: that Ukraine belongs to Russia and that the two are “one people — a single whole.”

Specifically, much of Russia’s political positioning to launch an incursion into Ukrainian territory is based on Putin’s claim that Ukraine — like Russia, a former Soviet state — is an extension of Russia, the “little brother” that has been led astray by the West and must be reincorporated into the family. Thus, he sees Ukraine’s increasing westward turn as a provocation, by both Ukraine and NATO.

In reality, however, Ukraine has long been distinct from Russia, experts told Vox, and Putin’s current mythologizing of the Russia-Ukraine relationship fits a pattern of falsehoods designed to reconstitute imperial glory, and more importantly, to shield Putin from the threat of democracy in former Soviet republics — and possibly in Russia itself.

That fear informs the potential conflict brewing along the Ukrainian border, Maria Snegovaya , a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, told Vox via email.

“It looks like Putin is committed to preventing the deepening cooperation between Ukraine and the US/the West,” Snegovaya said, “which he views as Russia losing Ukraine.”

Snegovaya points to a 2021 essay by Putin, titled “ On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians ,” as an example of his thinking.

In the essay, Putin called the two nations “essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” tracing his notion of a shared history back more than a thousand years. That assertion, though, elides a long history of differences between the two countries, and even more significantly, flies in the face of current Ukrainian attitudes, which favor membership in both NATO and the EU , (though neither is likely in the near future).

As talks between the West and Russia are stumbling and military preparations and rhetoric are ratcheting up on the US side, Russia is continuing to spin a false story about cooperation between Ukraine and the West as grounds for a possible invasion, Ukrainian journalist Oleksiy Sorokin told Vox’s Jen Kirby last week.

“This whole notion, this discourse of basically Russia causing an escalation to keep Ukraine out of NATO, is wrong, because Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO in the near future,” Sorokin said. “So this is just like, in Ukraine, this is seen as one of the fake conditions that Russia is trying to bring to justify their aggression. But the real reason for Russian aggression is that Russia denies Ukrainian statehood.”

Putin is clinging to a revisionist history to assert his claim over Ukraine

Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine has increasingly alarmed the US and its NATO partners, for good reason; Ukraine is considered a US ally, and a Russian attempt to reabsorb it would position Russia directly on the border of the European Union, potentially opening the door for future conflict.

One justification Putin has offered for a potential invasion is that Ukraine is historically linked with Russia, and thus Ukraine’s increasing affinity with the US and NATO is provocative. While there’s some logic to the idea that NATO’s eastward expansion can be interpreted as a threat to Russian interests, as Vox’s Jonathan Guyer explained last week , the idea that Ukraine is historically united with Russia doesn’t hold up.

Nonetheless, the idea is deeply embedded in the conflict, Don Jensen, the director for Russia and Europe at the US Institute for Peace, told Vox. According to Jensen, “When Ukraine and Moscow fight about history, it’s about identity for both countries.”

Putin’s argument , as he lays it out in his 2021 essay, hinges on the idea that both nations descend from an early princedom called Kyivan Rus , which encompassed some of modern-day Ukraine and stretched north into the Baltic countries. But the historical ties between that entity and what was then Muscovy — part of modern-day Russia — aren’t particularly significant, and the idea that modern Russia evolved from Kyivan Rus doesn’t carry much weight, Jensen said.

“So when Putin claims that they are the inheritor of the great Slavic lands, consecrated by the Byzantine — now Russian — Orthodox Church, he’s really making a historical claim that’s not particularly true,” he told Vox. “It’s like Texas claiming direct descent from William the Conqueror.”

Ukraine, for its part, is distinct from Russia in many ways and has been influenced by a number of different cultures, including by Central European countries in the west, and present-day Greece and Turkey in the south. Over the centuries Ukraine was also conquered by a number of different groups, including the Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Austrians, and Swedes, as well as, eventually, the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great.

“And that’s where the confusion comes in,” Jensen said, “because on the one hand, there were constant intermarriages between Ukrainians and Russians. But Ukrainian language and culture is noticeably different, and it’s really hard for Russians to get this. As a matter of fact, it’s hard for certain people in certain DC think tanks to get that.”

Although Ukraine had been part of the Russian empire at various points in history, Soviet propaganda cemented the idea , at least in older generations of Ukrainians, that their country was intertwined with the Soviet Union, and indeed was “Little Russia,” as Volodymyr Kravchenko explains in Harvard’s journal of Ukrainian studies , though in reality Ukrainian nationalism existed in some form throughout the 20th century.

In the present day, Putin’s insistence that Russia and Ukraine are historically and “spiritually” the same country allows him to push another narrative — that Ukraine’s openness to joining NATO and increasing alliances with the US and European countries is both a betrayal and somehow disingenuous, a sinister plot to tear the two nations apart.

However, Soviet-era mythologizing — and Putin’s current amplification thereof — of Ukraine as a Russian appendage is powerful. “I don’t think people paid enough attention to all of these changes that were going on in the societies [of former Soviet republics],” Jensen told Vox. “A lot of international relations people in academics and government now are realists, they don’t look at societies very much ... they tend to look at just great-power competition. So you end up ignoring the changes inside a society. You also end up dealing with Russia and not dealing with Ukraine,” he said.

Ukraine has been gravitating toward the West for decades

While Ukraine’s westward path has not been a straight line since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, there are some key points in the past 30 years that show the extent to which Ukraine’s vision of itself as a nation is not as Russia’s annex: chiefly, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum , 2004’s Orange Revolution, and the Euromaidan in 2014.

