Vladimir Putin once famously said in a 2005 state of the nation address that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Since taking power in 1999, he has sought to correct this by violently retaking lost territory with the goal of establishing a renewed nation. To his utter dismay, he has succeeded—in the wrong country.
The February 2022 invasion has deepened and inspired Ukrainian national identity, resulted in advanced military training for its armed forces as well as better weapons systems and profoundly greater funding, previously unimaginable diplomatic alliances and the kind of popular support Putin has always dreamed Russia might one day have.
He has helped turn the continent’s poorest nation into the most powerful military in Eastern Europe and the new poster child for Western democracy. Ukraine is now further from a Russian reunion than at any point in its history, and is a more cohesive nation than ever before.
This is a blessing for the world because, rest assured, like their Chinese counterparts, Russian imperialists are not irredentists but revanchists. They do not simply want to reunite all those who share the same culture and language. They want everything they ever had and more. Some Russian nationalists even believe Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867, must be duly returned to the once and future Soviet state.
Ukraine’s territorial and ethnic history is complicated, but its importance to Russian identity is indisputable. Kyiv is known as the “mother of Russian cities,” and indeed, the Kievan Rus eventually led to what is now Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Plus, Ukraine remains a global agricultural power, former storage site of Soviet nukes, home to the region’s greatest naval force, the Black Sea Fleet, and a transit point for Russian gas to the rest of Europe.
Indeed, Ukraine was such a powerful part of the USSR that some consider its declaration of independence in August 1991 a precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union the following December. Ukraine’s loss has therefore been a devastating blow to Russian prestige and power, which Putin (who honeymooned in Ukraine) is now desperate to claw back.
This sense of urgency only increased when a series of Russian presidential stooges in former Soviet republics lost to democratic reformists—in Georgia in 2003 as part of the Rose Revolution, in Ukraine in 2004 as part of the Orange Revolution and in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 as part of the Tulip Revolution.
The situation got even worse in 2013 when Russia’s stooge in Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, shut down efforts to join the EU and thus sparked the nationwide Euromaidan protests, during which he was forced from power and Putin, claiming the protests were a Western-backed “fascist coup,” invaded Crimea.
Yet despite clear political and ethnic division, the invasion in February 2022 was not an obvious strategic mistake. Putin had good reasons to think things would go his way. Crimea is largely pro-Russian, Luhansk and Donetsk are a mix, and there were pockets of pro-Russian support nationwide.
Russian cultural influence is powerful, and while Russian and Ukrainian histories began to diverge as early as the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus in the 1220s, Russia has nevertheless viewed Ukrainians as “Little Russians” as far back as the early days of the Russian Empire. In 1804, when the empire was still relatively young, the Ukrainian language was banned from being taught in schools.
Today, roughly half of Ukrainians speak some Russian while over 30% speak it as their native language, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. Moscow has noted the volume of Russian speakers in Ukraine—38.2% of Donetsk and 39% of Luhansk—as a way to claim that these are culturally Russian people.
But according to one poll, only 14% of Ukrainians claimed Russian as their native language in 2022, compared to 40% in 2012. Moreover, even Russian speakers have come together as Ukrainians—with some even deciding to ditch Russian and learn Ukrainian. In fact, 33% of residents in Kyiv, once a largely Russian-speaking city, have adopted Ukrainian as their language of choice since Putin’s invasion.
To be sure, Ukraine has been conquered and reconquered so many times that its people have never really had a chance to become a nation of their own. The name “Ukraine” itself literally means “borderland,” and for centuries it has been a vaguely defined steppe region nestled between major European powers. And while Ukrainians have a rich identity that is uniquely their own, they have also had precious little time as an independent nation-state to fully cultivate that sense of identity.
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