As the Kremlin builds up troops near Ukraine, it is signaling a central conviction: Russia cares more about the fate of its southwestern neighbor than the West ever will.
In speeches, interviews and lengthy articles, President Vladimir Putin and his close associates have telegraphed a singular fixation this year on the former Soviet republic. The Kremlin’s thesis is that the Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, the former living in a failed state controlled by Western forces determined to divide and conquer the post-Soviet world.
Ukrainians, who ousted a Russian-friendly president in 2014 and are increasingly supportive of linking their country to Western institutions, would, for the most part, disagree. But Putin’s convictions find receptive ears among many Russians who see themselves closely linked to Ukraine by generations of linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties.
Today, with a force of 175,000 Russian soldiers ready to take up positions near Ukraine in early 2022, in what Western authorities fear will be the prelude to an invasion, centuries of common history take on great weight.
Putin’s game may be a cold calculus of coercion, backed by signs that the threat of war is real — a way to force US President Joe Biden to recognize a Russian sphere of interest in Eastern Europe. In recent days, Putin has said Russia will demand “legal guarantees” that Ukraine will not join NATO, the Western military alliance, nor will it house any more Western forces, and he is expected to speak with Biden via videoconference on Tuesday. .
But for Putin — and many other Russians — the nearly eight-year conflict with Ukraine is not simply about geopolitics; it’s about a wounded national psyche, a historic injustice to be redressed. One of his former advisers, Gleb Pavlovsky, described in an interview the Kremlin’s vision of Ukraine as “trauma wrapped up in trauma” — the dissolution of the Soviet Union plus separation from a nation the Russians had long considered to be a mere extension of yours.
For many Ukrainians, Putin’s appeal to a common history is a hollow attempt to appropriate the country’s legacy and justify territorial ambitions.
“They stole our past,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the Center New Europe, a pro-Western think-tank in Kiev. “Now they are trying to steal our future.”
After the pro-Western revolution in Ukraine in 2014, Russia invaded and then annexed the Crimean peninsula and fomented an ongoing separatist war in the east of the country. Since then, Putin has tried to avoid Ukraine’s leaning towards the West — and has expressed growing irritation with the US, which is training and helping to arm Ukrainian soldiers.
Using military force to bring Ukraine back under Russian influence would damage Putin’s domestic standing, polls suggest — which is why Russian analysts do not believe Putin would pull the trigger for an invasion that would take a terrifying toll on Ukrainian and Russian lives . But Putin’s conviction that the Russians and Ukrainians are unfairly and artificially divided is widely shared at home, even by opponents of the government.
While other conflicts in the post-Soviet world have brought ethnic groups into conflict, the one between Russia and Ukraine is more complex. Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine, but Russian — which is very similar — is still widely used.
Russians often see Kiev, the current Ukrainian capital and former medieval center of Kyivan Rus, as the birthplace of their nation. Well-known Russian-language authors such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov came from the Ukraine, as did revolutionary communist leader Leon Trotsky and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski now speaks Ukrainian in public, but first gained fame as a Russian-language comedian who performed throughout the former Soviet Union.
“One of the colossal problems pushing us into conflict is that Russian identity does not exist without Ukrainian identity,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Parliament who was the only lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Crimea. fled to Ukraine, where he received citizenship and still lives.
Millions of Russians and Ukrainians have relatives in both countries, in part a product of migration in the Soviet era, when Ukraine was an industrial locomotive. For example, Alexei Navalni, the Russian opposition leader arrested earlier this year, spent his childhood summers in the Ukraine, his father’s birthplace. While criticizing Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, Navalni said in 2014 that he disagreed with Ukrainians “for whom it is a matter of principle to prove that we are different peoples”.
“I don’t see any difference between Russians and Ukrainians, none at all,” he said in a radio interview at the time.
Emotions aside, the idea of ​​a Western-allied Ukraine as a threat to Russia’s security is widely shared in Russian foreign policy circles. Ivan Timofeev, program director at the government-funded Council on International Relations of Russia, said NATO troops in Ukraine would drastically shift the military balance, even though the alliance already borders Russia in the Baltic and Arctic region.
“If you include Ukraine, the potential theater of military action becomes very large,” Timofeev said of NATO’s expansion. “The larger the front line, the less clear it will be where the attack will come from.”
In an article last month for the Valdai Club, a foreign policy forum with close ties to the Russian government, Timofeev said a full Russian invasion of Ukraine is highly unlikely, in part because it could incite domestic unrest. Even if Ukraine is always a higher priority for Russia than for the United States, he warns, Western sanctions and military aid would make a Russian invasion extremely costly.
Rather than predicting a bigger war, Timofeev said, Russia’s military buildup is intended to signal to the West the Kremlin’s extreme dissatisfaction with expanding its influence in Ukraine. “If the meeting with Crimea was the target of great enthusiasm from the Russian public for many reasons, it is unlikely that a major war would have such support,” he wrote.
Internally, the annexation of Crimea, a glittering Black Sea peninsula, has seen Putin’s approval soar to close to 90% in 2014. This year, the Kremlin has reinforced its attacks on Ukraine’s pro-Western leadership by appealing to Ukraine’s place in the Russian identity; Putin started an article in July on why the Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” describing their current divisions as “a great common calamity”.
The messages are having an impact. The percentage of Russians who say they have a negative opinion of Ukraine rose to 49% in August from 31% in February, according to polls taken this year by the (independent) Levada Center in Moscow.
Indeed, it was Putin’s policies that turned large numbers of Ukrainians against Russia, according to Getmanchuk, the director of the think tank in Kiev. Support for joining NATO among Ukrainians has risen to 54% this year, compared with 14% in 2012, according to the Razumkov Center, a research institution in Kiev.
“Inadvertently, of course, he contributed to developing Ukraine as a nation,” she said.
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