The Budapest agreement saw Ukraine hand over its nuclear weapons to Russia for disposal in exchange for security assurances from the Kremlin, the US, and the UK. Under that agreement, the US assured Ukraine not only that it would respect the country’s borders and sovereignty, but also that it would respond should Russia not abide by the agreement.

Later, the Orange Revolution in 2004 — in which the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lost a closely monitored election held after protests against Yanukovych’s attempt to steal the initial presidential election — marked a turning point in Ukrainian politics, away from Russia and toward democratic institutions. While Yanukovych did eventually come to power in 2010, Ukrainian society had made a decisive break with the past by that point, and pro-democracy reforms in response to the 2004 protests contributed to Yanukovych’s downfall in 2014 .

Then, the Euromaidan revolution, which began after Yanukovych backed out of a trade agreement with the EU in 2013, eventually forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia the following year. According to Peter Dickinson, writing for the Atlantic Council , both the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan “underlined Ukraine’s European choice and cemented the country’s rejection of a Russian reunion.”

After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 , in the intervening years, Putin’s aggression has “made Ukraine much more self-conscious; he’s pushed it to the West,” Jensen told Vox. “Even if he conquered the country, this would not stop.”

Although Ukraine’s post-Soviet democratic project has been flawed, recent events evince a desire among the Ukrainian people to continue building a stable, functional democracy that cooperates with the West — a desire that’s not just incompatible with Putin’s mythologizing of the ties between Russia and Ukraine, but potentially a threat to Putin’s own hold on power. A fully independent, democratic Ukraine could well signal to Russians that the Putin model isn’t their only option, and that popular uprisings can produce meaningful change.

“I think for [Putin] it’s quite important to prove that no, this democracy is not really genuine, that it’s the West that wants to impose it on the Ukrainians,” Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk told the New Yorker last week . “To admit that societies can do it themselves is to admit that change could be possible in Belarus, in Georgia, and in Russia as well.”

But while Ukraine has made a concerted effort — particularly since the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 — to engage with the US and Western institutions, it’s not clear that the West is reciprocating, Snegovaya told Vox.

“Major Western countries visibly lack unity on this issue,” she said. “Germany’s behavior is particularly unacceptable — it has been blocking Estonia’s weapons supplies to Ukraine .”

Last week, Germany refused to allow Estonia to sell German-made weapons to Ukraine under a so-called third-party agreement, frustrating NATO allies and German politicians alike. Germany has been loath to upset its relationship with Russia over the contentious Nord Stream 2 pipeline , making it more cautious than the US, for example, which is allowing Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to sell US-made weapons to Ukraine.

Going forward, Snegovaya told Vox, there’s little doubt that Putin will take advantage of the West’s uneven stance on Ukraine to paint a favorable narrative in Russia — similar to how he’s used a misleading narrative about the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine. “Instead of a message of strength, the alliance communicates a message of weakness,” Snegovaya said, “and Putin, as an experienced, opportunistic player, unquestionably sees that.”

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History | March 18, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s Rewriting of History Draws on a Long Tradition of Soviet Myth-Making

Much like Joseph Stalin, the Russian president has used propaganda, the media and government-sanctioned books to present an ahistorical narrative

Richard Cohen

Author,  Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

History has ever been a harbor for dishonest writing—a home for forgers, the insane or even “history-killers” who write so dully they neutralize their subjects. Direct witnesses can be entirely unreliable. The travelogue of the 13th-century explorer Marco Polo, which he dictated while in prison in Genoa to a romance writer who was his fellow inmate, is about two-thirds made up—but which two-thirds? Scholars are still debating. Survivors of Josef Mengele’s vile experiments at Auschwitz recall him as tall and blond and fluent in Hungarian. In fact, he did not speak that language and was relatively short and dark-haired. The director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel has said that most of the oral histories collected there were unreliable, however honestly contributed.

Many of these instances can be ascribed to the quirks of human memory. Actual fakery, though, has a long history. As Tacitus begins his Annals , “The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified, during their lifetime, out of dread—then, after their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering hatreds.” In England in the 16th century, it was common to share made-up stories about your ancestors in the hope of achieving greater social standing.

Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

A fascinating, epic exploration of who gets to record the world’s history—from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns—and how their biases influence our understanding about the past.

Most countries at one time or another have been guilty of proclaiming false versions of their past. The late 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan is known for his statement that “forgetfulness” is “essential in the creation of a nation”—a positive gloss on Goethe’s blunt aphorism, “Patriotism corrupts history.” But this is why nationalism often views history as a threat. What governments declare to be true is one reality, the judgments of historians quite another. Few recorders set out deliberately to lie; when they do, they can have great impact, if only in certain parts of the world.

“I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,” wrote George Orwell in 1942, reflecting on pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. “I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.” The problem continued to trouble him. Three years later, he went further : “Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.” Chief among the culprits were the falsifiers of the Soviet Union, in particular Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin .

Lenin presided over Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, but Stalin (a name he came up with, from the Russian word for “steel”) had usurped much of his authority even before his final illness. As it was, Lenin had already put in place the basic institutions of the Stalinist regime, a state committed to totalitarian rule based on the party, the army and the secret police; the soviets (workers’ councils), in whose name the Bolsheviks had seized power, had long been rendered impotent. Starting with the Red Terror of 1918 , Lenin and Stalin shared responsibility—by enforced famine , brutal imprisonment, mass killing , ethnic cleansing or assassination—for the deaths of some 20 million . In one of the peak periods of Stalin’s regime, from 1937 to 1938, seven million were arrested (Communist Party leaders were given quotas of “enemies” to be turned in), with a million executed and two million dying in concentration camps. At the height of this violence, 1,500 people were being shot every day. “ Ten million ,” Stalin told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as his tally for the dead, holding up both palms in the Kremlin in 1942. But that figure has been reckoned low, given the vast numbers who perished in what has come to be called the Holodomor (“hunger-death” in Ukrainian). (Coincidentally, Lenin and Stalin shared the same cook—the grandfather of current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has promoted a distinctly ahistorical version of 20th-century history amid his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.)

