The belief that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia rather than a country appears to be strongly ingrained in the Russian leadership's mentality. Opposing historical interpretations have actually The Girl in Kherson become a big element of the growing discussion between Russia and the Western World, and one which Putin appears to enjoy.
4.1 Kremlin Version of Ukrainian History
Vladislav Surkov was a well-known figure in Vladimir Putin's Kremlin for more than two decades. Surkov, dubbed the “Grey Cardinal” and the Kremlin's principal ideologist, is widely considered the brains behind Putin's Ukraine policy, which pitted Moscow against the West. However, by late February 2020, he had evidently fallen out of favor and was abruptly fired from his post as the president's personal advisor.
Surkov has a habit of making candid, off-the-cuff public statements that contrast sharply with the omertà observed by most of Putin's inner circle, providing rare insights into what the Kremlin's officials appear to be thinking. He sparked new controversy just days after his resignation by publicly doubting the existence of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Surkov declared in an interview published on February 26 that “there is no Ukraine.” There is a distinct Ukrainian flavor to it. That is, a certain Ukrainian-ness. Surkov went on to say that Ukraine is “a muddle rather than a country.” However, there is no such thing as a nation. “There is only a leaflet entitled ‘The Self-Styled Ukraine,’ but no Ukraine.”
4.1.1 Ukraine Is Not Even a State
Surkov is hardly the first official of Russia to make even such a statement. The concept that Ukraine is not really a country within and of itself, but instead a historic part of Russia, is found to be strongly ingrained in the brains of many Russian officials. “Ukraine is not really a state!” Vladimir Putin reportedly declared during a NATO meeting in Bucharest in April 2008, long before the Ukraine crisis.
What is Ukraine, exactly? Although some of it is in Eastern Europe, the majority of it was presented to them as a gift. In his speech commemorating the takeover of Crimea, on March 18, 2014, Putin stated that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. “Kyiv, Ukraine's capital is the parent among all Russian cities. Since Ancient Rus' is our major source, we can't sustain without one another.” Putin has made a number of similar claims since then.
In a February 2020 interview, he claimed that Ukrainians and Russians seem to be the exact people and that Ukrainian nationhood originated as a consequence of foreign influence. Similarly, Russia's then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev declared to a bewildered bureaucrat in April 2016 that Ukraine was “stateless” before and after the 2014 conflicts. Such slogans and innuendos may simply be cloak rhetoric for a more serious and tough policy approach to realpolitik. However, there is evidence that these views are influencing policymaking at the highest levels. Also, they seem to have faded into the other world leaders. According to the sources, at a briefing in the fall of 2017, US President Donald Trump declared that Ukraine was “not a proper nation” and had always been part of Russia. Comments like these from a few of the world's strongest leaders demonstrate how historiography has become an important issue in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict for both sides.
Historical considerations have been used to justify and excuse the Russian occupation of Crimea. Since military forces took control of Crimea in late February 2014, Russian officials have made a series of false claims about the peninsula's history, emphasizing the peninsula's historical ties to Russia. Beyond the Crimea issue, debates over how to interpret history have influenced Russia's overall approach to Ukraine.
Different historical readings, particularly during the Stalinist period, have now become an important aspect of the developing discussion between Russia and the Western world, and a topic about which Putin seems extremely enthusiastic. Amid all the mythmaking about Ukraine's past, there is a dose of reality in order—is it, in fact, historically valid to say that Ukraine has never existed as a separate nation or state?
4.1.2 Kievan Roots
In addition to its proximity in terms of culture, most Russians are drawn to Ukraine because Kievan Rus', a medieval empire centered on present-day Kyiv that emerged in the ninth century, is seen as a common ancestral homeland that laid the foundations for both contemporaries Ukraine and Russia.
However, from the period of its foundation, until the Mongols destroyed it in the 13th century, the Rus' federation of nations progressively divided. In the 14th century, Lithuania and Poland took over the western regions of the country, including Kyiv. For nearly 400 years, these lands, which comprised most of contemporary Ukraine, were officially administered by Lithuania-Poland, leaving a considerable cultural impact. Throughout these four centuries, the Orthodox East Slav population of these countries developed an identity distinct from the East Slavs who remained within the Mongol and later Muscovite borders.
Despite Vladimir Putin's historically incorrect statement that “the first linguistic differences [between Ukrainians and Russians] formed only around the 16th century,” unique Ukrainian linguistics had already emerged in the last days of Kievan Rus'. Following Poland's conquest of what is now present-day Ukraine from Lithuania, the Ukrainian language arose independently of Russian. At the same time, religious disputes arose within Eastern Orthodoxy. From the mid-15th century to the end of the 17th century, the Orthodox Churches of Moscow and Kyiv split, culminating in a schism that resurfaced in successive schisms.
