Putin’s historic approach could lay groundwork for war

Russian President Vladimir Putin presented his own version of Ukraine’s history, stating that the country was basically always part of Russia. Although this serves his purpose, it is also fictional. Ukraine has its own thousand-year history.

What is now Ukraine was a disputed region of shifting borders for centuries that did not come fully under Russian rule until the late 18th century, during the reign of Catherine the Great, and even then the Russian Empire could not easily or completely absolve it.

In his effort to bring an independent, Western-like Ukraine back into the Russian orbit, Putin is following a path well charted by many of the Russian rulers who came before him, from Peter the Great to Josef Stalin.

For the West, the question is whether it can limit Putin’s revenge ambitions through diplomacy, sanctions and Ukrainian military resistance. Putin’s recognition of two breakaway regions and the dispatch of Russian troops that already threaten the country could easily trigger a war for the rest of the country.

“I consider it necessary to make a long-awaited decision: to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic,” Putin said, referring to the two pro-Russian areas of Ukraine’s Donbas region, which since 2014 they have waged a war against the Kiev government that has claimed an estimated 14,000 lives.

All modern states, especially in Europe, have centuries of border changes behind them, and the emotional pull of nationalism can lead to lawsuits, ultimatums and often wars for territory, power and influence.

In his Monday night speech to the Russian people, Putin, sometimes somberly and sometimes angrily, dismissive of today’s Ukraine, saying that its creation as a sovereign state was a tragedy and an accident by the communist leaders in the 20th century.

Acting as if Ukraine had never historically existed until Soviet times, Putin blamed Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, and at one point criticized Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to seize the Crimean peninsula from Russia in 1954 and hand it over to Ukraine. .

As in all historical narratives, there were elements of truth in Putin’s words. Ukrainians and Russians are related East Slavic peoples whose destinies have been intertwined and separated throughout history.

But the president preferred to focus on the moment of Russia’s maximum control over Ukraine, opportunely forgetting that it is an independent nation recognized by international treaties and explicitly by Moscow for 30 years.

Instead, he presented today’s Ukraine as a corrupt and barely functional country, a US stooge that threatens Russia’s security and, in his view, has no real reason to exist except if it is united with Russia.

Both Ukraine and Russia trace their origins to Kievan Rus’, a trading center established by the Vikings on the banks of the Dnieper River more than 1,000 years ago, long before there was Moscow, which was originally pagan and later embraced Orthodox Christianity.

Kievan Rus’ fell to the Mongol invasions of Europe in the early 13th century. Muscovy, or the Grand Duchy of Moscow, did not cease to be a vassal state until the end of the 15th century.

Rather than being connected to Russian Moscow, the entirety of what is now Ukraine was for centuries part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, beginning in the 14th century, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as the Republic of the United States. Two Nations, a vast multilingual and multiethnic state that encompassed almost all of what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine (and parts of present-day Russia).

In its eastern and southeastern regions, the dominant languages ​​of the union were Polish and Ruthenian, the predecessor of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. Its population included Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews, and Tatars.

The raising of an army of Ukrainian Cossacks against Polish lords and landowners in the mid-17th century led to an alliance of the Cossacks with Moscow and the splitting of eastern Ukraine from the Commonwealth, which swore allegiance to the Tsar in 1654.

Western Ukraine remained part of the Two Nations Republic for another 150 years, until Poland was partitioned for the last time in 1795 and disappeared from the map of Europe.

Poland re-emerged after World War I and fought a turf war with Soviet Russia between 1919 and 1922, retaking much of Ukraine. Those lands reverted to Soviet hands a generation later, during and after World War II, but after the conflict, Ukrainian nationalist partisans engaged the Soviets in guerrilla resistance for several years.

The “great famine,” or Holodomor, that Stalin imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s caused millions of deaths and laid the foundation for Ukrainian rancor toward Russian-Soviet control.

That the Bolsheviks recognized Ukraine as an independent socialist republic when the Soviet Union was created was not accidental.

It addressed the reality of Ukraine’s independent history and identity, situated between Moscow and the West for much of its existence, but never having the possibility of self-government until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Contrary to what Putin claims, most Ukrainians do not claim to be part of Russia today, and anti-Russian sentiment in most of the nation has only grown since the seizure of the Crimean peninsula in the 2014 and pro-Russian separatists taking control of the Donbas region in the same year.

Now, with Russian troops marching back into Donbas, it seems that the millennia-old tug-of-war for dominance of the region, using force, weapons or diplomacy as necessary, is about to be renewed.