In her history of Eastern Europe, Anne Applebaum writes of the “peculiarly powerful combination of emotions—fear, shame, anger, silence—[that] helped lay the psychological groundwork for the imposition of a new regime,” Stalin’s Soviet Union. The completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from kindergarten schools to the secret police, put an end to independent historical inquiry. In this brave new world (Orwell described Soviet commissars as “half gramophones, half gangsters”), historians were not just to do Stalin’s bidding; if, in his eyes, they failed to do so, their lives were ruined and often shortened. For instance, Boris Grekov , director of Moscow’s Russian History Institute, had seen his son sentenced to penal servitude and, in terror, made wide-ranging concessions to the Stalinist line, writing books and papers to order.

Another leading historian, Yevgeny Tarle , was one of a group of prominent historians falsely accused of hatching a plot to overthrow the government; he was arrested and sent into exile. Around the same time, between 1934 and 1936, the Politburo , or policy-making body, of the Russian Communist Party focused on national history textbooks, and Stalin set scholars to writing a new standard history. The state became the nation’s only publisher. Orwell had it right in Nineteen Eighty-Four , where the Records Department is charged with rewriting the past to fit whomever Oceania is currently fighting. The ruling party of Big Brother “could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

Stalin, too, wrote his own version of events, contributing part of a “short course” on the history of the Soviet Communist Party. In his teens, vozhd (the boss), as he liked to be called, had been a budding poet , and now he contributed verse for the national anthem, improved on several poets’ translations and even made changes to the film script of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible . He was a master of what could be done with language; under him, the euphemism “extraordinary events” was used to cover any behavior he considered treasonable, a phrase that covered incompetence, cowardice, “anti-Soviet agitation,” even drunkenness. The great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert was to refer to Stalin ironically as “the Great Linguist” for his corruption of language.

“ Uncle Joe ” himself died peacefully, aged 74, on March 5, 1953, after three decades of bloody rule. Three years later, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev , announced a special session in which he gave delegates a four-hour “ secret speech ” denouncing the former leader and providing a radically revisionist account of Soviet history that included a call for a new spirit in historical work. Practitioners were admonished to upgrade their methods; to use documents and data to explain rather than simply proclaim past Bolshevik views; and to write a credible account—one that would include setbacks, confusions and real struggles along with glorious achievements.

So began a “thaw” that saw Stalin repudiated throughout the Soviet Union, political prisoners released and prison camps dismantled, ushering in a season of “free thinking” that, for instance, saw the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Not by Bread Alone , Vladimir Dudintsev’s bestselling 1956 novel about a physics teacher who invents a labor-saving machine that is rejected by bureaucrats because the innovation runs up against Soviet dogma. Khrushchev even set up a commission to protect defamers of Stalin. One high school history teacher staged a mock trial of Stalin in his class, while activists in Moscow put on an evening of poetry and music performed by and in honor of gulag survivors. By early 1955, lively discussions centered on the journal Voprosy istorii ( Problems of History ).

“You still had to toe a Marxist line,” says Dominic Lieven , an expert on Russian history at the London School of Economics, “but by the 1970s in many cases you could get away with quoting Lenin in the introduction and then providing much valuable info and ideas in the text.” Academics were allowed room for maneuver, so long as it was exercised discreetly and deniably, but they were not free of political controls regarding what material they saw, their links with historians overseas and what they could write. They had to observe a code of conduct— poniatiia , literally “concepts.”

For other members of the Politburo, the thaw, such as it was, seemed too much. In October 1964, Khrushchev was toppled, and Leonid Brezhnev took his place. Many innovations were reversed. Other conservative leaders followed—Kosygin, Andropov, Chernenko. In 1968, during Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring , this same process of opening up for a bit, then closing down again, repeated itself. Prisoners from the Stalinist period were released, some writers were rehabilitated and recent events were reexamined with more openness. Then the tanks came .

As became typical for Soviet historians, in March 1974, P. V. Volobuev , director of the Institute of History and a leading figure in new history-writing, was fired; a book of essays suggesting that Russia was a backward country in 1917 was condemned. It was not until March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took charge, that the writing of history was given a measure of freedom from government control. As David Remnick relates in Lenin’s Tomb , his prize-winning look at the Soviet Union morphing into modern Russia:

Something had changed—changed radically. After some initial hesitation at the beginning of his time in power, Gorbachev had decreed that the time had come to fill in the “blank spots” of history. There could be no more “rose-colored glasses,” he said. ... The return of historical memory would be his most important decision, one that preceded all others, for without a full and ruthless assessment of the past—an admission of murder, repression and bankruptcy—real change, much less democratic revolution, was impossible. The return of history to personal, intellectual and political life was the start of the great reform of the 20th century.

Boris Yeltsin , who served as first president of what was called the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, allowed yet further freedoms. The old textbooks became so completely devalued that history examinations had to be postponed throughout the Soviet Union. (In Estonia and Ukraine , laws were introduced that made writing bad history a prosecutable offense.) By 1989, Remnick notes, books had appeared in Russian schools with chapters on the Soviet period that resembled dissident writer Solzhenitsyn more than the approved texts of earlier generations.