Before the 18th century, most of what is now Ukraine was dominated by Lithuanian-Polish overlords, but the majority of the population was Eastern Slavic Orthodox, organizing semi-autonomous forces of fighting peasants known as the Cossacks. Most of them shared a fondness for Muscovite Russia on a cultural level but did not wish to become citizens either.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Cossacks of former Ukraine began to build their own small de facto states; the “Zaporizhian Sich” and then the Cossack “Hetmanate.” In 1648 they staged a massive revolt against their Polish masters. After six years, the Zaporizhian Cossacks and the rising tsarism of Russia signed an alliance pact.
Despite this brief foray into Moscow, the Cossacks considered other options—when they signed the Hadiach Agreement with Poland in the year 1658, they too were about to become full members of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Cossack quasi-state would indeed have been firmly tied in the near future to its western neighbors if this contract had been rigorously enforced. The deal, however, fell through and Cossack loyalties remained divided.
In the late 1600s, internal tensions over whether to help Russia or Poland ignited a sequence of civil wars between them. In a preview of the current situation in Ukraine, the Cossacks changed their allegiances several times in order to gain autonomy from both sides.
In 1667, Lithuania-Poland was forced to relinquish authority over areas east of Kyiv and which also included Moscow. Although the small Eastern Cossack state eventually became a vassal state of Russia, it had a tumultuous relationship with Russia. Cossack revolutions were now a regular occurrence in opposition to the Tsars. In the Great Northern War of 1708, for example, the Cossack commander Ivan Mazepa fought alongside Sweden against Russia. Russian armies burned Zaporizhian Sich in 1775, and the Cossack self-government structures were destroyed. The Russian Empire took over the rest of present-day Ukraine after Poland's final partitions in the 1790s (plus its own western edge, which was annexed by Austria). The territory of Ukraine was a member for another 120 years of the Russian state.
On a regular basis, the Imperial Russian rulers persecuted Ukrainian cultural forms and tried to suppress Ukrainian as a language. Despite this, a particular Ukrainian national mentality developed and solidified during the 19th century, especially among the aristocracy and intelligentsia, who worked to promote the Ukrainian language in many ways. The Ukrainians achieved independence after the Russian Empire fell apart as a result of the 1917 revolutions.
After many years of fighting and quasi-independence, Ukraine was again divided between the developing Soviet Union and the newly independent Poland. Nationalist sentiments were repressed in Soviet-controlled Ukraine from the early 1930s onwards but lay dormant until the traumatic event of the “Holodomor,” a catastrophic famine caused by Joseph Stalin's agricultural policies of 1932–1933 that killed between three and five million Ukrainians. Armed revolts against Soviet control arose after and during World War II, concentrating in the western parts of Ukraine, which had been acquired from Poland from 1939 to 1940.
Ukraine only became a permanent independent state after the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, although the de facto political bodies fighting for autonomy and independence in Ukraine had existed for decades before that.
4.1.3 Redrawing Borders in the “Wild Fields”
Even some who feel Ukraine's historic claims to independence are unquestionable think that its internationally recognized borders, particularly those with Russia, are, in fact, artificial. Apart from the controversial case of Crimea, numerous Russians think that the encircled south-eastern areas of Ukraine, which now have become the epicenter of the fatal conflict between Kyiv and Moscow, must be considered a part of Russia that was “lost” to Ukraine inadvertently during the 20th-century upheavals.
Vladimir Putin has referred to certain territories of Ukraine as “Newer Russia” (Novorossiya, a Tsarist-era administrative designation for these areas). This statement gives the idea that certain regions are historically disconnected from the remainder of Ukraine. The exact south-eastern borders of ancient Ukraine are difficult to ascertain.
During the time of Kievan Rus', control over what is now southern Ukraine was patchy at best, never extending to the east, where the Turkic tribes controlled. During Polish-Lithuanian suzerainty, these regions were regarded as the “Wild Fields,” a sparsely populated no man's land that was repeatedly threatened by Tatar invasions.
By the 1600s, the Zaporizhian Cossacks had actually gained a great deal of control over these countries, as well as for settling in areas that are now part of modern Russia. After falling under formal Russian control in the 17th century, Cossack's authority in the eastern parts of present-day Ukraine remained largely autonomous. The ethnic composition of these great lands remained remarkably diversified, as indicated by the fact that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians created Donetsk (1869) or Luhansk (1795), the two cities at the forefront of the current separatist struggle.
From 1919 to 1924, Ukraine's eastern borders were formally defined as the boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). “After the uprising, the Bolsheviks annexed significant sections of the former south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine for various reasons, may God judge them,” Vladimir Putin declared in a speech to Russia's parliament on March 18, 2014. These Las lands today make up southeastern Ukraine, and this was achieved without taking into account the ethnic mix of the inhabitants.” Putin has made a number of similar statements in the past. In a January 2016 speech, he condemned the internal borders of the Soviet Union for being “arbitrarily established, without any explanation,” and called the presence of the Donets Basin in the Ukrainian SSR “complete madness. [Russia's western borders] were handed over to Ukraine when the Soviet Union was created,” Putin muttered at his annual December 2019 year-end news conference.