Historians who had previously been obedient communists felt emboldened to come out in their true colors. Particularly notable was Dmitri Volkogonov , whose father had been arrested and shot in Stalin’s purges and whose mother had died in a labor camp during the Second World War. In 1945, the orphaned Volkoganov, aged 17, joined the army, and over some four decades rose to the rank of colonel general and the positions of special adviser for defense to Yeltsin and head of the Soviet military’s psychological warfare department. More than this, he was a talented historian, and in 1988, after years of research in secret archives, published an outspoken biography of Stalin that acknowledged his subject’s strengths but also frequently contradicted official versions of events and argued persuasively that it was only under Stalin that the Soviet Union became the “dictatorship of one man.”

By 2015, Yeltsin’s laissez-faire policies had long been revised by the controlling hand of Vladimir Putin , who took over as prime minister in August 1999 and is now in his fourth term as the country’s president. His views of his country’s recent history were clear. The Soviet Union was the last, not the first , European country to sign a deal with Nazi Germany: Western deals with Hitler were the real disgrace. In September 1939, the Soviet Union did not attack Poland; it merely protected territory abandoned by the collapsed Polish state. And so the defense of Stalin’s diplomacy has continued.

From the start, Putin appreciated the effectiveness of historical rhetoric for his nationalist agenda, particularly if it played to popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union, the collapse of which was a humiliation for most Russians. This was a point emphasized by historian Orlando Figes in a 2009 article on Putin’s approach to controlling the historical record as far as Russians are concerned. As he summarized their situation: “In a matter of a few months they lost everything—an empire, an ideology, an economic system that had given them security, superpower status, national pride and an identity forged from Soviet history.”

Polls in the year that Putin came to power showed that three-quarters of his people regretted the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and wanted Russia to win back lost territories such as Crimea and eastern Ukraine . As Figes argues, they were resentful about being told they should be ashamed of their history. They had been raised on the Soviet myths: the great liberation of the October Revolution , the first five-year plan , the collectivization of agriculture, the defeat of the Trotskyites, Soviet achievements in culture, science and technology. Why should they feel guilty? Today, even Soviet-era secret police uniforms are on sale . Putin promptly created his own version of history, combining Soviet myths (sans their communist baggage) with stories from the Russian Empire before 1917, and when the centenary of the revolution came, his government studiously ignored it .

Putin has not denied Stalin’s crimes (on the contrary, on several occasions he has publicly acknowledged them), but he urges that they should be set against Uncle Joe’s achievements, above all victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945. It makes for an odd balancing act. In 2015, a gulag museum opened in Moscow—but most labor camps and mass graves have not been commemorated and are gradually being destroyed or removed. As the Russian emigré Masha Gessen has written , “[E]very museum, indeed every country, ultimately aims to tell a story about the goodness of its people.” But Gessen can still talk of a “mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society” without it seeming a gross overstatement.

The first use of actual violence in the service of Putin’s control of history came on December 4, 2008, when masked men from the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office forced their way into the St. Petersburg offices of Memorial , a civil rights group that since 1987 has pioneered research into Stalinist repressions. The men confiscated 12 hard drives containing information on more than 50,000 victims of repression and other documents dated to between 1917 and the 1960s. In September of the following year, Mikhail Suprun , a Russian historian researching German prisoners of war sent to Arctic gulags, was arrested. His apartment was searched, and his entire personal archive was confiscated. He was told he faced up to four years in jail. Russia’s FSB intelligence agency also arrested a police official who had handed over archive material to the historian. A human rights campaigner in the Arkhangelsk region where the gulag was situated commented, “What we are seeing is the rebirth of control over history. The majority of Russians don’t have any idea of the scale of Stalin’s repression.” Later, in January 2018, the Culture Ministry withdrew the distribution license for The Death of Stalin , Armando Iannucci’s black comedy about the Soviet leader and his immediate circle.

In late 2011, a leading member of Memorial said that today’s power is very rational—it doesn’t shut everyone up. “There is freedom of expression and speech,” Arseny Roginsky told the New Yorker . “There are shelves of anti-Putin books in the stores.” But that optimistic view was uttered 11 years ago. Since then, Putin, who doesn’t care if his critics think he is “ on the wrong side of history ,” has become ever more intent on a single narrative, controlled by the Kremlin, about what Russia was, which means he will continue to deny the full complexity of its history, molding a collective memory through propaganda, the media and officially sanctioned books.

In an essay first published in 1990, the historian Eric Foner concluded:

Sometimes ... history serves mainly to rationalize the status quo. History can degenerate into nostalgia from an imaginary golden age, or inspire a utopian quest to erase the past altogether. And it can force people to think differently about their society by bringing to light unpleasant truths. In today’s Soviet Union, it is playing all these roles and more.

Whatever the intentions of Putin’s campaign, the current regime’s attempt to alter the historical record is hardly realistic. The opening of the archives, the publication of their documents and the work of organizations like Memorial have made that infeasible. Even so, as long as the government promotes self-serving patriotic myths, bad history will continue to be written and propagated.

Copyright © 2022 by Narrative Tension, Inc.. From the forthcoming book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission. 

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Richard Cohen | READ MORE

Richard Cohen is the author of  By the Sword ,  Chasing the Sun , and  How to Write Like Tolstoy . The former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses, he has edited books that have won the Pulitzer, Booker, and Whitbread/Costa prizes, while twenty-one have been #1 bestsellers. He has written for most UK quality newspapers as well as for  The   New York Times Book Review  and  The   Wall Street Journal , and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His new book,  Making History , is due out from Simon & Schuster on April 19, 2022.

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Putin’s Warped Idea of Russian History

• Olga Khvostunova
• February 27, 2024
• Eurasia Program

Bottom Line

February 24 marked two years since russia’s full-scale invasion of ukraine and the start of a bloody war that changed the borders of europe for the first time since world war ii., over the past two years, both sides have lost more than half a million people killed and wounded., to understand how this war will end, one needs to take a closer look at its root cause—the way vladimir putin understands russian history..

The total wartime losses of Russia and Ukraine are difficult to estimate. Neither country publishes accurate data , exaggerating the enemy’s losses and downplaying their own. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense , Ukraine allegedly lost 406,000 people killed and wounded, while Russia’s official losses were last reported at the end of September 2022 at about 6,000. Ukrainian authorities put Russian losses at about 404,000 people , while the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are classified . However, on February 25, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 31,000 Ukrainians were killed in the two years of war.

Independent assessments vary. According to US officials , by December 2023, Russia’s total losses amounted to about 315,000 people, which is about 85 percent of the Russian army as it stood at the start of the war. Ukrainian losses had been estimated at 200,000 . Journalists from the Mediazona project and the BBC track social media to collect data on Russian military funerals and have been able to verify the identities of about 45,000 military personnel, but, according to their estimates , the actual death rate is at least twice as high.

Ukraine’s civilian population has suffered immensely from the war. According to the United Nations , by the end of 2023, deaths among Ukrainian civilians exceeded 10,000 people, with about 19,000 people injured. The number of Ukrainian refugees stood at 10 million, of which 6.3 million fled the country, while the rest were internally displaced.

The economic losses are no less catastrophic. The United Nations reports that the Ukrainian economy lost about 30 percent of its gross domestic product in 2022 alone. The World Bank estimates that the restoration of Ukraine’s economy would require $486 billion. The Russian economy, on the other hand, contracted by 2.1 percent in 2022, but bounced back in 2023 by 3.6 percent (most of the growth was driven by increased defense spending). Another loss for Russia was the flight of approximately one million skilled workers who left the country as a result of the war.

After two years, the war has seemingly turned into a frustrating stalemate, grinding away lives and resources in both countries. While many experts and observers have done a tremendous job monitoring and analyzing the war, the question that often gets lost in the details is what does Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man who has personally ordered this brutal war, really want to gain from it?

Putin’s View of the World

Observers have noted that following the annexation of Crimea, which sent the Russian public into an unprecedented patriotic fervor , Putin increasingly acted like someone with an inflated sense of himself as a historic figure. This is not surprising: History is the Russian president’s favorite subject. There is nothing wrong with such a hobby, if only Russia’s political system were not so closely interwoven with Putin’s personal preferences and his worldview. Having been at the helm of a large and complex country for almost a quarter of a century, at some point Putin may have ceased to distinguish between his personal interests and those of the country. Perhaps he sincerely believes that his vision of Russia and his political choices are simply the right ones. Perhaps he really thinks that he is working for the good of the country, “ like a slave on the galleys ,” trying to secure Russia’s right place (and likely his own) in history.

Putin’s rhetoric has become steeped in historical narratives that are as convoluted as they are false, according to Russian historians . His recent interview with Tucker Carlson, during which the Russian president delivered a thirty-minute lecture on Russian history, is the latest example. But the interview was dismissed as boring and worthy of a chuckle . After all, this is not the first time that Putin has forayed into his favorite subject and preached his interpretation of history to the public.

The willingness to dismiss another litany of Putin’s grievances is understandable, especially when the Russian president rambles on about events that happened in Europe a thousand years ago. However, listening closely to what Putin says about the subject he clearly thinks a lot about can reveal the structure of his belief system and increase the predictive value of his policies. 

Today, the West’s strategy essentially comes down to containing Putin and weakening Russia by arming Ukraine, as the war depletes both countries’ resources. The best bet seems to be that Putin will leave office sooner or later and Russia will be free, or at least so weak that it will be unable to wage aggressive wars. This may even seem like a reasonable expectation, given that many Western nations are wary of allocating funds for a continuous, costly war that also risks provoking Russia into an even more belligerent foreign policy. However, even if Putin is gone or replaced, it is likely that his successor will pursue similar policies, especially if the Russian political system is not fundamentally reformed.

Putin’s Favorite Narratives

What are Putin’s favorite historical narratives that can explain his political behavior?

One is that throughout Russia’s thousand-year history it has been constantly surrounded by enemies. The country has been attacked both from East and West, but despite everything, Russia has always emerged victorious and strong.

Putin’s other favorite narrative is the historical justification for the centralized Russian state. In a 2012 article , Putin discussed the so-called national question. He argued that nationalism has come to the forefront in the West and that multiculturalism failed. He contrasts Western multiculturalism with Russia’s imperial model, also a multicultural state, but hinging on the basis of the Russian people and Russian culture that are presented as somewhat superior to ethnic minorities living in Russia.

Putin’s third favorite narrative is the holy sacrifice of the Russian (or Soviet) people in World War II, which he usually contrasts to the treachery and hypocrisy of the West. Here his ideas about Russia’s greatness interplay with his narrative about the country’s being a “besieged fortress.”