Putin's comments (which he has reiterated countless times) are inaccurate for two reasons: On the one hand, it seems irrational that present-day southern or eastern Ukraine should have been considered part of “Russia's chronological south” or “primarily Russian lands” in the 1920s, considering the lack of significant Russian influence in these regions before the 19th century. Second, Putin is wrong in stating that the boundaries of southeastern Ukraine were drawn “without respect for the ethnic character of the population.” The first census of Soviets, taken in 1926, a few decades after the eastern borders of the UkrSSR were established, found that ethnic Ukrainians outnumbered ethnic Russians throughout eastern Ukraine, including disputed districts. In the 1930s, however, the “Holodomor,” Stalin's agricultural assassination, changed this.
4.1.4 Bottom Line
The frontlines of the ongoing struggle between Ukrainian forces with Russian-backed insurgents run through the Donets Basin's lowlands, but they also run right through the region's history.
Russia's forays into Ukraine have sparked considerable support both domestically and internationally. Many have been hesitant to denounce them—or to embrace them—since they feel the Kremlin possesses history on its side: that Ukraine never has been a “genuine” country in its very own right, and that its provinces of the south-east, especially, are old-Russian territory. This viewpoint seems to be held by the political elite of Russia, notably Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and it seems to have affected their approach to Ukraine.
While these beliefs may appeal to ordinary Russians and some foreign leaders, a study of Ukrainian history reveals that they are based on a fatally incorrect historical interpretation. In the end, rewriting history and redrawing borders are unlikely to help the Kremlin. As a result of Russia's intervention in Ukraine, most Ukrainians have aroused their disdain for Russia, and thus it has done much to define the perceived differences between Russians and Ukrainians more vividly than ever.
4.2 Vladimir Putin’s Obsession with Ukraine and His Decision to Invade Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched an invasion of Ukraine in February solely for the sake of Russian greatness, has long been obsessed with the country's reunification with Moscow. In several cases, Putin has cast doubt on the idea of a distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, as well as a state.
For several Russians of his age who were weaned by the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the loss of its spheres of influence, remains an open sore. This was a personal setback for Putin, a KGB officer stationed in eastern Germany between 1989 and 1991 when the Soviet Union was rapidly disintegrating.
When the empire of the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian President Vladimir Putin often claimed that he, too, suffered the same hardships as his compatriots, recently claiming that he was forced to drive a taxi to make ends meet once he went to his hometown. Many Russians suffered humiliation and misery in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in stark contrast to the jingoism and luxury experienced by the West at the time.
Putin has said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century, despite having lived through two different world wars. Putin's rhetoric turned harsher as 150,000 to 200,000 Russian military personnel have been mobilized outside Ukraine's borders over the past week, sparking a wide-ranging diplomatic campaign to prevent an invasion.
In a speech on February 21, Putin wrongly claimed that Ukraine was seeking a nuclear weapon and called his administration a “neo-Nazi” regime responsible for any further devastation. He recognized the independence of the two breakaway regions and authorized the deployment of peacekeepers in the rebellious counties.
On February 24, 2022, Putin announced that he had chosen to launch a military operation in Ukraine during a televised speech, and gunshots were soon heard throughout the country, prompting widespread condemnation. He justified the operation by blaming Kyiv for allowing genocide to take place in the east of the country.
Putin's desire for revenge over Ukraine deepened, analysts say, as NATO and the EU moved into countries previously ruled by Moscow. Any attempt to draw Ukraine into a Western alliance has crossed the red line of the experienced Russian leader.
Putin has stated that his kind of historical goal is to stop what he sees as the growth of Russia's sphere of influence. He believes that Ukraine would join NATO within 10 to 15 years if the administration does not solve the security problem immediately.
Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine after a pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014, and pro-Russian rebels took up arms in the east of the country, killing more than 14,000 people. According to the Kremlin chief, Russia must react by being more assertive, if not dangerous. Submission is not the habit of former KGB spies and judoka. On several occasions, he has challenged the concept of a separate Ukrainian nation and state.
Two pro-Russian uprisings in Ukraine, in 2005 and 2014, Putin claims, were the result of a Western plot. According to US and Russian media, in 2008 Putin told his former US colleague George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even really a country.” Throughout his year-end press conference in December, Putin was further surprised by claiming that Ukraine was “shaped” by Vladimir Lenin, the creator of the Soviet Union.
In a lengthy article titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, he claimed that Kyiv’s activities are inspired by an “anti-Russian” Western agenda. Putin has insisted that the people of Ukraine are pro-Russians who have also been “deceived.” According to the “understanding” of the Kremlin, “the war would not constitute an aggression against Ukraine, but simply a rescue of the Ukrainian people from a foreign occupier.”
For months, the Kremlin has claimed that the West exploited Russia's post-Soviet vulnerability to set up a camp nearby, ripping up vague agreements made during the last years of the USSR. In reality, Putin is motivated by the desire to stop the passage of time.