These beliefs form a system that allows analysts to better understand why Putin denies Ukraine sovereignty and independence. He outlined his views in a 2021 article on what he sees as the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples and argued that essentially Ukraine does not deserve statehood. Appealing to the ideas of the Russian historian and philosopher Ivan Ilyin about the nations that lead and nations that are led, Putin assigns Ukraine the latter status. Why? Because such an order of things aligns with his personal view of Russia’s greatness. Finally, his belief that Russia is encircled by enemies is emboldened due to Ukraine’s willingness to escape Russia’s influence and move closer to Europe and United States, which Putin sees as a conspiracy crafted by the insidious West.

No Good Solutions

What can be inferred from Putin’s beliefs about Russia and the world?

The war, from Putin’s point of view, is absolutely justified. He sees it as a civilizational war between Russia and the West, whereas Ukraine is given the role of a sacrificial victim. If Putin does see himself as a historical figure on par with Peter the Great, thinking in terms of centuries, then he would go many lengths to preserve such a delusion. On the one hand, he is unlikely to risk everything and make a mistake, going down in history as a failed ruler. On the other hand, there is little he would not do to assert his right to superiority, and Russia’s nuclear arsenal offers him excellent leverage to do so.

What does this mean for policy? Today, after two years of full-scale war in Ukraine (although the Russian invasion of this country began in 2014), after hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, millions of refugees, and multibillion-dollar damages, the West faces three basic scenarios. One is to ramp up military aid to Ukraine to a level that will allow it to fight Russia more effectively and, ideally, take back all the occupied territories. Two is to maintain a war of attrition, grinding away lives and resources and hoping that over time the balance of power will change in Ukraine’s favor. Three is to force both sides to the negotiating table.

The second scenario has emerged as the most realistic. Western nations are not ready to risk their own security just to restore justice or express gratitude to Ukraine for holding back the Russian offensive, even if they would like to do so. The third scenario is much less realistic and the first one is virtually impossible. Policymakers who still hope that an agreement can be reached with Putin, since he is supposedly a pragmatist, should read his historical essays and update their own beliefs. Putin’s track record reveals a serious commitment problem, whereas his twisted view of history highlights a sense of superiority that is difficult to reason with. As for Zelensky, he seems to understand his dilemma perfectly: Until a significant part of the Ukrainian people signal willingness to negotiate, he will push for his 10-points peace plan that implies Russia’s full withdrawal from the country and various security guarantees.

Perhaps an unexpected factor can break the current monotonous grind of the war—a turn of events that will change the balance of power within Russia itself. One would like to hope that Russian civil society and the remaining opposition groups will become such a factor, especially given the shock caused by the death of Alexei Navalny. It may be a thin hope, but hope always dies last.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Image: IMAGO/Andreas Stroh via Reuters Connect

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Early career

First and second terms as president of russia, putin as prime minister.

• The Ukraine conflict and Syrian intervention
• Silencing critics and actions in the West
• Salisbury Novichok attack and relationship with Trump
• Constitutional change and the poisoning of Navalny
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Prigozhin’s mutiny

Why is Vladimir Putin still in power?

How has vladimir putin changed russia, what’s the background to vladimir putin’s attack on ukraine in 2022.

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Vladimir Putin

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Who is Vladimir Putin?

Vladimir Putin is a former Russian intelligence officer and a politician who has served as president of Russia from 1999 to 2008 and from 2012 to the present. He was also the country’s prime minister in 1999 and from 2008 to 2012.

Was Vladimir Putin in the KGB?

Vladimir Putin served for 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB , the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union. In 1990 he retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

When Vladimir Putin was named president in 1999, Russia ’s constitution limited the president to two consecutive terms. That’s why, after his second term ended in 2008, he served as prime minister before becoming president again in 2012. However, in January 2020 Putin drafted a constitutional amendment that would allow him to remain president for two more terms. It was included in a package of amendments that was approved by the Russian legislature and, in July 2020, by Russian voters in a national referendum.

In the two decades of Vladimir Putin’s reign, he has consolidated his rule and projected to the Russian people an image of Russia as a global power. He turned Russia from a nascent democratic state into an autocratic one, expanded Russia’s influence in the Middle East , strengthened Russian relations with China , and displayed a willingness to use force to achieve his goals, as in his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine moved toward closer integration with Europe. When pro-Russian Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych tried to reverse that trend in 2014, protests swept him from power . Having lost an ally, Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea . He also provoked separatist uprisings in Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions in eastern Ukraine; fighting between pro-Russian militias and the Ukrainian government continued there for years. Running on a populist reform platform, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019 with more than 70 percent of the vote. In 2021 Putin ordered a buildup of troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine, and in February 2022, after he announced the beginning of a “special military operation,” Russian forces invaded Ukraine .

Recent News

Vladimir Putin (born October 7, 1952, Leningrad , Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) is a Russian intelligence officer and politician who has served as president (1999–2008 and 2012– ) of Russia and as the country’s prime minister (1999 and 2008–12). One of the 21st century’s most influential leaders, Putin has shaped his country’s political landscape for decades with a mix of strategic maneuvers, military aggression against Russia’s neighbors, and controversial policies.

Putin reintroduced highly centralized, top-down control within Russia. He tightened the Kremlin ’s grip on mass media and the Internet, and he renationalized key industries; by some estimates, the state came to control as much as 70 percent of the Russian economy. He made it clear to Russia’s oligarchs that their positions were conditional on their personal loyalty to him and their abstention from politics. Putin also tried to assert dominance in the “near abroad”—a Russian term for the former Soviet states on Russia’s borders. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and launched a proxy war in Ukraine in 2014, prior to a full-scale invasion in 2022.

Putin studied law at Leningrad State University , where his tutor was Anatoly Sobchak, later one of the leading reform politicians of the perestroika period. Putin served 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer for the KGB (Committee for State Security), including six years in Dresden , East Germany . In 1990 he retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned to Russia to become prorector of Leningrad State University with responsibility for the institution’s external relations. Soon afterward Putin became an adviser to Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg . He quickly won Sobchak’s confidence and became known for his ability to get things done; by 1994 he had risen to the post of first deputy mayor.

In 1996 Putin moved to Moscow , where he joined the presidential staff as deputy to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s chief administrator. Putin grew close to fellow Leningrader Anatoly Chubais and moved up in administrative positions. In July 1998 Pres. Boris Yeltsin made Putin director of the Federal Security Service (FSB; the KGB’s domestic successor), and shortly thereafter Putin became secretary of the influential Security Council. Yeltsin, who was searching for an heir to assume his mantle, appointed Putin prime minister in 1999.

Although he was virtually unknown, Putin’s public-approval ratings soared when he launched a well-organized military operation against secessionist rebels in Chechnya . Wearied by years of Yeltsin’s erratic behavior, the Russian public appreciated Putin’s coolness and decisiveness under pressure. Putin’s support for a new electoral bloc, Unity, ensured its success in the December parliamentary elections.

On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly announced his resignation and named Putin acting president. Promising to rebuild a weakened Russia , the austere and reserved Putin easily won the March 2000 elections with about 53 percent of the vote. As president, he sought to end corruption and create a strongly regulated market economy.

Putin quickly reasserted control over Russia’s 89 regions and republics , dividing them into seven new federal districts, each headed by a representative appointed by the president. He also removed the right of regional governors to sit in the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. Putin moved to reduce the power of Russia’s unpopular financiers and media tycoons—the so-called “ oligarchs ”—by closing several media outlets and launching criminal proceedings against numerous leading figures. He faced a difficult situation in Chechnya , particularly from rebels who staged terrorist attacks in Moscow and guerrilla attacks on Russian troops from the region’s mountains; in 2002 Putin declared the military campaign over, but casualties remained high.

Putin strongly objected to U.S. Pres. George W. Bush ’s decision in 2001 to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty . In response to the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, he pledged Russia’s assistance and cooperation in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorists and their allies, offering the use of Russia’s airspace for humanitarian deliveries and help in search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, Putin joined German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French Pres. Jacques Chirac in 2002–03 to oppose U.S. and British plans to use force to oust Saddam Hussein ’s government in Iraq .

Overseeing an economy that enjoyed growth after a prolonged recession in the 1990s, Putin was easily reelected in March 2004. In parliamentary elections in December 2007, Putin’s party, United Russia , won an overwhelming majority of seats. Though the fairness of the elections was questioned by international observers and by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation , the results nonetheless affirmed Putin’s power. With a constitutional provision forcing Putin to step down in 2008, he chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor.

Soon after Medvedev won the March 2008 presidential election by a landslide, Putin announced that he had accepted the position of chairman of the United Russia party. Confirming widespread expectations, Medvedev nominated Putin as the country’s prime minister within hours of taking office on May 7, 2008. Russia’s parliament confirmed the appointment the following day. Although Medvedev grew more assertive as his term progressed, Putin was still regarded as the main power within the Kremlin .

While some speculated that Medvedev might run for a second term, he announced in September 2011 that he and Putin would—pending a United Russia victory at the polls—trade positions. Widespread irregularities in parliamentary elections in December 2011 triggered a wave of popular protest, and Putin faced a surprisingly strong opposition movement in the presidential race. On March 4, 2012, however, Putin was elected to a third term as Russia’s president . In advance of his inauguration, Putin resigned as United Russia chairman, handing control of the party to Medvedev. He was inaugurated as president on May 7, 2012, and one of his first acts upon assuming office was to nominate Medvedev to serve as prime minister .

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Tuesday briefing: putin lashes out over incursion.

Plus, A.I. is helping piece together an ancient epic.

By Justin Porter

Putin blamed the West for Ukraine’s incursion

President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West yesterday over Ukraine’s weeklong incursion into Russian territory. His comments were a sign of how the surprise attack has unsettled the Kremlin.

“The West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians,” Putin said during a televised meeting with his top officials. “The enemy will certainly get the response he deserves, and all our goals, without doubt, will be accomplished.”

Even as Moscow scrambled to respond to the incursion in the Kursk region, Russian forces continued to pummel Ukrainian positions in the east, Kyiv military officials said.

The Kursk region’s acting governor was shown telling Putin by video link that 28 towns and villages were under Ukrainian control. He said Ukrainian troops had pushed nearly 12 kilometers into Russian territory. Separately, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces claimed control of more than twice as much territory, “about 1,000 square kilometers.”

Background: Analysts said that Ukraine’s move had two main goals: to draw Russian forces from the front lines in eastern Ukraine and to seize territory that could serve as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations. Putin insisted that the attack would not soften his negotiating position.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-the-iba-governing-body-behind-olympic-boxing-storm-has-russian-ties-troubled-history

What is the IBA? Governing body behind Olympic boxing storm has Russian ties, troubled history

VILLEPINTE, France (AP) — Nearly 17 months ago in New Delhi, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian prospect.

The disqualification meant Amineva’s official record was perfect again.

The IBA said Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed “to meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.” The governing body claimed the fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests — the same tests that ignited a massive controversy about gender regulations and perceptions in sports this week as Khelif and Lin compete at the Paris Olympics.

WATCH: Why French authorities fear Russia may attempt to disrupt Paris Olympics

The IBA’s decision last year — and its curious timing, particularly related to Amineva’s loss to Khelif — would have raised warning signs around the sports world if more people cared about amateur boxing, or even knew more about the IBA under president Umar Kremlev of Russia.

The entire boxing world has already learned to expect almost anything from the Russian-dominated governing body that was given the unprecedented punishment of being permanently banned from the Olympics last year. In fact, it hasn’t run an Olympic boxing tournament since the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.

The non-boxing world largely doesn’t know, however, about the IBA’s decades of troubled governance and longstanding accusations of a thorough lack of normal transparency in nearly every aspect of its dealings, particularly in recent years. Many people took the IBA’s proclamations about Khelif and Lin at face value while dragging the eligibility dispute into wider clashes about gender identity.

The International Olympic Committee has decades of mostly bad history with the beleaguered governing body previously known for decades as AIBA, and it has exasperatedly begged non-boxing people to pay attention to the sole  source of the allegations against Khelif and Lin .

“These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said this week. “Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”

Yu Ting Lin of Taiwan ahead of her fight with Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan at the Paris 2024 Olympics, North Paris Arena, Villepinte, France, Aug. 2, 2024. Photo by Peter Cziborra/Reuters

On Saturday, IOC President Thomas Bach said it was “totally unacceptable” the two boxers have faced what he called hate speech in a “politically motivated” uproar.

The IOC had stuck with the previous incarnation of boxing’s governing body through decades of  judging scandals ,  bizarre leadership decisions  and  innumerable financial misdeeds  while it presided over Olympic boxing tournaments.

Not until 2019, nearly two years after the organization elected a president with what U.S. officials call deep ties to Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, did the IOC finally banish the perpetually troubled group.

The most powerful organization in amateur boxing for decades is now governing a reduced roster of national federations while keeping up its fight with the IOC. Nearly three dozen nations, including nearly all of the prominent Western boxing teams, have taken the extraordinary step of leaving the IBA to form World Boxing, a new governing body, in a final attempt to keep boxing in the 2028 Olympics.

AIBA’s final Olympic downfall was triggered about six years ago when it elected president Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman described by the U.S. Treasury Department as an organized crime boss. Rakhimov, who denies those allegations, finally resigned in July 2019, a month after the IOC suspended ties.

The group changed its name and elected Kremlev, a Russian boxing functionary and an acquaintance of Russian President Vladimir Putin. That only made things worse between the IBA and the sections of the international boxing community not beholden to the body’s financial support, unlike many smaller boxing nations.

Kremlev introduced Russian state-controlled Gazprom as its biggest sponsor and moved much of the IBA’s operations to Russia after he took over in late 2020. He also fought off a challenge to his leadership two years ago by essentially  scrapping an election  in highly dubious fashion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to International Boxing Association President Umar Kremlev during the opening ceremony of the International Moscow Cup held within the framework of the World Boxing League at the newly opened International Boxing Center at the Luzhniki Sports Complex in Moscow, Russia, Sept. 10, 2022. Photo by Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Pool via Reuters

None of this sat well with the IOC — particularly after the Olympic organization advised its governing bodies to prevent Russian athletes from competing with their flags and anthems after Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in 2022. The IBA disregarded that guidance at its world championships the following year.

The IOC permanently stripped the IBA’s Olympic credentials and ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments with a task force.

Former governing body president Wu Ching-kuo, the last to take part in an Olympics, made moderate progress in improving AIBA’s reputation until his leadership group decided it would attempt to control boxing in all of its forms — including the professional game. The ill-conceived plan to use the chance for Olympic medals as a cudgel to sign fighters to pro contracts went nowhere, and Wu was eventually drummed out of AIBA himself amid severe financial woes.

But Kremlev has seized his opportunity this summer to call into question the IOC’s governance over the Paris boxing tournament while stoking the wider outcry raised around Khelif and Lin.

Kremlev also has made additional allegations about the gender of both fighters without providing proof, and people across the world have accepted his word. That’s unbelievably frustrating to veteran boxing executives like Boris Van Der Vorst, the Dutch businessman leading World Boxing. Van Der Vorst ran for the presidency of the IBA, only for his candidacy to be inexplicably declared invalid.

People have misidentified Khelif and Lin as men or transgender.

READ MORE: For women athletes of color, outsized scrutiny over gender is nothing new, historians say

“It’s not very respectful for the boxers who are competing here, to Chinese Taipei and Algeria, to speak about them in these terms. That’s what I’m trying to stress,” Van Der Vorst told The Associated Press.

So much is unclear about the IBA’s decision to ban Khelif and Lin last year, particularly since both had competed in IBA events for years without problems.

It’s even possible the decision was actually made according to the results of legitimate tests conducted over two years, as the IBA says — but the IBA has refused to officially say what, when or where these tests were administered, who evaluated them, or what the results meant.

The national boxing federations of Algeria and Taiwan are still members of the IBA, which is making a last-ditch appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal against its Olympic banishment.

The IOC has said boxing will be dropped from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the sport lines up behind a new governing body, and World Boxing is the only obvious alternative.

Until then, Kremlev isn’t attempting to make nice with the IOC. He announced plans last month to pay more than $3.1 million to Olympic medalists and coaches, even though IBA has no connection to many of the nations that will win in Paris.

This week, he released a series of English-subtitled videos on social media packed with insults, saying the Olympics “burns from pure devilry” and calling Bach “evil” and urging him to “resign urgently.” Kremlev has ended some of them by saying he’s sending Bach diapers so he doesn’t soil himself, then punching the camera.

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